After the Fall

We fly out of Alaska in the complaint addled escape from slightly rainy weather. My clients want sunlight, they want clear skies, and hopefully their disquiet mixes with jet exhaust and is left far behind. On the flight, an attempted molestation turns into a malediction of malice. I am forced to pretend I am asleep while nauseating efforts are made to separate me from my honor. I suppose when you have unlimited funds and are used to getting everything you want at a moment’s whim that sex probably follows this trend. I’m not a mere plaything, this has now been clearly explained. I am simultaneously revered and exiled for defining boundaries and outlining borders as we cross the International Date Line into Russian airspace. Crossing imaginary boundaries, crossing invisible lines. There are rules for this. There are expected modes of behavior, especially onboard this particular aircraft. I abandon all of these for the solitude of my iPod and an endless flow of stolen music. My clients sulk in my irreverence, they expect to be venerated, their practices fêted, their boorish stories given unflinching attention, applause, and garish laughter. I offer none of these. Simply put, this is not my first rodeo.

Siberia. The mere name itself is steeped in connotation. A winter without temperature. Frustrations spill over, a suitcase is ripped into, clothes thrown about, all a desperate plea for an acknowledgement that will never come. These motions are only meant for violent opening acts, those so frantic as to breach as to need, as to live – not the removal of bikinis and summer dresses. I remained abandoned and inaccessible. The still cabin of the aircraft was, for seven hours, the only cure for reflecting glacial sunlight and halfway thought out attention getting acts. I was in the eye of the storm.

The plane touches down in the early afternoon. Going through customs is like being a part of a strange emotionless circus act. Our driver takes us from Irkutsk to Listvyanka right on the shore of Lake Baikal. The place is, in a word, desperate. Like a trailer park. Malnourished people shuffle about a malnourished boardwalk. The town is filled with caustic post communists. No sympathy, no caring, no effort made. Revelers are withdrawn and sullen. Relaxation looks more like detention. The hotel staff is obtuse. “I cleaned the bathroom for my job, don’t use it.” The housecleaners clearly explain to me. To use something is simply an inconvenience, an act of sedition against the state. Things are for maintaining, poorly, not for using. This is our endless tribute to the communist system. Unrelenting work, uninspired action, unyielding oppression until finally, thankfully, death. Your passing merely an inconvenience to those left living, left alive to continue trudging through this intensely sluggish misery.

There is a chandelier in my room. The minibar filled with vodka and whiskey. The bed is shockingly uncomfortable, the thin mattress is pressed into obscurity despite my every attempt to redistribute my weight as evenly as possible while I think light thoughts. There is a lesson in this mattress, I just can’t figure out exactly what it is.

The restaurant service here is beyond horrible. It takes hours to get your food, they don’t even refill your drinks while you wait, not even the expensive alcoholic ones. It has the feel of a place that does not really care about making money. Customers are a burden on the business. The waitress pours my sparkling water into the glass with the meticulous attention of a brain doctor performing surgery, then she disappears for the next 45 minutes. A strange defective little man plays the saxophone in a strange defective way. He, like the waitress, is executing profoundly attentive control over how into his music he appears to be. The performance is a lie. The service is a lie. This whole fucking place is a goddamn lie. The ailing jazz music makes me feel sick inside. All these things are testament to a misguided escape. Like a sweat shop worker, riddled with pain, muddling through this hopeless life, imagining the rhythm of the sewing machine is the purr of an expensive convertible automobile driving through the French countryside. The cheap plastic fan on the table blowing fresh clean country air through their hair. The tickle of sweat dripping down the back of their neck nothing but the gentle caress of an attentive lover. But in the blink of an eye they are back, plodding, hopeless. The fantasy only making reality that much more painful.

I can’t handle this shit. I can’t take this place sober for another fucking minute. I attack the minibar, vodka and orange Fanta. The shit leaves my mouth tasting horrible, scratchy. I hit the streets. Wander somewhat drunkenly. I stop and pick up a giant Russian beer from a roadside stand. I drink as I walk, everybody is doing it, everybody. They are staring at me. I am a total alien. My size, the giant sideburns, the sleeve tattoo… alien. I don’t move like these people, don’t think like them, but I can drink like the motherfuckers. I end up laid out against a concrete wall, ass in the dirty sand, shoes kicked off, socks now soiled and gritty as I wiggle my sticky toes inside them. I am sprawled out drunk, watching people pass by in a daze. Women, trailer park beauties, stunning and vile. Lust rules in the land of desperation. Out here, on the edge of the world, desperate acts are the only accepted behavior in a desperate place. No wonder so many are lured into the sex trade, or even that it persists.

Lake Baikal, it’s the world’s largest fresh water lake. It has an ecologically unique variety of wildlife. Freshwater dolphins cut through the extraordinarily clear and pure water. The Russians stole it from Mongolia some years ago. It was yet another in the long line of imperialistic bargains. Beads and smallpox blankets for priceless natural treasures. The commies have taken a page from the capitalist playbook. They got their filthy fingers on this majestic wilderness and then encircled it with a trailer park. Good job fellas.

The whole place is despoiled decadence. The leather couch in my room stinks and makes my skin itch. Slippery shits fall out of me like bad dreams, the toilet paper as rough as birch bark. The bathroom is a failure. Hot water, yes. Working water pressure, no. I suckle close to the showerhead as it dribbles over my tired body. The plumbing is obsolete. The smell of human waste seeps up through the pipes, spilling out into the air. Diffusing and expanding into the entire space, pressing down on everything – slowly crushing it, like a poisonous balloon being inflated in a dollhouse. The smell mixes with the vapors of the formaldehyde beet wine spilled on my jeans and the layers of sweat glazed on the leather couch to create a uniquely Soviet and completely disgusting aroma. This is the stink of stagnation. This is the stink of communism. From this place, this parched anxiety, this wellspring of corruption, there is no escape.

One thing is certain, Russians know how to drink. Men are stumbling drunk by evening, falling down drunk by nightfall. I walk into a bait shop, it turns out to be a bar. The drunks keep ordering, the bait shop bartender keeps serving. I order a bottle of what looks like red wine – it’s not. Not even close. It’s some kind of disgusting beet wine. Tastes like sour throw up. I pound the bottle so as not to taste it but the flavor burns like chemicals in my neck. For some reason I go for another bottle, I want to ruin myself from the inside out. My breath is hot and acidic. A fight breaks out outside. Two skinny guys in striped shirts are telegraphing long, weak, haymakers at each other. Their friends just stand there and watch, eyes glazed. A police officer walks up to watch. Nobody is trying to stop or help. Nobody is cheering, no excitement or celebration. Both men basically lose the fight, their friends help them up and pour more alcohol down their necks. One crawls away on all fours to start puking in the street. The other stumbles into a car, the driver is agitated, words exchanged. Soon they are pulling the man from his car through the window and kicking him on the sidewalk. They leave him there, writhing. Nobody cares. Bad Russian club music is coming from everywhere. Every open window, every car, every small crappy stereo sitting on the curb, everywhere. I stumble back into the hotel lobby, a man is playing on an acoustic guitar. It sounds scarily familiar, what is he playing? I know this song… Hotel Fucking California! He is singing it in Russian. Men drunkenly perform traditional dances between bouts of swilling bad wine and laying on the couches there. I guzzle hard from the polluted tasting beet wine. I cough and some skin comes loose on the inside of my throat, I try and swallow it.

Wait a minute, of course. Now I understand. Now it all makes sense. The jet crashed over the Bering Strait. I’m dead and this is hell.

I head back towards my room. There’s a wedding in the hotel I’m staying. Ordinarily I would crash the party, make fumbling drunken gestures towards the female partygoers, and become either hero or zero in the course of a few choice words. A quick look at the awkward slow-motion feeding frenzy on the dance floor and I pull back in horror for the solitude of my room. The obnoxious techno is spilling out through the walls, pouring up through the floor. My room is flooded, everything soaked in Russian disco music. I turn on the TV to counteract the vile rhythmic bile seeping into my skin, invading my every pore. Sticky drunken techno blends with patriotic songs coming from the glowing propaganda box. The flickering screen strobes through inspirational images of Russians battling back Nazis, cosmonauts, and infamous political figures. I have been exiled from my hotel because of this noise. The only American for 10,000 miles, locked away in the ‘pearl of Siberia’… tantamount to hades. The Soviet Union is gone, communism has failed, but these emotionless fucks are still trapped in the hate-state-paradigm. So here I sit, a red blooded American patriot, with all my rights and responsibilities, eyes pressed shut, dry heaving from Russian beet wine while I plug my ears to escape.

It stays light here very late. When night eventually does fall the darkness is crushed under a thousand unmasked halogen bulbs that hang like Christmas tree ornaments over every pole and wire. I go to sleep with the TV blaring, wedding music roaring, DJ screaming, wedding guests cheering. Sometime during the night I yank the cord to the television. I guess I didn’t want the KGB watching me sleep. I wake up at 5am, pale blue refrigerated light fills my hotel room. I’m locked in a refrigerator in Siberia, air running out. The sound of a moths wings beating against the cold window. I know how it feels. I am like a moth, flying on feeble wings.

I escape from my prison cell and wander the streets.  I take photographs, create thoughts.  I reflect on everything I’ve seen and put it into poetry, dreams escaping in the vulgar form of words.  Now you will know the horror of my mind:

A churning storm of discontent rose in the countryside.  People rumored that it was due to the new season of celeb-reality, cold and indifferent to the turning leaves, but in the darkening skies most stared blankly into the horror that was their own lives.

With the mild winter running close, some kind other, worried for the lack of pursuit in everyday life, graciously left this sign as tribute, still rusted from other lands, far from concrete.

Far too many diagrams were drawn, test groups studied, and engineers consulted, but combustion is a cellular need, the internal cord between burning and the molecular death.  A reminder of carbon and oxygen as if we have square gas fueled suns moving us between floors.

Our planters, not innocent boxes for habitable living.  They are colonialists, amassing roots into frames for new countries.  All merely a preparation for the coming war against the naked ground.

I pass a small trash bin on the street.  I only glance at it briefly, but in that moment its pleading eyes echo the age old mantra of misery.  Mere steel, paint, a few screws, and a thin plastic liner, but from that humble construct came an appeal on all that once was and all that might have been.  Its gaping mouth choked with waste.  The homeless begging heart of endless defeat howling, “Kill me.  Kill me.  Kill me.”

A thousand hours of absent minded conquest, many thousand tons of steel and wood and bone, borders created, drawn and destroyed, from this and many times more unmentioned and forgotten, is this small aggregated stone marker consecrated by yellowed, urine fed, weeds.

Making objects and organisms into cute, gaping eyed, or miniature trendy styled figurines is a deeply dreamt religion, hot fired and hollow, light enough to carry and with colors intended for reflection.  The shopkeeper positioned the dolls like chess pieces.  Even static battles, painted manufactured arms are hopeful letters to some future sale.  While sleeping behind the counter violates zoning laws, the shopkeepers hope that one late night all these figures will awake and obey makes all the fines an investment.

The fence, a lonely option, to help those outside to be happy outside, and those inside to remain secluded.  At birth, or creation, or manufacturing date.  To resolve a violent and vein boiling dispute between the ideas of entry and exit, these two, the fence posts and the chainlink fence, were promised to marry.   Bound together against the coastal winds.

To not alarm populations that objects are alive, hidden punishments for dismounted wooden doors must be creatively blended into expectations.  The graffiti is a guard, ensuring that the passersby are adhering to local containment laws.  It’s undying vigilance expressed in the endless loop of devotion,  “Guard the wall, guard the wall, guard, guard, the precious precious wall.”

Unfortunately the blue wooden beds, stretched out like autopsy tables, did little to corral the sun’s attack on the ground.

City planners continue to be suspicious of growing a concrete cactus from a temporary pavilion.

Built to move, as earthquake ready blocks twisting into puzzles, into ground shaking toys, the people and glass and beds all asunder and toppling in unstoppable dimensions.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Related posts:

1. Snowden
2. The Tri-County Trifecta
3. A Winter w/o Temperature
4. Mia and Me
5. Maiden Voyage