Excerpt From Cabbage Language, a novel by Robert Duncan Gray
“I remember the autobahn. How slow we felt doing anything else”
Fiction by Robert Duncan Gray
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HOLOGRAM
I remember everything. Everything. I remember too much. More than my life. I remember my mother's pregnant belly, ripe like watermelon, fat with laughter. My birth came later than expected. Waiting is the worst. After two weeks of waiting, my father poured her a glass of champagne and they toasted to this life, that life, to the windowsills and waitresses, and they drank. And another. I remember. I was there. I can feel the tingle of the alcohol tiptoeing through her veins. The baby kicked! The baby kicked! We danced together, faster and faster as father packed the bags. Grabbed the keys.
I remember the day Johnny Kennedy was shot. How Jackie cried and cried.
I remember the Black Forest. The waltzing Matildas, how the fat hung over their ankles. How they wobbled in celebration of themselves. I remember the dirt paths. They went on and on, changing only ever so slightly, as the forest thickened until there was nothing but bark, leaf and darkness. Light of Day, you would not have fit in. They would have strangled you.
I remember the amalgamation. There is a light connecting us all. I am touching my coffee cup, which is touching the table, which is touching the linoleum tiles of the kitchen floor, which is touching the front door, which is touching the cement steps outside the door. The cement steps are touching the pathway, which is touching the street, which, somewhere quite far from here, is touching the beach, which is touching the ocean. You are swimming. The curve of your breaststroke.
I remember school as an institution. The days run away. The words we wrote on the bathroom walls. They didn't like that much, did they? The first drink. A mixture of everything left over by other people. Bright green. I remember the sharing of bodies. Stuff strutting. The flatulence.
My mother's parents' home. The narrow driveway, a bed of gravel between two brick buildings, the black gate, the courtyard. I remember rose gardens. A white dog with black spots that was mean to everyone but my little sister. My little sister! How she whined. How she wore a denim baseball cap and a denim jacket and denim jeans and denim Chuck Taylors, because that's exactly what I wore. How stupid we looked! How we loved those clothes. The grass stains on our knees.
I remember the bath time I took a bite of a bar of soap. I cried and cried.
I remember the white cliffs of Dover. The world was made of chalk. Drive the car onto the ferry boat and it takes you over the channel. I remember the first time we went under the water. How disappointed I was that the tunnel was not clear. I dreamed of shark infested waters. I thought we were going to see bananafish. I wanted that perfect day. I expected them to play cellos and trombones.
I forget the facial structure of my immediate family. White skin blurs slowly coming into focus. But I remember the design of the playground at the bottom of the hill. The slide. The swings. The grey electricity box. The power lines. The wooden climbing frame. Dirty sand.
I remember a boy. His name is Greg. I remember him being silly. Limbs flailing, almost animated. Hair just this side of long, flopping over his forehead, into his eyes. Nottingham as a football team, but not a city. He skateboards ugly. He takes a holiday to some place, maybe Thailand, and crashes his jet ski into another jet ski and dies. I remember washing my hands in California as it happened. Playing tennis alone against a brick wall. The sun soaked bay smiling up from below.
I remember riding the bus to school. I remember each and every bus ride separately. How the drivers hated us. How they waved us on in spite of themselves and their hate. We drew on their steamed windows with our dirty hands and shouted in a language they did not understand.
I remember the autobahn. How slow we felt doing anything else. I remember the autoroute. How they tried to drive us off the road because we had German stickers. I remember the homes we rented on the holidays that defined us. The photos we only took of smiles. Never a camera out at home, never captured the dull moments or the moments of sheer terror or misery. I don't know what I look like crying, but I know what I look like pretending to smile.
I remember how my maternal Grandmother was the first to die. Cancer. How she withered away. The last time I saw her, she was more bone than anything else, but still smiled just as warm. I tried to say I LOVE YOU, but the words wouldn't come out. I remember my Grandfather on the telephone, angry because the nurse was late, shouting into the receiver WELL I THOUGHT THE FACT THAT SHE'S DYING MIGHT GIVE HER SOME PRIORITY, and that's when I knew she was actually dying and not just sick, and that's also when I knew that the fact that someone is dying rarely gives them any priority.
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Robert Duncan Gray is the pope of dope and the author of CABBAGE LANGUAGE. He is a charming chap who lives and works in Portland, OR. He is an editor for HOUSEFIRE BOOKS and he is in a gang with a cat named Owl. For more information on Rob Gray, click the link to sillyrobchildish.com.
[Photo Via: DeviantArt]