Nervosities

By John Madera

In this debut collection of experimental short fiction, John Madera explores the complexities of identity, memory, history, and language, revealing the heterogeneities and instabilities that distinguish the post-industrial world. Born of diaspora and transversalism, the fourteen stories in NEVOSITIES exhibit narrative modes and voices that converge on our ever-evolving culture of violence, mediatization, and fragmentation. Ultimately, these fictions enact a realization of what Deleuze and Guattari (via Antonin Artaud) call “the cancerous body of America, the body of war and money.” Reading NERVOSITIES is at once a journey to an alternate universe and an uncanny chronicle of all-too-familiar terrain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9781304362049

Book preview

Nervosities

Copyright © 2024 by JOHN MADERA

ISBN 978-1-30-436204-9

First Anti-Oedipal Ebook Edition, May 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher. Published in the United States by Anti-Oedipus Press, an imprint of Raw Dog Screaming Press.

Cover Design © 2024 by Matthew Revert

Interior Layout © 2024 by D. Harlan Wilson

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PRAISE FOR NERVOSITIES

"A spirited shake-up of language and expectations, Nervosities nails our unmoored reality with humor, attentiveness, and a bountiful imagination." —RIKKI DUCORNET, author of Netsuke, Brightfellow, Trafik: A Novel and The Plotinus

John Madera’s variety-pack of fictions display a stunning range of modes, registers, rhythms, and acoustical flourishes. But these excursions into the wilds of sound and image aren’t undertaken for the sake of virtuosity alone. They are each of them honest and passionate quests for reality, for life on the page. —SAM LIPSYTE, author of No One Left to Come Looking for You and The Ask

"A first book? Really? It’s almost impossible to believe, considering how astonishing Nervosities is. What I love about these stories is how they couple a commitment to language and maximalist literary endeavor with a sensibility that is politically aware, engaged, and radical. From razor-sharp approaches to immigration to explorations of the vagaries and struggles of relationships, these are virtuoso pieces that are, nevertheless, decisively human. Like John Keene’s Counternarratives, Nervosities is a complex and compelling book." —BRIAN EVENSON, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World and Burning Floor of Hell

"A total-immersion catastrophe theme park comprised of fierce cosmopolitan intelligence, heterodox sentences, and deranged forms, John Madera’s Nervosities evinces a beautiful rage before our whirled world in which there is always a bomb secreted a couple feet away, the timer ticking down. Listen: a rare new fiery presence has just landed in the literary jungle." —LANCE OLSEN, author of My Red Heaven and Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel After David Bowie

"Borges asks us to imagine maps more detailed than the things they represent. John Madera, mad Mercator that he is, gives us, in the gyrating GPS that is Nervosities, a whole atlas of super-saturated jazzed and jazzy tympanically tsk-tsking texts. Verving veneers, swerving stories like laminated anatomies that peal and peel, fox and flex their way through the advanced math of the Four-Color Theorem. These fictions zoom. They scale and scald, flay and flux. Walls of words, they do tip-top topo cartography of every thing’s everything … and more." —MICHAEL MARTONE, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith

"The fourteen sententially ambitious and masterly entries in Nervosities introduce us to a bold and startling new force in American fiction. John Madera is a learned and scathingly observant chronicler of our turmoil, and his prose is some of the most robust, ruckussing, and gravely brilliant I have read in ages." —GARIELLE LUTZ, author of Stories in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive

"In a literary landscape in which originality is often spoken of but seldom truly delivered, John Madera is the exception—an uncompromising writer and thinker whose singular vision is, indeed, his North Star. Linguistically rich, formally challenging, and intellectually intoxicating, Nervosities reads like the work of a mad genius torn between saving the world of letters and watching it burn." —KURT BAUMEISTER, author of Twilight of the Gods and Pax Americana

"Mining the zeitgeist, John Madera’s Nervosities deeply explores characters on the periphery of recent and sometimes catastrophic historic events. Here sentential torrents attack conventional narrative form, riffing on themes, placing well-chosen details, like a commanding jazz solo. Like the characters in Nervosities—each one trapped in a kind of mental Hall of Mirrors—readers of this book will be compelled to ask themselves, Who am I and why am I here?" —YRIK-MAX VALENTONIS, author of 120 Days of Gomorrah and Cranium Theatre

For my daughter, Naiomi

CONTENTS

Some Varieties of Being and Other Non Sequiturs

Notes Toward the Recovery of Desiderata

Suspension as a Unit of Experience

Bees Build Perfect Hexagons with Their Spit

It’s No Stranger to You and Me

Waterlogged at the Antipodes

A Later Voyager’s Summer Excursus

Pearls Can Be Dissolved in Vinegar

Nature Under Constraint and Vexed

You Should Have the Body

Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan

Reflections of a Walking Ruin

To Have Done with the Division of Moving Bodies

An Incommodious Vehicle

Notes and Acknowledgements

Can it really be that for us existence means exile, and nothingness, home?

—E.M. CIORAN

SOME VARIETIES OF BEING AND OTHER NON SEQUITURS

Varanasi, garrulous city swathed in fog, dusty streets teeming with saffroned Sadhus smoking hashish; sun-dried women carrying babies and bundles and the weight of age and memory and beauty and rot; barefoot children—their threadbare clothes windows on their whittled bodies—selling postcards of the ghats and temples to privilege-insulated tourists; and a virtual menagerie comprising pugnacious monkeys, lumbering cows, immovable buffaloes, scatterbrained chickens, and countless chirping birds carving arcs in the air; city whose filigreed temples are flanked by shacks and rubbish heaps; grunting city that mocks my practiced sincerity; city whose talons grip the nape of my neck; recombinant city entered through a multiplicity of openings: doors, windows, gateways, dreams; recursive city: it mumbles: breath to death; it mumbles: birth to earth; sepulchral city: it rasps: dust in the shadows, dust in the wall cracks, dust in the air, dust on the windows, dust in the whitewashed sky.

It was Sunday. In four days, the name Lashkar-e-Kahar would sound and eddy out, and cleave an abyss between before and after, yield blackened cries and inmost sobs.

Having ridden a rickety rickshaw from the train station at Mughalsarai with a driver snake charming serpentine streets, imperiously passing other auto-rickshaws, pedal cabs, unhelmeted motorcyclists, and pedestrians slaloming around; and negotiating the opposing traffic full of their lookalikes—the air punctuated with crisp carillons, accusatory honks, and my own rickshaw’s apartment-buzzer chirp, and its fluttering engine: tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut—I was anxious to set my belongings down, and though I had more weight than I could handle, belongings were not what I wanted unloaded from my body, nor was it my sense of belonging since I had long since lost that in my bright-eyed and hammered years; nevertheless, it was with this buckled-knees feeling that I immediately searched for a guesthouse rather than follow my original plan to become invisible, that is, to lose myself in the city; for I had set out to get away from the nagging of this follows that, to escape this fumbling for a foothold feeling, but instead what replaced, no, predominated over that like river sediment cementing over a plain was this feeling that I was an outline, a contour, the borders of whatever it was I was widening out, losing form; and peering through a palimpsest of memories I was not sure was even my own anymore, not mine because if it is true that we are irrevocably altered by whatever or whoever touches us then, as a result, those experiences we thought were our own must belong to someone else, I wondered, then, who was this person, transformed, yes, but still comprising these layers of memory? Did this mean that the only appropriate end for a life lived in perpetual blankness was an unmarked grave?

Walking up the cracked steps and through the door of what would be my home for the coming days—a sleepy sandalwood scent in the air—I scanned the paint-chapped walls, cracked floor tiles, and the worn furniture’s stringy upholstery; and an eager clerk who smiled, splattered me with pleasantries, softened me with sirs, and beckoned a boy to help me with my bags. And lazing on the counter before the clerk, a cat, framed by a wedge of light, knowingly eyed me, sussed me out as the luftmensch that I was: an impractical amalgam of flesh and air, contemplative and useless: a drifter living off the remains of his already meager savings. Glowing behind the clerk was a large, largely unreflective mirror that still made the room seem larger. The man, splaying open a thick mildewed book—a chained pen flopping out like a fish out of water—asked how long I was planning to stay with them, fingered a line for me to sign in time with the airy music playing from a box. Until the day I leave, I said, and from his smile I gathered that he understood what I meant. I asked him what we were listening to. Summun, Bukmun, Umyun—do you know Pharoah Sanders? he said. He was asking if I was aware of Sanders, of his music, but I said, Yes, we are old friends. I was doing this a lot: interpreting questions to mean something different than what they were intended to mean. You like jazz, I said. It was a small world, after all, he said and laughed, his laughter wet, as if it had been bathed in something clear. I did not correct his misremembering of the phrase. I asked him what it meant. Music means whatever you want it to mean, sir, he said. I tried to mirror his inscrutable, beatific smile. Oh, it means Deaf, Dumb, Blind, sir. My life in 3-Ds, I said, rapping my knuckles on the counter. There were funnier responses, of course, but I had been tired of the game long before we had even begun. He laughed again. Sometimes we put it on infinite repeat, he said, that and the next song, ‘Let Us Go into the House of the Lord.’ I liked what he said about the music, about putting it on infinite repeat. I took it to mean something more than the programmed repetition he was talking about. I was doing this a lot, too: investing more meaning into what people said, into what happened around and to me. He told me he had once worked in a hotel where the managers had played jazz to attract westerners, and he laughed recalling how customers would complain, how they had wanted to hear Indian music, even filmi, those odd ebullient soundtracks, which he could never bear to listen to. But jazz had taken hold of him, he said. He told me more about jazz—and the names flew by. After more prodding from him, I shared that I was here to walk along the shores of the Ganges. He told me that John Coltrane’s wife, Alice, a devotee of Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian guru, had sprinkled the saxophonist’s ashes into the holy river. I had nothing to say and so I just listened, followed the rise and fall of his words more than the actual meaning. Seeing me zone away, the clerk apologized and pointed to the stairs where the boy waited for me. As I followed him toward my room, the cat, a sandy-colored thing, pounced to the floor, and, before slinking into a shadowy corridor, slowly swiveled its head and blinked at me.

From my room’s balcony, ginger-smeared by the sun, I eyed the locals like a god (how my mind was still stuck in a mundane monotheism amidst India’s poly-everything was a mystery to me) gazing upon his witless creation—so unlike chess, where the figurines with their unchanging features, roles, and gestures perform precisely on a Euclidean battlefield—and the narrow winding streets, streets as labyrinthal as consciousness, as full of uncertainty as they were of wonder, and just as filthy. Wildstyle geometries: riverbank stairs on top of stairs overlapping stairs colliding into stairs leading up to temples and palaces and guesthouses. Five bare-chested men sat cross-legged facing the river. A fleet of old boats floated at the ramparts, long bamboo steering poles jutting out from them like locusts’ antennae. A group of boys wrestled each other into the water. A whimsically mustachioed man spoke into a rockabilly-type microphone, glancing intermittently at a tome on his lap. Two men carried an enwrapped and garlanded body atop a makeshift bamboo stretcher and rested it on four big blocks of ice. A tatterdemalion of a man, a Harijan, one of Gandhi’s so-called children of god, tended the flame of a pyre. I watched a torso bubble and drip and blacken, husks of it falling away, exposing a ribcage the fire, too, slowly consumed; but the spine, while charred black, remained intact, irresolute as if still fulfilling its duty to prop some body up; and a river-facing skull, flesh even now around its mouth, seemed about to laugh, its teeth, then, spilling out of its maw, before the lighter of the pyre crushed its dome with a bamboo pole, finally freeing its soul, releasing it from the circle of birth and death. Nearby, an oblivious emaciated goat munched on a garland of marigolds. Eyes sweeping back to the Ganges, I saw two men on a boat weigh down the body of a leper with stones and then heave it into the river; the sound of it, from where I was, perfunctory, curt. But I could not possibly know all of this. Things were escaping from me now much like air from a tired and deflating windbag.

Later, after a plate of koftahs (balls of minced beef that effervesced in my stomach) and an assortment of fried and baked breads, all washed down with a mango lassi, I sat at a table thinking about how I was thinking, and I thought about how hard it was to move, how I was trapped in one of Xeno’s paradoxical ideas, trapped thinking about the impossibility of motion: I had to get halfway there before I could get the whole way, but before that, I would have to get a quarter of the way before I could get halfway, and … well, then, I was trapped in an infinite regress—there could be no first step; if I cannot start it, how, then, can I ever complete it? This thinking paradoxically propelled my body—my energy, no, my will unraveling like one of those balsawood windup rubberband-powered airplanes set aloft—and emptied my head in order to sail straight over the other heads bobbing around me, and toward something else, something higher, something less concrete but somehow more real, something like air, maybe; something that waited for me, no, something that followed me, ran away from me, and waited for me, something that was both a shadow and whatever was its opposite (do the shadows we cast even have an opposite?): something impossible like that. Instead, I was sucked through litter-strewn streets, like the lumpy bolus searing through my intestines, through an alleyway of arches where a gallery of birdcages hung from walls, where translucent canopies billowed like sails; through another alley, where piles of potatoes, brainy cauliflowers, unraveling cabbages, nosey carrots, phallic cucumbers, woody bulbous turnips, gold papery onions, Christmasy red and green chilies, itsy-bitsy pebbly peas and beans, chunks of okra, bitter bottle pointed and ridge gourds, globular radishes, lugubrious pumpkins, and cairns of tomatoes all sat on winsome wicker bowls. Streams of people—sometimes sidling against me and matching my stride, sometimes allowing me to move ahead and then running to catch up with me in a kind of peripatetic polyrhythm—plied me with promises of marble-floored former-palaces, air-conditioned guesthouses with the best view of the holy river; enticed me with doughy dumplings soaked in rosy syrup; frozen custards and fried funnel cake-like confections dusted with cloves, cardamom, and saffron; and warm puddings loaded with nuts and dried apples, mangos, bananas, guava, papaya, or pineapples; beguiled me with intimations of relaxing massages, with the mention of ganja, a sure physic for stress, anomie, and angst; or simply solicited me for rupees; and so I felt as if I had metamorphosed into a living automatic teller machine. It did not help that I still wore a cuffed button-down long-sleeved shirt and dark slacks, albeit both very much rumpled, and lace-up oxfords, its stitched details across the rounded toes lost beneath three weeks’ worth of caked-on dirt. Though certainly less than charitable, I was just about ready to give up everything.

I had come to know Varanasi as I had come to know what I knew, which was little, about India—well, no, not even as little as the tittle of its i—first, through my feet, and then through my eyes and ears; and what I had learned was that Varanasi was a concatenation of contradictions and that instead of sorting them out or reconciling them somehow I should simply revel within this old city’s darkness and light, its chaos and stillness, its abundance and scarcity, its silence and noise. But nothing could really prepare me for the ghats. Decrepit and funereal, there was still a kind of magic to them, but no, saying it was magical was—well, how can magic be possible in a disenchanted world? Call it strange and beautiful, then, an atmosphere where every measure of intimacy was performed center stage: people bathing, laundering, eating, brushing their teeth—sometimes using just a finger—shaving, sleeping, and praying, and pissing and shitting; everything but sex; and vendors hawking food, saris, incense, and trinkets; and cows, goats, and dogs roaming around everywhere. Ritual ablutions in a dirty river, it was total immersion here: flowers and food and bottles of water, juice, and tea and statues from the Hindu pantheon and religious books and saris and shirts and pots and pans and cutlery. If this city were holy, it was because of its seeming unconcern with appearances, its flagrant disregard for order.

It was dusk when I came to the Harishchandra ghat where I dipped my hands at the river’s edge, and watched little flowery candle-floats drifting languidly; coracles, budgerows, and canoes floating slowly by; cumbrous barges bobbing; everything wreathed within chalky mist. A man, his eyes bloodshot from the crematory smoke, crept toward me, stuck his beaklike nose in my face and pecked at me with scattered thoughts, flooded me with information in an attempt to coax me into paying him for a tour: There is burning … everybody learning … good karma, bad karma … life very short … look like dust … soul is going, so, no ghost … body sink … sometime body come up … dog and eagle eat. From his incessant talk, I also pieced together that after a father dies the family’s eldest son shaves his head, wears white, and lights the funeral pyre. But the youngest son lights the mother’s pyre. After the body has been burning for two hours, a bone is selected from it and then tossed into the Ganges. The men: a chest bone; the women: a hip bone. After a short while, I gave the man some rupees and waved him away. I wanted to stand there without a soundtrack playing in my ear. Watching the fire, I felt something like nostalgia, like this was all strangely familiar; it felt like sitting around a campfire, its bright glow and smoke inspiring secret-sharing and inducing sleep.

Think of me as a pilgrim—why not?—but not one tinkling bells, lighting candles or incense, clapping hands to wake up a god; not a seeker of relics, of transcendence, of release from earthly indignities, but as one contemplating the calamity of his life, one regarding ancient ruins as mirrors of his own rubble; or, instead, as a man with an unclean spirit like one of those biblical unfortunates wandering around vacant spaces, seeking solace and never finding it; an extinguished man; or perhaps as a man in pain seeking a cure for an illness he knows there is no cure for because what can cure nothing when something, no, countless somethings were the cause of that nothing?

Before my father died, he had left instructions that he was either to be buried standing up, that is, vertically, so that when he entered the land of the dead he would be one step ahead of the game, or, if a vertical burial was not possible, then I was to cremate his body and cast his remains into Death Valley. After he died, I was swallowed into a serrated sinkhole where all I could hear was his voice, the last things he had said to me: I was okay with getting old and being alone … What worries me now is getting sick and being alone … dying alone … Sometimes I feel jumpy around other people and I don’t want them to come around … I have so many thoughts happening at the same time … I just want to turn them off … I want to be free of pain … Is that too much to ask? My father had always used humor to spackle over holes in his life, his lapses, his problems, his mistakes, but after the first lump was found in his throat, it all but disappeared. As the cancer spread, he had many sleepless nights, had difficulty sifting through overlapping thoughts, stopping what he called the ping-ponging in his brain; and he would complain about every little thing: the room’s temperature, the nurse’s curling lip, the doctor’s breath. It was only when he talked about the details of his wake, funeral, and burial that his old self emerged. After he died, I had his body cremated, and I drove out to Death Valley—its desiccated environs a mirror of my own blankness—and, over the course of three days, spooned him out into Dante’s View, The Devil’s Golf Course, Funeral Mountains, Darwin Falls, Furnace Creek, Badwater Basin, and Zabriskie Point (he had loved Antonioni). The weathered rock formations’ painterly striations were set aswirl in my mind as I lazed underneath the desert sun watching colorful swatches float on my closed eyelids. Cremation, so I had learned, breaks the body down into bone fragments and gases, elements that float into the atmosphere. As my father’s ashes flew and merged with the land, with the sand, the water, the rocks, I thought I might be able to vanish there, too, float away like one of the valley’s ephemeral lakes into the miles upon miles upon miles of wilderness, through water-fluted canyons, up toward cloud-capped ranges, and away into the air—and I remembered how my father had responded to my initial resistance to the idea of cremating his body: Like I always say, Reduce, reuse, recycle. I did not have the chance to ask him what happens if you are, like me, already made of air.

A homemade bomb is left by a man at Varanasi’s Sankat Mochan Temple, and another one at the Cantonment Railway Station. Both explode on the Tuesday evening after I arrive. The police later unearth and defuse a third live bomb found in a bag in a market in Godaulia, a residential locality. Connected to timer devices, these ammonium nitrate bombs were set to go off one after another. I cannot explain how I had known that the man who left the bombs was, much like me, an angry, disappointed man, a man who could not let go of this letdown feeling; that he had planted the bombs in each place in full awareness that it would tear bodies apart; and that this man—as many men before him, and as I, too, after a day of clandestine, if rather banal, but still certain violence, had been accustomed to doing—had returned to his home, washed his hands, had dinner with his wife, and, after a dessert and a cup of tea, had plopped onto his bed and drifted easily to dreamland.

A fantasia: He is jarred from heavy-eyed numbness by the tinny deet-deet-deet, deet-deet-deet of his alarm clock, occasionally hitting the snooze button, and drifting off to some pillowy suspension of time. After this inertial play, he pit pats