9.12.04
I tried to think of something interesting to talk about today, but all my first semester coursework is due in next week so this week has been spent in a haze of "oh crap I forgot about that," working and staying in my room. I could tell you wonderful stories about my adventures in sitting. Sitting on my bed with my laptop, on the couch, in a chair, on the floor. But I'd rather not relive the horror of actual work. Instead, I'll cheat a bit, and show you some of the work I was doing (albeit the more pleasant part). I'll cheat a little bit more because a first draft of this piece already shows up on this blog some time back, but I was proud of myself for actually going back and finishing it.
Autobiography of a Backpack.
A long time ago, I met a boy with a backpack that spoke to him.
It was, we agreed, a sure sign of his insanity, because nobody else could hear it.
While we agreed on this, I somehow never found it strange. When I thought about it at all, I was slightly jealous.
The boy told me the story of how the bag first began to speak. It was after he had been beaten up in a locker room. He was lying on his back, staring up at the dust-covered heating pipes, breathing through his mouth because his nose was full of blood. The bag had been beaten up as well. It was collapsing in a corner. There was a depression, an indentation in the green and purple fabric where it had been kicked, caught in the breath-sucking moment of foot-to-stomach contact. The boy apologised.
"It's okay," the bag said to him. "The fuckers don't know where my nuts are."
The backpack swore like a sailor - something he claimed he'd learned from a Puma sports bag. And in the beginning, he hated me.
I could tell, somehow. The gortex straps prickled against my palms. Eventually I stopped passing him across the room, picking him up and handing him over. The boy apologised awkwardly, not knowing how to apologise for a fragment of himself, however disjointed, that would spit at me if it had saliva.
They held conversations. I had to wait for the translation. Or the insult. Once we were waiting in the rain.
"What did he say this time?" I asked.
"He said he signed up to be a backpack not a fucking water bottle."
"Tell him if he was my bag, I'd sew up his mouth."
The boy laughed. "He says, 'Madam, if I was your bag, I'd purse my lips.'"
"Churchill?" "He says no. He says Churchill was so fat you couldn't see his backpack. He says Churchill would have been lost without him."
Then the boy shut up, turned his face away, and stuck his hands in his pockets. The suddenness was enough to stop me from asking what the bag had said this time. I remembered another quote. Winston, you're drunk, and then, Bess you're ugly, and tomorrow I will be sober. And I thought that I had cut myself again on the bag's razor wit, and that tomorrow he would still hate me.
It became hard to remember that Sac (the rucksack, the backpack, the bag) was just a fragment, a broken piece of a broken boy. The boy was sweet and daft and made people laugh because he was happy to let them laugh at him. The boy tried hard to be as funny as Sac and always fell short. Sac would recline, lazily against the skirting board of the boy's bedroom, or would hang from the back of his computer chair, passing judgement on the world. He reminded me of a great ape, a story-book gorilla; lazy, arrogant, assured. Always with a touch of gleeful chimpanzee malevolence.
"So what are we going to do?" he asked me.
"I don't know, what do you want to do?"
"I don't know."
"Ask Sac," I said.
"You ask him."
"He doesn't like me."
"We spoke about that. You ask him."
"Hey Sac," I said. "What do you want to do?"
"He says he's not sure about you, but he wants to sing his irresistable syren song and see how many unwitting mariners he can lure to him. He thinks it will be much more profitable than busking."
So this became the situation: My best friend spoke to an hallucinatory rucksack that we both acknowledged existed solely within the realms of his imagination. But most of the time, we forgot this fact. Sac was loud and hard to ignore, Sac was brash, Sac would taunt bullies and stand up for the underdog. Sac was the boy's defender because he could not defend himself. Sac did not always like me, but I was jealous anyway. I remembered bullies, and I remembered locker rooms too. I wished my sanity was more fluid. I wished the logical parts of my mind would fall away like dried fish-scales; I wanted to shed them, to be left with a shimmering backpack who would bitch about the world in a poor immitation Irish accent.
"So that's not his mouth?" "He says, hell no, it's his pouch. What do you think he does? Swallow all the stuff he carries?"
"Well...It makes sense..."
"He says, 'dude, that's gross.' He says he's a marsupial."
"If he hasn't got a mouth, how does he speak?"
"Um, apparently, you aren't wise enough in the ways of the force to understand, young one."
This was at the point where our conversations no longer consisted largely of four letter words followed by 'you', but before... Well. Before. Before his side pocket was being held together with a safety pin, but not before one of his two main clasps had broken, and it was necessary to loop his left-hand strap around the plastic remains to keep him shut.
What Sac wanted more than anything, I learned, was to be filled with cool stuff. As a bag, apparently, carrying stuff is a duty and a calling. He never wanted to be able to speak. He wasn't quite sure how it had happened. After that, he wouldn't tell me anymore. I suppose we reached a block in the boy's mind - a point at which his logic train threatened to fall apart, or perhaps it just became too painful. You know. If you want to analyse. I am trying to analyse now, but it is hard. I forgot to do it at the time.
Later than that, right before the before I was talking about - the boy was leaning against the fence on the other side of his garden. I was crouching, fiddling with the grass. It was almost night. He told me the bag was dying.
I cried.
We whispered in the dusk. The boy told me he had already tried the arguments I was suggesting. The bag didn't want his holes mended, he didn't want to ride around inside another backpack. The boy raged at the bag, and pleaded. It was no use. He was going. He was sliding away. In time the boy quieted. He invited me over, and asked me for a favour.
"I shouldn't be the one to do this. You should be the one to do this." "We don't want me to do it." "But he hates me."
"No. He doesn't. Not anymore. He's me, remember. And I trust you, so he does too. He never really hated you. I was just scared. I was scared. We trust you now. You'll do this right." "Why won't you do it?"
"Because I can't. He's me, remember. I can't bury myself. It would hurt too much." "But we're not even going to bury him. Shouldn't we at least bury him?"
"He's a bag. He wants to die like a bag."
We filled him with as many cool things as we could find, and I carried him home with me.
We put the following things inside his pouch: three teenage mutant ninja turtle action figures (Leonardo, Donatello, and Master Splinter), a deck of cards for Magic: the Gathering, my notebook (which was filled with crazy stick men pictures of a cartoon apocalypse and a list of books I wanted to read and all the quotes I heard that I liked), three dairy milk chocolate bars, pictures of the time we went to London and got lost, a hardback book without a dust jacket (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula in one edition), a softbacked book (The Art of War by Sun Tze, which neither of us had ever read), and a computer mouse (because the boy was giving it to me, and Sac wanted to be useful on his last journey.)
It was the first time I had ever worn him on my shoulders. We wove between the people at the station. We waved goodbye.
On the train, I thought, for a moment, that I heard him demanding to know why he didn't get a ticket. I would have replied - something funny and sarcastic - but the conductor was staring at me, so I fumbled my ticket over to him, said nothing, and regretted the decision.
When I got home, I buried him in the trash can.
Autobiography of a Backpack.
A long time ago, I met a boy with a backpack that spoke to him.
It was, we agreed, a sure sign of his insanity, because nobody else could hear it.
While we agreed on this, I somehow never found it strange. When I thought about it at all, I was slightly jealous.
The boy told me the story of how the bag first began to speak. It was after he had been beaten up in a locker room. He was lying on his back, staring up at the dust-covered heating pipes, breathing through his mouth because his nose was full of blood. The bag had been beaten up as well. It was collapsing in a corner. There was a depression, an indentation in the green and purple fabric where it had been kicked, caught in the breath-sucking moment of foot-to-stomach contact. The boy apologised.
"It's okay," the bag said to him. "The fuckers don't know where my nuts are."
The backpack swore like a sailor - something he claimed he'd learned from a Puma sports bag. And in the beginning, he hated me.
I could tell, somehow. The gortex straps prickled against my palms. Eventually I stopped passing him across the room, picking him up and handing him over. The boy apologised awkwardly, not knowing how to apologise for a fragment of himself, however disjointed, that would spit at me if it had saliva.
They held conversations. I had to wait for the translation. Or the insult. Once we were waiting in the rain.
"What did he say this time?" I asked.
"He said he signed up to be a backpack not a fucking water bottle."
"Tell him if he was my bag, I'd sew up his mouth."
The boy laughed. "He says, 'Madam, if I was your bag, I'd purse my lips.'"
"Churchill?" "He says no. He says Churchill was so fat you couldn't see his backpack. He says Churchill would have been lost without him."
Then the boy shut up, turned his face away, and stuck his hands in his pockets. The suddenness was enough to stop me from asking what the bag had said this time. I remembered another quote. Winston, you're drunk, and then, Bess you're ugly, and tomorrow I will be sober. And I thought that I had cut myself again on the bag's razor wit, and that tomorrow he would still hate me.
It became hard to remember that Sac (the rucksack, the backpack, the bag) was just a fragment, a broken piece of a broken boy. The boy was sweet and daft and made people laugh because he was happy to let them laugh at him. The boy tried hard to be as funny as Sac and always fell short. Sac would recline, lazily against the skirting board of the boy's bedroom, or would hang from the back of his computer chair, passing judgement on the world. He reminded me of a great ape, a story-book gorilla; lazy, arrogant, assured. Always with a touch of gleeful chimpanzee malevolence.
"So what are we going to do?" he asked me.
"I don't know, what do you want to do?"
"I don't know."
"Ask Sac," I said.
"You ask him."
"He doesn't like me."
"We spoke about that. You ask him."
"Hey Sac," I said. "What do you want to do?"
"He says he's not sure about you, but he wants to sing his irresistable syren song and see how many unwitting mariners he can lure to him. He thinks it will be much more profitable than busking."
So this became the situation: My best friend spoke to an hallucinatory rucksack that we both acknowledged existed solely within the realms of his imagination. But most of the time, we forgot this fact. Sac was loud and hard to ignore, Sac was brash, Sac would taunt bullies and stand up for the underdog. Sac was the boy's defender because he could not defend himself. Sac did not always like me, but I was jealous anyway. I remembered bullies, and I remembered locker rooms too. I wished my sanity was more fluid. I wished the logical parts of my mind would fall away like dried fish-scales; I wanted to shed them, to be left with a shimmering backpack who would bitch about the world in a poor immitation Irish accent.
"So that's not his mouth?" "He says, hell no, it's his pouch. What do you think he does? Swallow all the stuff he carries?"
"Well...It makes sense..."
"He says, 'dude, that's gross.' He says he's a marsupial."
"If he hasn't got a mouth, how does he speak?"
"Um, apparently, you aren't wise enough in the ways of the force to understand, young one."
This was at the point where our conversations no longer consisted largely of four letter words followed by 'you', but before... Well. Before. Before his side pocket was being held together with a safety pin, but not before one of his two main clasps had broken, and it was necessary to loop his left-hand strap around the plastic remains to keep him shut.
What Sac wanted more than anything, I learned, was to be filled with cool stuff. As a bag, apparently, carrying stuff is a duty and a calling. He never wanted to be able to speak. He wasn't quite sure how it had happened. After that, he wouldn't tell me anymore. I suppose we reached a block in the boy's mind - a point at which his logic train threatened to fall apart, or perhaps it just became too painful. You know. If you want to analyse. I am trying to analyse now, but it is hard. I forgot to do it at the time.
Later than that, right before the before I was talking about - the boy was leaning against the fence on the other side of his garden. I was crouching, fiddling with the grass. It was almost night. He told me the bag was dying.
I cried.
We whispered in the dusk. The boy told me he had already tried the arguments I was suggesting. The bag didn't want his holes mended, he didn't want to ride around inside another backpack. The boy raged at the bag, and pleaded. It was no use. He was going. He was sliding away. In time the boy quieted. He invited me over, and asked me for a favour.
"I shouldn't be the one to do this. You should be the one to do this." "We don't want me to do it." "But he hates me."
"No. He doesn't. Not anymore. He's me, remember. And I trust you, so he does too. He never really hated you. I was just scared. I was scared. We trust you now. You'll do this right." "Why won't you do it?"
"Because I can't. He's me, remember. I can't bury myself. It would hurt too much." "But we're not even going to bury him. Shouldn't we at least bury him?"
"He's a bag. He wants to die like a bag."
We filled him with as many cool things as we could find, and I carried him home with me.
We put the following things inside his pouch: three teenage mutant ninja turtle action figures (Leonardo, Donatello, and Master Splinter), a deck of cards for Magic: the Gathering, my notebook (which was filled with crazy stick men pictures of a cartoon apocalypse and a list of books I wanted to read and all the quotes I heard that I liked), three dairy milk chocolate bars, pictures of the time we went to London and got lost, a hardback book without a dust jacket (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula in one edition), a softbacked book (The Art of War by Sun Tze, which neither of us had ever read), and a computer mouse (because the boy was giving it to me, and Sac wanted to be useful on his last journey.)
It was the first time I had ever worn him on my shoulders. We wove between the people at the station. We waved goodbye.
On the train, I thought, for a moment, that I heard him demanding to know why he didn't get a ticket. I would have replied - something funny and sarcastic - but the conductor was staring at me, so I fumbled my ticket over to him, said nothing, and regretted the decision.
When I got home, I buried him in the trash can.
