The Real World 

Dale dropped the roach in an empty beercan, blew dopesmoke at his laptop screen and typed: “The real world bothers me, I come on here, this bothers me, I go back to the real world, the real world comes in here, I come back to the real world.” He leaned back in a worn desk chair and drank the last of a beer gone warm and flat. Hand found mouse, published another futile thought. One day he’d figure things out. He’d be more successful. He’d make more money. With the money he could buy happiness and with happiness he would be validated. He didn’t know specifics but when he became more successful and moneyed he’d know. There were some leaps in logic in all this, the formulation uselessly algebraic, the variables vaguely defined, but he had no clarity. He didn’t have clarity because there was no potential in his future. Admitting this tilted him closer to despair. He rose from the peeling fake leather of the chair and took three steps to the fridge. The beer was cold again. His mind wandered to France where he imagined purchasing a black market revolver off an Algerian in the Paris suburbs. After eating a well executed meal he found a nice country view and put a bullet through his right temple that exited his left temple.

Last week he reframed his suffering as a companion. He now thought of it as a chimpanzee that hung off his neck, wore a fez and a diaper, smoked cigarettes, exuded a grey fecal stench. That’s what his life was. A pathetic cartoon. Kind of funny but not really. Understanding did not console. It made the pain more exact. It made him want to lash out. When he taught he wanted to lash out at his students but couldn’t afford to get fired. The head teacher Jared issued Dale a verbal warning earlier that month.

He scrolled through fragments of celebrity gossip, political polemics, the latest on the latest war, felt increasingly passive, empty and useless, clapped the screen down.

*

The students were mostly Japanese, stylish and quiet, reluctant to practice speaking, so Dale’s lessons ended up grammar- and vocab-heavy.

He pointed at the words with the capped tip of a dry-erase marker: “You ride on a bus, you drive in a car, you ride on a motorcycle, you fly in an airplane but you are on the plane. Make sense?” 

They nodded yes with perplexed faces. At this point a concept-checking question would be detrimental, would send them right back around to the beginning of the lesson with ten minutes of classtime remaining. Not making himself understood was like being an alien in his home country.

*

There was a construction pit on the corner lot beside his apartment sublet. The shattering jackhammers were not only outside the apartment but inside his skull. Construction of the subway station was the excavation of his soul. The ongoing clamor deepened his malaise week by week. Earplugs chafed his ear canals. He looked down at the miniscule laborers in their hi-viz vests and hardhats. They really worked for their cash, Dale thought, bad habits and thankless families chewing through their labor faster than they produced it.

*

It wasn’t only a rough patch. Dale was dour. Once a friend made fun of Dale’s dour nature in a short animated film. He put his enlarged CG head on a CG dumpster, animated it to the tune Ridin Dirty and called it Dumpster Head. Then his so-called friend exhibited the work as a video installation and uploaded it on YouTube.

*

He was forty-three years old. His white chin whiskers looked like a film of mold. Floating pains migrated from his lower back to the abdomen up through the chest and came to rest behind the left scapula. He was ashamed and estranged and adrift, didn’t know why or from who or where from. “I’m forty-three years old, still dicking around with poetry and the only thing I can say about my poetry is it’s a form of being lost,” he typed, clicked the blue button. It didn’t get a single like.

*

The following afternoon in his elective there were ten students present, a symmetry Dale appreciated. It meant no odd-numbered groups. He wouldn’t have to explain as if to a class of pre-schoolers that there’d be one group of three. He could split them up into pairs and assign the prepositions worksheet. They would discover the grammar point.

 “I’m giving each of you a number between one and five. When you get your number, stand up, hold up the same amount of fingers as your number, two fingers for two, three fingers for three, and so on, then find the person with the same number and sit down with that person. Complete the worksheet together.”

They nodded with each added clause. He numbered the students while handing out the worksheet and sat down at his desk. They looked unsure in their original positions, watching him for another cue.

“Get up! Find your partner,” he lashed out.

The students got up as one unit, bumping into each other and calling out numbers, sometimes the wrong ones, chairs skidding, sentence fragments clashing, Dale thinking of some prepositional phrases applicable to himself: on edge, in debt, overworked, underpaid.

*

After each workday he was mentally depleted and his head ached. Today was no different. He walked down Pender trying to make eye-contact with someone in the crowd. This gesture was met with aversion or indifference, or ignorance, since people were always on their phones. He noticed the shift in women’s fashion from close-fitting casual to loose and flowing elegant, throat sore from all the repetitive pronunciation exercises. The dull pain in his head coalesced with the street noise and the constant motion of traffic induced him to walk faster, almost at a jog, yet he had no appointment to make and nobody waited for him to come home.

At the intersection of Pender and Homer the orange hand flashed, turned solid. He stopped, waited. When the light changed, a guy wearing silver bellbottoms and a ruffle front blouse overtook Dale. The guy faced his reflection in the windows of passing cars, stated: “Isis was a lesbian terrorist” and swaggered pimpishly the rest of the way across Homer. Dale laughed, noticed his left Adidas Gazelle had come untied. He crouched, tied his shoe, stood up straight, waited for the vertigo to subside and continued.

 Further down Pender Dale resisted going into one of the used booksellers where he might find an affordable volume by Peter Handke or Charles Reznikoff, Anna Akhmatova or Emily Dickinson. But it wasn’t payday and he went on, cut diagonally through Victory Square where muzzled pitbulls wandered about off-leash, their owners stoned and drunk on the grass, splayed over park benches, thug dope dealers posted up in the shadow of the cenotaph.

Half a block down Hastings Dale encountered an entirely different milieu. This was where all the ambulance sirens stopped. Someone in an alcove heated a square of tinfoil and sucked the crack cloud through a blackened glass tube. Puttylike skin hung slack off a woman’s toothless jaw that chewed on her need. Dirty fingernail probing a pus-filled sore. Down one whole side of the next block grey tents were pressed together, dissolute households crammed into each. A man cleaned out a brazier. Someone divvied up a Black Forest cake. Arm latticed with scars flagged down a police cruiser. An officer got out wearing black nitrile gloves. On Columbia the same shoe came untied again. He knelt to tie it and his knee joints cracked. As he snugged the bow a crow dive-bombed him. He felt its plumage on his ear and cheek. Startled, Dale stood, went on, and the crow did it again.

From a shop window in Chinatown a waving lucky cat seemed to mock him.

He turned right on Main. Bus stop glass lay in a shattered shimmering pile below its fixture. He snuck on the bus through the back door, sat down and heard: “Why the fuck do I have to pay and you don’t?” The man was very fat. Small righeous eyes stabbed from a bloated face.

“Fuck off,” Dale said.

“Get off the bus mooch.”

“Suck liquid shit Jabba.”

The man pretended to hold himself back. It just looked like he couldn’t get up.

“You must pay triple,” Dale said.

“Why would I pay triple?”

“Cuz you take up three seats you morbidly obese pig. Fuck you.”

At the next stop Dale got off asking the guy if he was coming with. Outside the sun leaned on him like a tall gold slab. He started worrying if maybe one of his students had been on the bus, power walking up the remainder of the hill, jaw clamped, patches of sweat expanding across the back and darkening the underarms of his blue dress shirt as a person shouted “Dumpster Head” from a car window.

*

Just back from the liquor store Dale’s phone rang. It was his mother.

“Hi Dale.”

“Hey mom.”

“We need to talk.”

“What about?”

“You need to contact the student loan people so you can arrange some sort of repayment plan.”

“I’m working pay cheque to pay cheque. I can’t afford to deal with my loan right now.”

“Well you need to contact them! They keep calling me. Everyday I get a call.”

“Change your number.”

“I can’t change my number! I have my Avon business! I have hundreds of customers. How will they get hold of me?”

“I never thought of that.”

“You never think of anything besides yourself. Go to the bank! Consolidate your debt. I’m sick of dealing with your creditors,” she pleaded, dogs barking in the big house in the background of the call.

“I can’t survive,” he stated.

“Get another job, a second job. Tutor evenings and weekends. Do some landscaping or some extra kitchen work. Anything. I can’t take these damn people calling me morning noon and night.”

“Okay mom, really sorry. I’ll think of something.”

“Don’t be sorry! Pay your goddamn bills—”

 He pressed END.

*

“We made another world, a new world called the internet, and we stand like crystal balljoints between our first world and this new one,” Dale posted. A few of his mutuals liked it. There was a lot of crazy shit online to compete with. Instead of working on his lesson plans, Dale would get stoned to a psytrance playlist and scroll through social media accounts, absorbed by the inner space of bizarre textual self-reflection and vapid nihilism. It was the images that really drew him in, though: kittens with cigarettes in their mouths, diagrams of the Sephirothic System of Ten Divine Names, clouds and sunsets, owls perched in dead malls, the construction of Brasilia from scratch, a ceiling fan caught in a fly trap, some writhing mass of eels devouring an extra large pizza, female pubic hair trimmed down to the shape of a heart, a doorway on Mars, cyber cafes in flooded dirt cellars full of people crouching on their chairs with rapt empty faces much like Dale’s.

That night was no different, almost. While chuckling at a video of a dancing bear cub, Dale noticed a private message. It was from an online friend he had with a made-up name from a different timezone. He clicked on it. There was a link to a track. The music had tribal drums and ambient synthesizers with a sample of a lecturer placed legibly in the mix so the listener could follow along. This voice spoke about chakras, that they were a kind of adhesive which held the physical and luminous bodies together. They were like screw-points that loosened and let go when a person died. At this point the luminous body detached from the physical body and became formless again. The way it should be, Dale thought.

It was after eleven. He yawned, stepped into the kitchen, saw a cockroach immobile on the wall, sprayed it with bleach. It vanished through a crack in the plaster and he lost what little appetite he had, almost didn’t brush his teeth before getting into bed, where he folded himself in musty bedding.

He usually had disturbing, incoherent dreams and that night was no exception. Dreamspace of a building interior full of steps and distant crowds with eyeless faces he was not allowed to talk to because they were celebrating something he had not been part of. Shallow fountain pools everywhere with railings across them and no other way around and his dreamself with terrible balance falling into the shallow water and his clothing wet and cold as he staggered up wide staircases through empty plazas, each like a vacuum further down the tiered depths of his subconscious. Dale nightly dipped his tired, scaling feet in the abyss.

*

He was listening to Bach’s Toccatas, hungover, when Jared poked his head in the classroom and asked him into the office. Jared was wearing his Titleist hat, FootJoy polo and center-creased khakis. He had a pallid complexion and a wart on his double chin, appeared to be in a smiling mood. Dale figured he had a tee time.

The head teacher’s office was more of a utility closet with a desk and two chairs. There was shelf dedicated to the school’s photocopier paper. A white backdrop with an infinity corner and some lighting stands were packed in one corner. Dale sat in one chair next to Jared’s clubs and Jared sat opposite the narrow desk.

“So, Dale, how’s the Rudiments Program working out for you?”

“Not bad I guess. Depends,” Dale said, a five iron in his face. 

“On?”

“Who I’ve got in the class. If there’s some Latinos and Euros in there it helps the Asians break out of their shells.”

“True,” Jared said, and the door opened, hit Dale in the shoulder. 

“Paper,” Bret from admin said. Dale handed him a ream. Bret was new and eager. Dale had been there too.

“So, yeah, Dale,” Jared continued, “we’ve had some complaints from the Seoul student group, saying you were a bit harsh a few times. And there’s been some other complaints about your afternoon elective. I should be clear, I like you, this isn’t coming from me. But the director told me to tell you that you have one more chance. But I can give you an option. You can quit on good terms, I’ll give you a reference letter. Or you can stay and risk getting fired next time there’s a complaint.”

Dale looked at Jared for a while. Jared looked at his golf clubs.

“Sure.”

“You’re gonna stay on?”

“No, I’ll take the rest of the day off and pick up the reference letter and my cheque on Friday.”

“Perfectly understandable. I’ll draft it tonight and Shelly’ll have your cheque ready Friday. We’ll get your classes covered.”

*

Dale wandered down through Coal Harbour, looked at the mountains and water, felt nothing, bought some pre-rolled joints and cold Baltikas in Gas Town, then found a shady place in Granville Square, lit a joint and popped open a beer, looked at the empty marshalling yard, the old brick faces of the buildings bordering it, the grey ballast, all the different tracks leading somewhere.

A guy with braided hair circled the fountain ledge in bare feet. His head looked cooked. Some belongings lay in a pile next to the fountain.

 “Everybody’s backwards cuz our evolution,” he explained to an imagined audience, kept circling, words lost in the fountain’s plash, came back around: “We’re children, one in God, but we don’t appreciate it. All the things you did aint shit, just a bunch of weakness. I don’t belong in this world. I’m a criminal. I divorced myself from this world. You need to know the truth, the one great Truth, the one great Messiah.” He peered out into the empty plaza. “We’re not doin good. We’re lonely, stuck in our own fuckin heads.” He poked his skull with an outstretched finger, grey braids swaying over a back tattoo of a flaming eagle and coiled snakes. “I fought to make my moment. It don’t just happen like that. I went to the penitentiary. I’m a warrior. Where’s all the fuckin warriors? No more warriors. You’re all mushy, not a bit of warrior left. No warrior left in you.” His words got lost again and he completed another circle. “It’s a paradigm: Messiah. You think he’s such an important person? No, he’s a regular motherfucker. Messiah’s a regular guy, and I know you know,” he pointed at Dale, looked him in the eye with something fierce and maniacal Dale had not seen before.

The port cranes stood erect like a startled herd round the waterhole. Two police officers approached cautiously, incrementally, as a cruise ship three point turned in the middle of the inlet.

They snapped on their black nitrile gloves and quietly told him to get down. He got down, sat on the edge of the fountain, then stood and in a low voice began to lecture the beat cops, pointed his finger in their faces. They waited for him to relax, firmly pulled his arms behind his back and cuffed him. Dale heard the manacles clicking tight on his wrists. They led him away, sat him down in the shade of a highrise while the rogue preacher continued on about the “gross injustice, the cop farce—the Messiah was read his rights too.”

*

Before he got really drunk Dale sat down in a coffeeshop with a double espresso. There was an old issue of Modern Painters tucked in his backpack. He flipped to a piece about an affluent couple from San Francisco with the biggest video art collection in the world, scoffed when he read that their Tudor-style house in Presidio Heights was filled with flatscreens and concealed electronics so they could watch something from their collection at any time anywhere in their house, but, and here he scoffed again, they rarely sat down and enjoyed an artist’s video work. While he read the article, Dale kept glancing up at an octogenarian seated nearby. The man’s eyes were small and moist and drained of life. Whenever he brought his mug up to drink his top denture plate clacked down and Dale saw the man’s bare gums. Finished with the article, he looked up again. The old man held his teeth in his hand and yawned. Dale looked inside the dark slobbering rictus, thought about what was next. Another dead-end job working with people he didn’t like for hardly a living wage while evenings and weekends he wasted his time on the internet. Trying to write and publish poems that might one day be collected into a single volume five people would read. Taking calls from his parents that increased in disdain from one year to the next. Viewing another damp basement suite that had already been rented out. Greying. Fattening. Getting stoned. Sucking wind. Hating a life he was supposed to be grateful for. Someone entered the cafe. He looked up at an attractive female wearing a black high waisted pant suit and leather side zipper boots with the thick square heels. Her perfume was narcotic. He nodded at the businesswoman, smiled. She looked away at the pastry rack.

*

“Whatever this was it wasn’t enough,” he typed, with difficulty, and posted these six words, six words to replace him, the text cleaving and merging in his double vision, an empty fifteen pack on the kitchen counter, cockroaches coming in and out of the cracks in the wall plaster, in and out of the empty beercans. Dale took up the spray bottle filled with bleach, uncapped it and drank until the bottle was empty and a burning sphere expanded in his belly, a star of blood vomit dripped down the wall into the sink and he fell to the floor. His luminous body detached from his physical body and Dale wasn’t Dale anymore. What Dale had been was everywhere and everything and there was no more pain because there was no more self. There was no form.