Batholithic Fragments of Jaar
J. Billings
#127
I want my readers to be confused about whether my stories are real or fiction, if any of it happened to me or if it only existed in the extrapolated nethers of my brain.
#128
I want my readers to wonder why every one of my characters wears broad brimmed hats, like the Pope in the summer.
#129
How much time do you spend on the phone? I asked him.
Quite a bit, he said. I got rid of my TV. I have two phones now. One to watch and one to make calls. It’s scary.
We’ve become so attached.
It’s not that. It’s two things, I’ll tell you. First, it’s a gadget, and we fucking love gadgets. And then it’s that blue light. It sucks you in.
Well, it’s the world at your fingertips.
Not really. I’ve been asking questions and it doesn’t have a clue.
What kind of questions?
If there’s a God.
#130
I want them to wonder: if I’ve read one of his stories, then have I seen all of his tricks? Have I seen everything he can do and what he’s all about? Everything his characters can do? All of the words he has in him?
These are unending questions.
#131
A writer friend told me to never use the words tilted alley in my writing. I’ve used them in every single story I’ve written. Does that make me a bad writer or a bad friend?
#132
There’s a character in my novel named Dick Cold. He's a blind restaurant owner and he enjoys dancing to disco songs and trying to pick up women who aren’t his wife. I love his name. I stole it from a local shipping storage warehouse called Dick Cold Storage. Writers do things like this all the time.
My novel will never see the light of day, so I may as well spill its contents. The plot follows two intertwining stories surrounding a police officer, the last in a long familial line of policemen, and a drifter looking for his missing, drug-addicted sister. The policeman is a philosopher at heart and the drifter is a confused romantic. The story falls somewhere in between pulp mystery and psychological ramblings. There’s a section of thirty pages where two characters swap metaphors and argue about the definition of a dream. No one will ever publish it and I’m becoming okay with it. Maybe even comfortable with it. The working title has always been “Lineage.”
A few months after I’d written my first draft, I passed by Dick Cold Storage on my way to rummage around the junkyard. The sign for the storage facility no longer matched my character’s name. Instead, the sign read Lineage.
I swear these things happen all the time.
#133
I live in a festering zone of my own stories. It’s a nauseous world, one I can’t shake, but also one I don’t want to get rid of, because then I’d lose it and it would be gone forever. I don’t think I could ever relocate anything like it.
Here’s what it’s like: imagine you’re in a suburban neighborhood, the safest one you can think of, and you’re walking down a wide neighborhood street at one o’clock in the morning. Off in the distance, still a few blocks away, there’s a man in a broad brimmed hat sitting in a chair in the middle of the street, in between the spotlights from the street lamps.
Or, maybe it’s as if you’re in a movie theater and you can’t take your eyes off the only other people in the theater, a young man and woman a few rows in front of you fluctuating between hearty laughter and vicious underbreath insults. Halfway through the film, after not watching a second of it–of course, you haven’t been paying attention to it either–the couple leaves. As if on cue, the film’s camera enters a cinema and you see the same couple on-screen, arguing about the stalker sitting behind them. At once, you’re separately parallel from the world and at the same time you’re dangerously in it.
There’s a reason I can’t describe it as well as I’d like. It’s a feeling that can only be had by reading someone else’s words.
#134
In order to write well and, more importantly, make it anywhere in the industry, I must act like I know everything, while at the same time acting like I know absolutely nothing.
#135
I intend for my sentences to always be too long or too short, but never, for God’s sake never, somewhere in the middle.
#136
I think it’s happening again.
#137
I have a friend—he will remain nameless for both petty and legal reasons—who took a trip to Montevideo with his Uruguayan wife. She planned to show him all of the local spots and introduce her family and generally maintain a pleasant comportment, as one would expect from a South American.
One day during this trip, my so-called friend traveled to a local beach on the bay, not one of the various tourist traps, but also not one of the local off-the-beaten-path diving holes. A very normal, everyday beach, for the everyday person, yet a notable location for one reason. As it happened, a few years earlier, I had written about this beach in one of my stories, entitled “Ridícula Película.” I changed the beach’s name and only used pictures from travel websites to help fill out my words, but I felt some connection to the place, as every writer would attest. When my acquaintance told me he would be visiting this beach, I was jealous and fascinated. I told him to remember everything and tell me exactly what it was like in real life. So, on the day he visited the beach he sat along a pier and digested all of the people sunbathing on the sand and the movement of the waves and so on, and then a few months later we met for drinks at a taco joint to catch up and he spilled it all to me.
The entirety of his initial thoughts and memories and observations were unremarkable, to say the least, but then he took out his cell phone to show me a video. We bantered on for a minute about the disgusting inverse relationship we had with our phones—as they grow more sentient, we grow less—and then he started the video. In the center of the tiny screen, a hunched old man, no larger than a child, pulled a red cooler of beer across the beach in a snaking fashion, almost like he was trying to avoid the authorities in slow-motion. Even from the grainy footage, I could see his round frame glasses and blue shorts and extremely tanned skin, as well as a distinct geometric tattoo across his right shoulder. Eventually, he wandered off the beach and into a tilted alley behind a food shack.
I steadied myself and wiped my forehead. Oh fuck, I said, it’s Joerger the beer seller. In “Ridícula Película,” I had created this exact man—this noble, humble beverage purveyor—out of thin air. My character wore the same clothes, sported the same features, walked the same, carried the same drink cooler. How was it possible this man was real? I’ve heard it said that faces in dreams can only be faces you’ve seen in real life, as the unconscious brain can’t create faces on its own, but does that hold true in waking hours as well? Had all of my characters been themselves in reality, without me knowing? Of course, I gave thought to the chance this man had been in a picture I’d seen on the internet when I’d done my research, but I would never write a character exactly as I’d seen them in a picture. Sure, I steal almost everything I write from images or experiences, but never that explicitly. No, the answer was much more metaphysical, much more dire and malicious.
While I contemplated these existential questions, my friend closed the video file and said he had something else to show me.
#138
Luz would be watching Irma Vep. Xol would be watching Reality Bites. Liesl would be watching The Passion of Joan of Arc. Raoul would be watching Gummo. Shabazz would be watching Pusher. Socrates would be watching Antichrist. Ingeborg would be watching Mirror. Copernicus would be watching Phantom of the Paradise. Honus would be watching Dirty Harry. Rolf would be watching Blue Velvet. Weber would be watching The Last Temptation of Christ. Sonya would be watching Jaws. Josep would be watching La Strada. John Michael Halloween would be watching Cruising. Roque would be watching Pink Flamingos. The God of Angles would be watching Y Tu Mamá También. Angel would be watching True Romance. Udo would be watching Pulse. Binks would be watching Melancholia. Chaz would be watching Scream. Omega would be watching Upstream Color. Mr. Silence Dogwood would be watching The Secret of NIMH. Carlos Q would be watching La Ciénaga. Wadd would be watching Taxi Driver. Consequence Chan would be watching Moonstruck. Frankie del Valle would be watching Body Double. Lars Connors would be watching Natural Born Killers. Grace Exotica would be watching The Great Beauty. Zoetemeque would be watching Summer with Monika. Atom would be watching 3 Women. Delirious Stanley would be watching In Bruges. Voeller would be watching The Square. Brian Pill would be watching All That Jazz. Ibex Maurio would be watching Knight of Cups. V would be watching Synecdoche, New York. Boron would be watching Lost Highway. Cohen would be watching Belle de Jour. Danny Viajar would be watching Bad Timing. Roach would be watching Enemy. Dick Cold would be watching The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
#139
What is intention and who knows of it? What if I’m intentionally stupid? Or purposefully dull? Does that make ineffectiveness more effective, or at least more sensible?
#140
I would give anything to be published just one more time.
I would give anything to be published in a place with more than one hundred readers.
I would give anything to be published in a place with more than one thousand readers.
I would give anything to have this one specific piece of my stratum published.
I would give anything for someone to tell me I’m good enough.
I would give anything to be published in a place with more than ten thousand readers.
I would give anything to be published in a place with just one thousand readers.
I would give anything to be published in a place with just one hundred readers.
I would give anything to have more than ten people read something I’ve written.
I would give anything to have more than five people read something I’ve written.
I would give anything just to be published one more time.
I would give anything to write something good.
I would give anything to write something.
#141
Today my wife told me to be safe and then the bartender told me the same thing. Am I in danger?
#142
I must always remember: writing mimics life. For example, stupefying confusion makes complete sense if the normal state of being is confusion.
#143
A Monarch Waystation. They Call Him Seven Death. Let the Punk Think. Bravos X. Kubrick’s Rubric. Volks. Strrange Ecstasies. The Lost Puppy of the Moon. Past -Steves. The Air Zoo. Angloflaxon. A Bar Named Dad’s. Slow Motion Luxury B122. The Seventh Planet from the Sun. 100,000 Hours. Viscious, Ohio. Orpheus Singing Society. The Cream of Jazz.
#144
A few years from now, a man in a smoky room will tell stories about when he died and then the universe will invest itself a new majesty. Until then, we have each other.
#145
[[text redacted]]
#146
I despise this United States of Fiction.
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J. Billings is not a writer. He lives and breathes in Hilltop, USA. His work can be found in ergot., BRUISER, and Blood Orange Review, among other places, with forthcoming work in Black Warrior Review, BULL, and San Antonio Review.