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"Untitled Story" -
Part 2 A weekly-updated story by Truston Aillet, Studio 8 Writer June 9, 2005 Packing took longer than I anticipated. There was so much I wanted to bring to Catfish Stevens, to share with him, to give to him, but I only had the square space of one small suitcase. The proper selection of items to be discarded and of those to keep was a process I don’t have words to describe. Finally, however, there came a point when it was all over, and at that juncture in history, it was time to go. Only one thing stopped me. A third letter arrived in the mail. It was written in the sloppy paste of a bull’s manure on a form of paper made from weaving and thatching hay together in wonderful inter-locking patterns. It said only: “If you find me, I may do little in rejoicing to see you. I may spin and spin and spin like a butterfly with a single powdered, painted wing. A butterfly such as that is destined to die. I also may enjoy being found.” What struck me like thunder rolling across the plains was not in what was said in the letter, for I had made up my mind to go, but the fact that there was, for the first time, a return address. It was postmarked from New York City, but I was certain that that particular address was no more than a process point from the letter’s origin in China. You see, my mother worked for the postal service for the duration of her life, spending several of my high school years in a letter processing and transferal department. She used to sing to me at night while I took long baths in de-oxygenated water of her hard days at what she called, the LP and TD. I sat with her in her office on many of my homework-stuffed evenings and watched her sort and relay envelopes that came into the United States from places whose addresses weren’t considered worthy of national intra-state travel. It was through her that I acquired my first pen pal, a paralyzed girl who lived in a tribal community in the Andes Mountains and who was kept alive because she fell into a well and was forgotten. We wrote for many years until the water level rose above her nostrils and the swimming lizards had their way with her flesh. During our most fevered writing periods, we spoke often about Catfish Stevens and we allowed ourselves the mutual dream of one day meeting and lobbying him to abolish either paralysis or deep stone wells. In her traditionally pagan and pre-modern culture, as well as her lack in the knowledge of the civilized world, not to mention her immediate confined and isolated setting, there was no way for my pen pal to know that those things couldn’t happen, so I allowed the dream to flourish. And now, after many years, though I wouldn’t be bringing absurd requests, I would, however, be fulfilling some part of my young dream - I was on my way to meet Catfish Stevens. But there was something I had to do before I left. On a piece of double-sided tape, with a melted crayon, I wrote back to my idol and what I now considered my newest pen pal. “C.S.,” I wrote, “you are my favorite author and a great poet. I have never read your poetry, except where it applies to your fiction, for example, as in the book, ‘Dawn of the Thunderbreath’ where you quote from one of your own poems. Others have been a more reliable source of information concerning you poetry, others who have read it in wonderful detail and say to me things like, ‘He writes really well’ and ‘You should read some of this’ and ‘…a celebrated poet, let’s hope his miserable books can catch up to his poetry’. Things are great here, in my own life and in the life of the nation. Your exodus into China was brilliantly covered on the local news. I cried a lot lately. Don’t worry about it. I’m still limp but I’m working on that. Will you please write a book about me?” Upon conclusion, I wrapped the tape around a baseball made in Taiwan and threw it into the river that flows behind my laboratory, where, because of some classes I took in my failed attempt at college, I knew it would flow into some other mighty river that would flow into an even greater river that would eventually flow into the ocean and ride the currents all the way to the South China Sea. There, I assumed a wandering fisherman would pluck the ball from the river like an eagle would snag a trout too close to the surface, and the old wise man, after a long fruitless day without so much as a nibble, would send the ball through the proper Chinese channels to a place he feels might be its source...
Click here for the next installment to Truston's "Untitled Story"! How did this story begin? Find out HERE. |
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