Chapter 8: Soliloquy

8

“Sometimes Norman feels like he’s watching his own life from outside, like he’s actually just receiving the story of his life and interpreting it thusly,” Norman says into his digital recorder, standing on an outcropping of rocks overlooking the wind-textured Atlantic Ocean. “He can fill in the darkness between the words with his own little musings and flourishes, but beyond that it is just a series of facts told by an omniscient narrator. All true.”
He takes in the vista of the ocean, imagining it all to be just a matte painting a few feet away from him down the rocks.
“Still, he is never audienceless, even when he’s alone. In the context of the real world, of standard goings-on and everyday events, however, Norman might be considered something of a strange bird.” He uses his free hand to hold his coat tighter against his body and grimaces as the wind whips his hair around his forehead. “Being that he is always aware of some invisible, omnipotent viewer (which he recognizes is really, like all things, nothing but a part of himself), he does his best to imbue each moment of his freewill with a certain je ne ses quois, a certain distinct Norman-ness, a sort of existential entertainment value, a sort of subtle awesomeness. As he stands, he makes the face he wants to be making as opposed to the one which his body would make without any judgment. He touches places as he passes them, taking for a moment a tiny glimpse of that place’s essence. He can almost see the spirits in the air. When he is alone, he knows the camera is on him. It is when he is alone that he most owns himself, his scene, his choices. Amongst others, Norman finds his identity compromised to a certain extent as such sphinxes as empathy, compassion, responsibility and community invade his mind like spyware, taking up his processing power until the bits left over to run his internal programs are so slow that the user gets frustrated and turns away from the screen, or simply pulls the connection, and social-instinct autopilot kicks in.”
Norman frowns at the wind, uncertain if what he has just said actually makes any sense at all.
Soliloquy

“After all, what is it best to be, when you’re alone? Does it matter, when I’m alone,” he asks his future listening self, “if these words I speak are right, if they actually make sense together, or are they just there to remind me what I meant to say? Hmm.” It strikes him that even now, he’s not entirely sure what he meant by that, and that realization makes him laugh softly to himself.
On the ocean’s horizon Norman notices a tiny black speck – maybe a ship of some kind. For whatever reason, it makes him think of Laura, and that whole mystery surrounding her and their almost-random meeting.
“I love you,” he says toward the horizon, into his digital recorder, and to the wind with the intent that it be carried to wherever Laura is at this moment. He tries to picture her location in relation to him and the space he can see at the moment (ocean, rocks). No doubt, he assumes, she is downtown somewhere in Portland. Norman is in Cape Elizabeth, a few miles from Lee’s house, at Two Lights Park, standing on the rocks by the ocean, to escape the distressing vibe at the house. How far away are we right now? he asks Laura with a thought. As if in response, his mind’s eye is filled with a cinematic shot in which his own wistful face gazing across the ocean is on one side of the frame and Laura, in her apartment, suddenly looking up away from a book, is on the other side of the frame in a diagonal split-screen.
Every once in a while, Norman makes himself reassess his philosophies and values to make sure they still stand up to the light of scrutiny and reason (and still suit his idiom). He finds he must be alone to do so, as the presence of others inevitably fills him with a sense of communal empathy that dulls something crisp about his unique personal self. He is only truly vorpal alone.
In his mind he narrates aloud, and while he does his mind’s eye becomes stronger than his visual eye, and for him he is more standing in a David-Lynch-ishly red-curtained room in his brain, interacting with a phantom of himself that mimics his actions like a mirror, than standing on the rocks on Earth.
I am Norman Newman, he says (and the reflection agrees). There is a me. Or at least, there can be said to be one. There is something fundamental that is getting all this information and doing whatever with it. That thing is me. This shivering body, even these thoughts – just tools. Just words. Where am I – the true me – then? In some sort of higher dimension or whatever? But wherever I am, there I am, and any form I take even there is still just a tool, an avatar. A is A. I may have freewill, but still whatever is is, whatever happens happened.
We have gotten so confused by all the flashing beauty and pain around us. All there really is is the self experiencing and interacting, changing the world and taking it in (though not having to make a big deal out of the things that don’t go how it may have wanted).
Norman sits down on the rocks and folds his legs beneath himself. Then he lets the world whirling around him fade from his vision again and retreats to the warm sanctuary of his memories of Laura’s flesh. The tickle of his own windblown hair against his face becomes Laura’s curly hair; the empty wind blowing against the front of his torso becomes soft, warm skin beating with life. He feels the way she tenderly reached back as he spooned her in the big bed that took up most of her small, map-bedecked bedroom. Her warm fingertips touched the side of his hip, followed by the much cooler palm of her hand. She whispered, “I love you too,” though at the time he had said nothing.
He opens his eyes just as a particularly aggressive gust of wind blows around him, stinging his eyes and causing them to tear up. He holds one hand up over his glass right eye to protect it from the cold and blinks away the tears.
“What is love?” he asks his digital recorder. “Is it something more than what I do?” He thinks about his past lovers, trying to bring to mind the tactile sensation of their various skins against his own, but all he can feel in his imagination is Laura’s. “Are my old loves still alive somewhere, like souls in some kind of heaven? I have never fallen out of love with anyone. How could one?
“What is the purpose of love? Of specific, monogamous love, I mean. We can all love each other as an exercise in self-knowledge and temperance and such, but just loving one specific person? I mean … I’m in love with Laura. It’s as clear as a feeling could be. It’s like I can see that love between me and the world everywhere I look now. Her specifically. But I don’t think that’s what the Bob Marley idea of One Love is supposed to mean. It means One Love – one single love shared by all. Isn’t that right? So what’s with monogamy? Is it just societal logistics? Or is it just people’s insecurities? The fear that no one will love us, and so the need to cling to one person who claims they do? Lou would say, ‘As humans, we are driven to pair bond.’ But why, beyond instinct? It seems to have some connection to duality – the two. The one and the other. But in the context of being human and getting to know people and having sex and kissing and all of that stuff – what is the purpose of it all?
“I sometimes feel like most of what I do on Earth is busy work meant to teach me shit I already know. Of course, I am only saying these things to transfer them into a format of saying them to others so that…” Norman trails off for a moment. “That sentence was fucked anyway. I don’t know where that was going. It’s just - some of the best moments in my life I will never be able to share with anyone. Moments like this. Beyond the words in this machine, the actual experience. It will only ever be mine?”
He gazes up at the sky above, ribbed with gray tubular clouds. A harsh breeze gets under his sleeves and coldly clings to his ribs. He huddles into a ball, with the recorder held between his knees.
“Whoo,” he hums, “coldness, coldness, coldness.
“These soliloquies of mine. If there is no great Reader out there, then are these thoughts just recirculating through the closed system of my mind? I know that on a macroscopic level, that must be the case. The universe is clearly just a whorl swirling eternally in on itself. If there is more, then the whole includes that extra bit too – and just yet-unknown – and there isn’t more anymore. Infinity and zero are the same donut. But here, inside of it, there are ends and beginnings and things and other things and so surely, surely there must be some equal and opposite reaction, as it were, to the thoughts I am sending out into the World…”
Warmth falls across Norman’s back from a powerful field of sunlight that has just cut through the clouds behind him.
To himself, the ocean and the warmth on his back, Norman sings aloud, with the same passion he would give to his microphone if he had been recording a Box track, the Radiohead song I Will. “I will … lay me down … in a bunker … underground … I won’t let this happen to my children … Meet the real world coming out of your shell … with white elephants … sitting ducks … I will … rise up. Little babies’ eyes … eyes … eyes … eyes…” Norman’s unashamed singing voice is something like David Bowie as Morrissey in The R. L. Burnside Story. He finds himself happiest in such moments, alone, singing to the air. As always, however, the nirvana of his solitude is dispelled.
This time, to Norman’s surprise, it is Imogen. She is stepping carefully down along the rocks toward the place where he is sitting, a red scarf flapping around her neck, her shoulder-length jet-black hair dancing frantically in front of her red-framed glasses. She is wearing a long skirt that she made herself with a lovely, ornate painting of Shiva on the left side, and a tight black top that accentuates her large, round breasts. She looks like a windswept dream, enough so that he genuinely wonders until she is right next to him, speaking, if it is just a vision.
Norman stands as Imogen’s Chuck Taylor All-Stars step over a small tidal pool, onto his rock.
“Hello, Norman,” she says, holding her hair back from her face, her head cocked to one side, like she’s trying to look up under his mask.
Norman can only smile into the wind. He knows he ought to speak, and doesn’t want to seem rude, but it is more important to him that he say nothing trite or inadvertently hurtful.
“I didn’t expect to find you here,” she tells him, turning to look at the ocean, and he wonders if it is the truth. For his part, he had hoped not to run into her here, it having been a place they would come together to draw. He now remembers an intuitive thought of her when he first arrived that made him wonder at the time if she might already be there, and he had treaded carefully toward the rocks, looking out for her presence, ready to comically duck away for his own/the Reader’s amusement.
“Are you on your own?” he asks.
“Yeah. I just came to be by myself.”
“Me too.”
Imogen turns back around to face him and looks into his right eye (she always looks him in his glass right eye when she wants to really capture his attention). Norman’s world shrinks to Imogen and the ocean backdrop behind her.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “should I let you be alone?”
“No,” Norman replies, his face remaining generally expressionless only because none of the emotions that are coming to him, suggesting themselves, seem appropriate.
Imogen smiles cutely and folds her hands in front of herself. She stands there, still, in front of the Atlantic Ocean. Through the shy but intimate look in her eyes Norman can see the old Imogen he remembers pressing his body against, precious sleep in her smile, her voice a comforting hand, that old love in her posture, wanting only for Norman to tear away the plastic wrap that surrounds her and give her permission to fall back into his love.
“How are you, Imogen?” he asks softly.
She smiles away the impulse to frown, looks down below Norman’s eyes and says, “You know. I think it sucks we’re not friends right now. I miss you. I don’t really understand why you’re avoiding me. And I have to admit, I definitely don’t get what you were trying to say with that mixtape you left for me.”
“It wasn’t a mixtape with a specific message, per se. And I’m not avoiding you specifically,” Norman tries to explain. “It’s not what I’m not doing so much as what I’m doing, if you know what I mean. I’m just doing something else right now. I meant to give it to you in person, but you weren’t there on Wednesday.”
“I guess I just thought when you first said you were coming back out here that maybe I was part of the reason,” she says.
“You were,” Norman admits. “I didn’t know what would happen, but you being out here, seeing you again was a huge part of the reason I came out here. I mean, I love you. But I don’t know. Things didn’t turn out how I expected.”
“Yeah.” Imogen puts her hands behind her back and twists in the wind, looking off to the side, down along the shore. Norman can see that she is holding back tears. “I wish you wouldn’t say that, because I know you don’t really mean it.”
Norman’s throat takes the painful brunt of that comment. “I’m sorry, baby,” he coos, wanting to console her but not knowing how to as an ex-lover.
“Don’t call me baby,” Imogen says with a half-hearted swish of her hand in his direction, still looking away to avoid crying.
“I don’t know how you want me to be. I’m sorry.” Norman looks at the lovely girl who used to be his most precious love, who indeed he still adores despite all the drama that split them apart. He knows that they will never kiss again, but after that thought, kissing her is all he can imagine. He looks into her eyes, which are welling up with tears. “What do you want from me?” he asks her.
“I want this to tear you up as much as it does me, until you realize that you’re really still desperately in love with me, and fall into my arms.”
“I will always love you, Imogen, but if I fell into your arms right now I would knock us both into the sea.”
“Stop being so literal,” Imogen barks, finally losing her grip on those tears.
Norman only then notices their treacherous surroundings, the rocky drop into the ocean. “I actually wasn’t,” he says, smiling despite himself. He scratches his lip to hide the smile. “Imogen, I do still love you. I will always love you. You’re incredible. But I don’t know if you and I mean the same thing anymore when we use the word love.”
Imogen’s light tears begin to fall heavier, measured now in weeps.
“I’m sorry, my darling. You know, I always told you that my art, my purpose, is my highest priority.”
“Yes, thank you, you reminded me every time you could.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. You are amazing, and I hate the idea of you ever leaving my life, of us not being close. But I can’t go through this with you, this, whatever this is that you’re doing to yourself.”
“I know,” Imogen says like she’s heard it a thousand times, “I should learn to control my emotions with pure will.”
Norman shrugs. “Or just think about the outside world for a while and find some perspective. I mean, relative to everything else that’s going on, is your position really that bad?”
“Fuck you, Norman,” Imogen spits. She glares at him with trembling cheek bones for a few long moments, then turns with a weep and begins the slow process of walking carefully away from him over the uneven rocks.
“I didn’t mean in relation to the break-up pain,” Norman tries to explain, “I meant in relation to the pre-break-up arbitrary depression that led to the break-up.” He finishes the sentence to himself, as she is already out of earshot in the rising wind. Norman watches her leave in silence until she is over the grassy rise away from the ocean.
Norman sits back down on his rock, facing the gray, wind-textured Atlantic.
Though he fights the initial physical impulses (a weight in his chest, an arrhythmic cramping of the throat), Norman can’t stop himself from crying when his mind’s eye falls across a slideshow retrospective of Imogen’s loving glances throughout the past.
It strikes Norman that in a fictionalization of this moment, be it a book or a film or whatever, the scene might linger on this sad moment of his for a while as denouement from the previous dramatic dialogue, but not for too long before it faded off into the next important scene of plot development. But for him, he has to sit here until he decides to get up, then walk back up the rocks to his car and drive home. Like Imogen – for Norman, she left the scene moments ago when she stepped over the horizon, but no doubt she is still walking, not far from here, not quite to her car yet. Perhaps she will sit for a time by herself, blaring some old mixtape on her car stereo.
Norman retrieves a pen from his pocket and writes IT’S ALL ABOUT THE EDITING at the base of his thumb, surrounds the words with a box.
As he walks back from the shore, through the short forest path, past the picnic area where a family is having lunch and flying late-season kites, down the little concrete steps embedded in the hillside and across the gravel parking lot to his car, Norman makes a point of noting and appreciating the details of each little moment surrounding him. So much information there is, and we catalogue it in our memories (and even in the moment’s perception!) usually with just quick sketches. He stops briefly and considers the staggering amount of information that surrounds him in even this simple moment in a tiny corner of southern Maine. It strikes him that potent dramatic moments that you will always remember and throw-away moments like this that there are billions of throughout your life and that you will never remember are physically, measurably identical in nature. There is the same amount of information in terms of the physical surroundings, where everything is and what spin each particle has and such. But somehow certain moments are more real, they live higher in the world. Norman wonders how many insects are within sight that he doesn’t know about, and he wonders how much awareness is involved in being an insect. They are biological, after all; they do make choices. They learn, they consider; they’re not robots (any more than this guy approaching).
“Hi there,” nods a white-haired gentleman who is walking the opposite direction with his frail wife.
“Afternoon,” Norman nods with a smile. Who was that guy? What’s his story? How did they fall in love, and where will his awareness go after he dies?
Norman gets into his black Mirage and shuts the door. He sits for a while in the quiet, cramped solitude.
When he next looks back up at the world, his gaze falls upon Imogen’s car, which he hadn’t noticed before, still sitting on the opposite side of the parking lot with Imogen inside, crying. Norman’s heart clenches up. He can’t help but say, “Oh, Imogen,” to her from a distance, but then decides that that is as much comforting as he can do for her right now without hurting her more.
He turns the key and the whole car rumbles for a moment, the stereo begins blasting the Prodigy song Breathe. “Exhale, exhale, exhale!” Norman lights a cigarette, puts the car into drive, and then proceeds to sit still, switching his foot back and forth between the gas and brake as needed. He ashes several times out the window then flicks his cigarette into the wind of the careening streets outside. The world spins and swoons around him, and just after Breathe has ended and the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah has begun (a mix CD originally intended for Imogen but never delivered), he puts the car in park and turns it off, then steps out into the driveway at Lee’s house.
As soon as he enters the breezeway, letting various cats in and out when he opens the door, Norman can hear Lee and Ben arguing with each other in the garage. He stops in his tracks halfway in the door and looks down at his feet and the passing cat traffic with a frustrated sigh. He wishes there was some kind of potion he could force-feed them all that would make them reasonable, make them just chill out, make them realize that everything can be controlled by choice, even how you feel, how you react to anything at all.
Knowing that Lee will tearfully beg him to give them space if he were to interrupt, Norman turns around and heads back out toward the driveway, passes his car and sits down lotus-style in the center of the bulb of the cul-de-sac. He closes his eyes, curtaining the whole world in the pale pink color of his semi-translucent eyelids.
“You can be well,” he whispers. “Just be well.” He waits, as if listening to the World for a response. “You can’t hear me, can you?” He opens his eyes, to address the World instead of just the backs of his eyelids. The trees that tower over the houses sway about. The playful screams of children down the street mask the less jovial ones coming from inside the garage. It makes Norman think about something he read in a book about the Rwandan massacres back in the nineties – something about an ancient tradition in Rwanda, a certain way a woman can scream that anyone who hears it is obliged to come running. “Is anybody listening?” he asks, listening to the shouting in the garage. He pulls out his digital recorder, quickly asks it, “How do you free the slave who just returns to his cage?” then returns it to his pocket.
Norman lights a cigarette, then closes his eyes and meditates there for a while. He lets his spirit slip away and drift wherever it may, which ends up taking him upon the mind currents of astral Portland, up into the sky above the World, then drifting slowly back down like a glowing black snowflake and watching the thrumming circuit board of astral human society from above.
About ten minutes later as the sun is setting and the trees glow orange, a neighbor’s car comes up the street and has to slowly drive around the young man in a lotus position in the middle of the cul-de-sac.

I am not afraid at all.
I am not afraid at all.
I am literally not afraid at all.

He whips the thought repeatedly against the dark wind like a prayer flag held up into the Upper World, or like text in a novel of the future, centered and emphatically italicized, hoping the repeated thought itself might somehow spread some reason into the surrounding spiritwaves.