Unimportant Details

Car Sickness. Vertigo when looking down even momentarily while in an accelerated frame. His love of popular science, astronomy facts. He recorded them in his calendar notebook while riding the bus. Trying furiously to fit one in in the brief amount of time the bus stopped to pick up one here one there. Then an intermission of fragments: what the facts were and waiting at each red light for the next one and the philologists asked the writers to stop writing so they could catch a break or they went off into endless theories about method and forgot they had a subject only too many stop lights and too much [x] came out. So Samuel wrote, and here and there inserted the symbol ‘[x]’ which he had lifted from somewhere and forgot where, but he remembered this part: that its use was different in the original. By inserting an ‘[x]’ here and there S had saved some of his claims from being obviously false—but they were still not true, or if true then an empty sort of true, so he couldn’t be too satisfied. Broken skin, lost bicycle, found penny, vertigo in spite of his care to only write while the bus was stopped, the white hot ring he’d left on the bench waiting for the bus, the white hot ‘[x]’s he’d littered the pages with. Off the bus now and it was raining—first soft then hard. The force of the drops shot muddy clumps onto his legs, and the mud ran with the red from his shin wounds. S couldn’t feel it—the red. It was color. Something to look at. Though he was tempted to infuse it with a meaning it didn’t have—he resisted. It wasn’t worth it he thought, and besides probably it made the moment cheaper. So he walked around a nearly v shaped row of houses, small, white, with that perfectly unremarkable white siding, flimsy looking metal railings leading up the sides of concrete steps to blue, brown, and red doors. From there he crossed the busy road where the traffic was so consistent and swift that crossing was a real task, and crossing limp was out of the question. He crossed, timed it neatly, and began to climb the hill on the opposite side. It was steep and covered in thick grass, which now was a sleek green waterfall. He slipped, knee in the grass, finding a pocket of mud in a thick, densely coated patch of blades. It was rinsed clean in moments by the downpour. Again: same knee, all grass this time. Now he felt his shin wound. “Fuck!” he winced and clutched the sides of his leg. He made the top of the hill and was now protected by a long overhang, which grew from the roof of a squat department store. It was closed, had been for some time—tape on the windows, dark inside. He sat back against the wall, waiting for his friend—cold, but in spite of this he almost fell asleep. His calendar notebook, the one he’d been using as a journal, was kept mostly dry throughout his trip from the bus stop to the overhang, as he’d rolled it up in the front of his jacket. It now rested open on the concrete next to his dripping legs. Cleaned though they were by the rain they were still bleeding, and the one he’d twice fallen on was slightly stinging.

Samuel saw Madimaken’s work boots in the lower eighth of his visual field. He looked up. M was wearing a white dress shirt and a tie, black slacks—all of which looked absurd because of the boots, or the boots because of the shirt and pants. “You writin’ somethin’?” M indicated the calendar notebook. “Yeah. It’s a short story. I’ll read it to you later. You want to get something to eat?” “Sure my interview’s at 1:00, so I don’t got much time. How about pizza? There’s this little place by the university café?” S said ok and they walked under the overhang as far as they could before making their way through the open air between them and the pizza place. S was anxious to impress M, who wrote beautifully and was honest enough to tell him if his story was crap or maybe something worth working on. M asked S if he’d heard about [x]; S said he’d heard about it but didn’t know all the details. So M went about telling S what he’d found out just this morning digging around in his office. S said it reminded him of this paper he’d read, about the theory of [y]. M said he hadn’t heard of it but was in general not interested in [y].

Sitting over the remainder of a bland slice of pizza, S began to read to M from his calendar notebook. M, finished with his own slice by the end, replied: “You’ve got a shy sense of humor—it’s really quite funny. The part where the tortoise says, ‘when god moved the stone, all the mass made him imperceptibly small’, or, what was it?” S gave him the line. “Right: ‘god only moved and is the stone, in existing beings and men, imperceptibly small’. Was that your line? It sounds so familiar.” “Oh, no,” S said, “the tortoise is quoting [z]. I just thought, because of the way the story begins /” Here M cut S off. “No no. I don’t want to know. Frankly, it’s beautiful, the way some things can get to you when they remain mysterious. Fill in the gap and it’s a smooth ride, all the way to the end. Nobody remembers a smooth ride. Nobody writes about the time he caught the bus, had lunch with a friend before work, slept soundly. It’s the hang ups make the story—your bleeding shins, broken bike, my fuckin’ shoes! For Christ’s sake do you want to ask why I’m wearing my work boots to an interview?!” “Why are you…” S went for the bait, realized it was rhetorical, too late, and felt like an ass. Of course M didn’t want him to know why—that was an illustration of his point about odd little details. And, now, in a markedly different tone: “I moved here…when I moved to the city…I packed a large black suitcase with my clothes. I put my dress clothes on top but didn’t want my dirty shoes in the bag. So I wedged them into a box of VHS tapes, my collection of French TV. The box got lost in baggage handling—unimportant detail. When I finally got it, I’d forgotten about the shoes and put it in storage with the rest of the things I didn’t think I’d need anytime soon. Woke up this morning, going crazy looking for the shoes when I remembered: they’re with the French TV tapes.” “I’m sorry,” S said, “I get your point—about detail.” “I know you do,” M said reassuringly, “but I don’t mind telling you about my shoes.” And they sat there in silence as S finished his slice. “Ready to go?” M asked.