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"Untitled Story" -
Part 1 A weekly-updated story by Truston Aillet, Studio 8 Writer May 10, 2005 Catfish Stevens, my favorite author and world-renowned poet, once wrote to me for the first time on a parched and weatherworn scrap of rice paper he found near a dried ditch in China. It was indeed the first time, having never happened before, and not only was it a “first time” type of thing, but it was also the beginning of what would later become the Catfish Stevens Letters, of which every child now in the western world can quote to some degree. In the heat of the moment, however, as I unfolded the yellowed, snippety bit of paper, I was ignorant to the destiny that lay ahead, and I plunged into my fate like a diver who leaps unworried without looking. I have a custom, a way about me that some folks hate with a passion, and it is that I never allow my eyes to fall to that part of a letter that would betray the owner of the scribbled ink on the page, the signature. To counter this, people have devised countless ways to stymie what they see as an aggravating habit, sending letters in envelopes that are in the shape of the sender’s name, or some people write their name on the letter over and over and over so that I cannot “not” see it, or some folks simply deposit a small amount of poison in powder form so as to end my life permanently. Catfish Stevens wasn’t privy at all to this proclivitive quirk of mine, nor did he care to be, and so he simply left his signature at the bottom where most letter writers tend to place it. What I am trying to say here in no simple terms is; I had no idea as I began to read the ragged note, who the author of the words was. The letter was by no means lengthy. In fact, it would be described years later by those who studied it thoroughly to be quite short indeed. It said only: “I need to get some sleep.” I must have cried for days on end after reading those few simple words. I can remember my wife coming into the mourning room and sitting next to the teal-colored platform I had chained myself to. “Bubba, you must please stop this. You bring much dishonor to our home and you have neighbors talking about you like you are fool.” “Tender, wife,” I said to her as I stroked her pock-marked cheek, “If I could fill these acne-induced scars in with fresh and new skin I would, but you see, there is nothing I can do. Likewise, there is nothing you can do for me either. Go.” I pointed to the door, which had a flashing neon sign above it that spelled, “EXIT”. “Go, leave me here, I can take care of myself. Someone else needs me right now more than you do. Go.” It was the last time I saw her, though she revisited me many times in my dreams. 'Cinderella' I called her because I never knew her true name. Finally, after thousands of tears and an unknown passage of time, another letter arrived. This time, it was the second letter and it was written with a red marker over type-set columns and cropped photographs on an unread sheet of newspaper. I dried my tears for what I calculated to be thirty-seven minutes and then stared for a very long time at the red words. They said: “I will enter a time of prayer and no man will make me leave it.” Arguably, it was a longer letter than the first, though skeptics tend to disagree even today. It was at that point that I made a choice that many scholars have called “The Catfish Stevens Decision”. I spent several days scanning the contents of the newspaper underneath the blood-colored writing, studying it in a very methodical way that I have always found helps me to concentrate: I read a sentence, hold my breath until I am close to suffocation, exhale, and then scream in my mind what I think the sentence is about. If the answers are slow in coming, I curse myself with a generational curse that will pass from me to my children and down the line for centuries to come. Luckily for the grandchild and great grandchild-like bastards I never had, the answers did in fact come. The newspaper was printed in a small Chinese province outside of Beijing, a poor village where goats and chickens make love for want of nothing else to do. I had heard of the place when I was a child, remembering how my father would teach me about the geo-political situations in unknown places of the world while he beat me with a two-inch thick leather belt that held his shotgun shells. Communist islands in the south pacific, faltering British colonies in South America, undiscovered villages in the Himalayas, outdated Eskimo tribes in Alaska/Canada - I had heard about them all. I was beaten often. Sometimes it wasn’t even punishment for something I had done, it was just that my father wanted to teach me something about a place he knew quite a great deal about, but which many others on the earth did not. The scars that crisscross my hind end, and which have repelled many would-be girlfriends and lovers, read to my mind like a road map to out-of-touch places across the globe. So it is that I knew about Chao-Puuk, the tiny dying village on the outside of a thriving Asian city, where it was my intentions to be within a matter of days... Click here for the next installment to Truston's "Untitled Story"! How did this story begin? Find out HERE. |
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