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My name is Pablo. If I told you my real
name you would remember me as a child. My parents were very famous;
you might have watched their funeral service on television last
week as I did. Of course I wanted to go to the services; I loved my
parents very much. Very much indeed. The problem you see is that I
cannot leave my apartment. I have not left my apartment for any
reason for over fifteen years.
I do not know why, not really but I do
know the thought of walking out my door, leaving the sanctuary of
my four walls and entering the filth and despair that is the
outside world leaves me terrified to the point of paralysis. I wish
it were not true but it is maybe the only true thing about me. My
neighbors think I am crazy, that I am hiding from the world. Crazy?
No, I am not crazy, I hide from nothing! I simply choose not to
participate in madness.
As for my parents I will miss them
terribly. They were not bad people, they loved me and cared for me
and left me a great amount of money, most of which I will never
spend. I have written many stories about them. That is what I do. I
write stories. All day, every day and sometimes for several days at
a time when I cannot sleep. I sit here at my desk and look out
through the massive floor to ceiling windows that make up the
majority of the wall that faces out across the boulevard below;
onto the billions of slithering filthy people doing their
slithering, filthy things… and I write stories.
I have stacks of them piled up like paper
pillars through the house and many of them are absolutely about my
parents. Well, not specifically, completely or utterly about my
parents. That is silly. I take little pieces of them, small
fractures and of their heart, tiny fissures of their souls and put
them into the characters I create. That’s what we do you
know. Writers I mean; we take pieces of truth and wrap them in
paper lies, like presents. I remember reading somewhere, once
– when I was young and still out there in that- that fiction
is a lie and that good fiction is the truth behind the lie. I
don’t know who said it but I think sometimes that it could
have been me.
So that is me, a wrapper of truth, and it
suits me well. At least it did until recently, before they started
deconstructing the building across from my own. It is an old, old
building; historic actually and the papers sang for weeks its old
praise and its vivid history linked arm in am with this sin filled
city. It mattered little. In the end, those who do the adding said
the cost to make it whole again didn’t “pencil”
and it was cost effective only to bring her down. I made no
thoughts about it when it started. They started slowly and it has
been taking them now over three months to get to the final day,
which is tomorrow.
I’ve watched it all from my desk and
through my window. It started with the removal of furniture. Old,
fine furniture of all manner where marched out and down the old
cracked stone steps. It’s a smaller building than mine, only
12 stories and so from my 33rd floor perch I watched the workers as
their continuous antlike line paraded out the desks, beds and chest
of drawers.
Then they began to tear out the guts of
her. The copper plumbing, wiring, beautiful gold fixtures and all
the other things that make a building a home came out in the hands
of ants just like the furniture and as I watched this, this
deconstruction occur each day two things happened. The first was
that with each sink and chandelier I saw carried out like dead
soldiers I became sadder and sadder. The second was that ideas
poured out of my head like at no other time in my life. I would
create seven, eight, sometimes TEN stories a day! The pace was
frantic, I could not, at times, type fast enough to keep up!
It was as if each thing removed had a tale
to tell and I could see them. I could see all of the different
people.
The wrinkled black hands that washed
themselves in that porcelain sink, washing the blood and birth off
his hands… to late to save the child but at least the mother
would live.
The young couple groping each other with
passionate fury on the four poster bed, the cries of passion
erupting from the mistress as the foul cheater entered her from
behind.
The old couple rocking back and forth in
the two identical chairs, holding hands in the quiet peace of their
loves reminders.
I could not stop if I wanted to. I sat
there, day after day, often in pants soaked with my own urine and
watched the parade of people’s memories and wrote about them.
I had to; it is after all, what I do. At first it was joyous! O,
how I loved the sight of it all, the clicking of the keyboard in my
ears was beauty. The pure beauty of truth wrapped in lies.
But then it became tiresome, like a death
march that couldn’t be stopped and I felt myself getting
hollow. That’s the only way I can describe it. I started to
realize which each story that came from me, I would in turn, have
to give something away. The pieces of them required payment of some
sort and that payment was myself. I became smaller and smaller each
day, I felt like a pumpkin slowly being scraped of its meat.
And then it was over. One morning the ants
did not return. Everything that could be taken was and only the
shell of the building remained. The next day the monstrous metal
machine showed up, its wrecking ball dangling with delight in
it’s patient promise of destruction. That was yesterday and
the papers say today it will attack. I do not expect it to take
long; the ancient, crumbling, hollow building will not put up a
fight.
My name is Pablo as far as you know and
like the building I stare at in this pale morning light, am under
deconstruction.
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written by pablo vision on March 30, 2008
Wonderful stuff, Mark – now all of New York know that I sit in urine-soaked pants whilst writing my stuff – cheers!!!
I must stress that it is much like Brian Wilson and his sandbox – not any kind of feckless attitude to hygiene – it just feels right.
Great writing in this piece – I love it!!!
written by Lady Lazarus on March 30, 2008
have read this many times now and still think it's fantastic