aloft somewhere beyond comprehension

by Basil Rosa

This gargle, this rumbling, this wonderment.

With each opening of my eyes comes a realization, stronger than the last, that I will forever be pumping cream into doughnuts and eclairs long before dawn, laying them out in their sheet pans, ready for the oven. Such a dream. Such a life.

My boss, faceless and nameless and sexless, says, “A whole lotta people like a sweet breakfast on the go.”

I tell myself I don’t do this dream work for money. I do it for clarity, for consciousness’ sake. I’m skilled now, and as I work, there’s a sense of the now – without past, without future – that overtakes my body and allows me to stand more upright as I labor to fashion these pillow-soft treats and take pride that I’m so fast, so accurate that the boss would rather pay me than invest in the use of a cream-dosing filling injector machine. I like knowing that in dreams I’m not a phantasmagorical being, but an asset derived from the gravity-bound heat of my father’s longing.

Pausing, I draw back my window curtains and stare at the soft morning without sun. The dream has ended.

There’s an intimation of light in the sky, and I hear the birds gathering in the trees that surround my building. Doves, pigeons, magpies, the occasional cheep-cheeps from a posse of starlings. It was the trees that sold me on taking this place, and they don’t disappoint, even in winter when they look so harsh, denuded of their foliage, like varicose veins in black against the white sky.

Waiting, I’m always waiting. What for? I cannot say. Perhaps it’s a matching audible manifestation to answer all the tension I feel stewing inside. At this moment in time, I don’t want to hear the machinations of my nervous system, its synapses firing, its connections enforced in that alchemy that floats blood into and around flesh and bone.

Where have they gone, those sweet still seas that once murmured and rippled within?

No time. Enough already of this musing. There’s work to be done. I could dawdle here all day. Perhaps this is why I work, knowing it brings focus into my days, provides a structure. I’m no good to myself when idle for too long.

*****

Ah, the traffic. As I drive, I start emptying myself of the litany of mistakes that have shamed me of late. I start revisiting all those men, who’ve been—at times—either a brother or a father figure. I love women, but it’s men I need now, figures who’ve understood the drive in me, the force that I must offer to the universe as a small thank-you and contribution. I believe life is best when it’s about me giving back rather than just taking or, as some might say, accepting.

I think of so many sometimes-driven-until-insane men, these friends of friends, these avuncular cohorts, these makers. Will I ever return their generosity? I hope so. For the time being, I must single them out and, while doing so, cleanse myself of any sequences I can recall from the nightmares I experience while asleep.

Dreams. A favorite movie by Kurosawa. I must leave dreams behind and look to what the sunrise and my work in the big mind-kitchen will bring. I feel a sense of lucidity in one recollection of a dream moment when I viewed the massive furry paws of a polar bear plodding over snow that spread textured like a lamb’s woolen coat. In that dream, I saw myself watching myself—how I stood in a straddled stance, feet planted as if my legs were the tines of a wishbone, and my upper torso like a slender joint papered in a show of breeding under control.

I have such dreams often, and I prefer, during downtime in my car, to slay them into extinction while keeping a cigarette or a toothpick between my teeth. My life is no longer an adolescent fantasy of rescuing all the betrayed children and other innocents from various gulags. No longer am I a succulent assassin bolstered by the warmth of an understood accomplice, a wingman, nearby. I’ve become dull, reliable, trustworthy, and I don’t mind. This ‘yes’ to conformity has brought freedom through a side door and a third eye, and when I walk now I fancy myself a slender glint flashing off a stone. I’m fully alive, not a soul borrowed, not ever, and I’m willing to flourish in my time and witness the stars while expecting no voices to herald my arrival.

Boy on the rise, the make, I think. Be a constellation.

*****

So much of this freedom (or better that I use the word liberation) stems from accepting that if I were to close all past chapters and bind them between the covers of a book, seal that book, and then flee, the persistence of their ghosts would continue to haunt, so etched as those ghosts are into consciousness. Why fight what time will only ladle as more of this fire, this me?

Roadside, I see iced-over embankments of snow piled like clumped pastries, like marzipan or a stollen with white frosting that dazzles, wet and brilliant, early in this day—this winter season—and when the wind blows as it always does here, even the frozen crust over those embankments dares to release a few swirling emanations. Naturally, I think of this snow as sugar, and I’ll be looking at sugar all day long, powdered and granular, but sugar is what helps me to peer in through childhood’s window, to see how I no longer cling to old razors of wanting, what I don’t deserve to have.

Let me clarify that thought. I should say that I once wanted what I didn’t understand, that I needed to earn, first, and then accept and maintain. Take relationships, for example. They start, but they don’t end, even the romantic ones with their break-ups and heartsick echoes. The process of understanding them continues on and on until applied, sometimes subconsciously, in the wisdom used to approach the next new one. Or to refine, adjust to, or alter an old one.

Everything is about relationships, isn’t it? The thrust and parry, the fencing, if I may, of what it means to cope actively and not give up on one’s self.

*****

I’m in the mind-kitchen now, and it’s noisy, and there is only the work, though I’m with my colleagues, and to be with them is to be a cog and yet to remain still. Many of them are women who speak two languages, some of them three. They have little formal education, and they like to eat. They’re big women, love their pastry, and most of them have leathery brown or molasses-black skin, and all of them have tremendously deep smiles.

So fond am I of these bosomy dream women in their hairnets (I wear one too), in their stained aprons, and how they look at me with curiosity, perhaps respect (I hope so), or perhaps blame toward me for whatever misery they’re feeling. Maybe, behind my back, they admonish me with rumors, spiced with hatred and racism. Or else love, because I’m one of them, and I don’t judge, and I take advice from them.

What I think about them doesn’t matter. We’re on our territory now. We’re like a family. We share the mind-kitchen. They don’t tell me what I can say. I don’t tell them. My silence says it all here in this landscape of mixing bowls, whisks, funnels, nozzles, ladles, and big spoons. I find the information I don’t want and all of the lore and love I need. This is what working has been teaching me all of my life:. Work never ends. It defines who I am alone, but more importantly, among strangers.

I’ve learned much in the mind-kitchen. I can read now at a basic level in Spanish, though Portuguese is still beyond me. I use Spanish when I need to make certain connections and demands, knowing my co-workers will appreciate any lack of a need for translation despite my accent. Some of the ladies find it cute and have told me so; they still giggle at me, depending on how busy we are.

*****

Everybody hates a winner. Is this true? I’m not sure. I think most people hate cheaters more and hate being a loser most of all. Don’t quote me on this, though. Just a hunch.

I will say that the more I age, the more my dead-eyed moments in front of a mirror prove how much I despise the sight of myself fading. I’m one of the oldest ones at work in the mind-kitchen, able to turn pages back to 20th-century chapters that resonate like stale, annoying ghosts.

Nobody here talks politics or religion. We never discuss the problem that is ‘existence’. We’re all too busy for such philosophical thought, but we do talk about what we see on screens, the cutting down—or the expansion—of our waistlines, an occupational hazard for sure among doughnuts. Some of the ladies talk ceaselessly about their children—the flute trills in their voices, how they envy blonde Barbie’s hair, the scent of Pokémon’s tracks in a climate-controlled wilderness. Some of the men, and we are in the minority for sure, talk about sex, though mostly about money and sports—especially sports, indeed.

Plain and simple common sense? Am I nuts? We don’t talk much about that. It appears to me to be what one lives for but never examines. It may be gone among some, but not here. Seems to me those with too much time on their hands are always decrying how lost we are to common sense in this era of taunting and flaunting and shouts and experimentation.

When I’m home away from the kitchen, I tend to get stern and studious, aiming to learn more about the presidents voted in since I came into political consciousness. The Americanized Irish smut of Reagan. The English/Texas ‘yahoo fiefdom’ of Bush and Dubya His Son. Yale, Harvard, the inside track, Obama’s drone strikes, and Clinton’s rodeo of sexual exploits on the job.

It’s all shameful to me. I can’t think of any of them as role models, and this might explain why on paper a mediocre utility infielder in professional baseball earns a guaranteed larger annual salary than the nation’s president, certainly larger than what all my kitchen colleagues and I, combined, will earn in one year. But we men don’t talk about that element of sports. Nor do we live on paper.

There are perks, of course. I get to bring home stale doughnuts, but I don’t eat them; I donate my share each week to a local food bank. This helps me fuel the delusions I live with regarding how charitable I am, how professional baseball players donate some of their excessive shares, as well. Panem et circenses. Droll stuff.

I remember that for about a month in late September of 2001, I mistrusted and took a hard look at everything I saw and all that I’d been taught to believe in. Then I went back to work. Now, I believe nothing. The payments on accrued interest alone for each of the creditors I owe money to will keep me pumping cream into doughnuts in this kitchen for up to fifty hours a week until I’m a corpse. There are no longer any quiet Sundays for me, no evenings by the fire. I rise early and get home late. Like a beast, I rut along into the soil to maintain the mortgaged sprint lane I’ve fashioned for myself. I had choices, and I made them. I could have signed on and climbed various mountains, and I did have options; I could have, but I didn’t. I picked my numbers and slid my chips across the table.

That’s liberty for you.

*Originally published at The Argyle Literary Magazine

Image of Basil Rosa

BIO: Basil Rosa’s novels include Tax Free Ride On A Midnight Carousel, and A Million Miles From Tehran, both published in Australia by Jaffa Books. Recent stories have appeared online in the UK at close2thebone.co.uk and retreatsfromoblivion.com.