It. (rasatabula) wrote in repose, @ 2018-02-02 15:22:00 |
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Entry tags: | *narrative, jack penhaligon |
Who: Jack
What: Intervening periods
Warnings: Nada apart from ongoing addiction shit.
He was hungover on the plane. It wasn't the best decision he'd ever made. The first leg of the trip, he sat in cattle-class on the paper's dime with his knees painfully rammed against the seat in front and he drank whatever it was the hostess came around and handed out. He was somewhere between the greasy nausea of surfacing out of the sea-deep inebriation and then he was letting it close over his head again. The second leg of the trip it was a tiny, tiny plane and the tail-winds shook them up and down and he slumped into his seat with a hand over his eyes and tried consciously to avoid being sick.
He was hungover the first morning. The light was soft through white-waxed wall but outside it was merciless. He had a handful of clothes stuffed into a holdall, and he dragged on jeans as the plane's refreshments thudded against the inside of his skull, and a shirt and laced up boots and went outside where Bab Al-Salam stretched out in white puncutations over dusty earth. He wanted to drink, he wanted a coffee, he wanted a cup of tea. Instead he took a camera and a notepad and he slung them around his neck and into his pocket variously.
The first night he remembered. The second he forgot. It was merciful that way, the narrowing of life before the airport. There were enough people that there were half a dozen things that could be said or written that would hint at the whole without saying nearly enough to be revealing. Jack forgot the town. He forgot the air-plane and the ride over. He saw other people - relief workers, news-reporters, white men and women who observed, who participated but for whom this was a fraction of reality that absorbed the whole rather than the end and the beginning.
The fourth night he headed out of the camp. Took a bone-jostling truck-ride to the border where the hotels and the bars were, where people looked the other way at the consumption of alcohol and he went to the place all the journalists on a somewhat less threadbare ticket stayed. He spent the evening in the bar and the night in the room of a camera-woman with short-cropped hair the color of corn and who smoked with the careful quickness of somebody used to few pauses in the day, and he took a cigarette from her on the way back, still fuzzy on the drink from the night before.
He filed the first copy on the seventh night. He filed the next three days later, on dial-up and a battered laptop that belonged to someone else. The awful, raw sensation had been muzzled, in other people's stories and in imported alcohol and when he came back through Turkey, he found a postcard nothing like the camps and the crowded humanity and the greedy, brazen hope that licked within it and dropped it into the mail for Leena, blank.
He sat on the plane and he got drunk enough that the ride back was fine and the copy was print-lines in his head and on his tongue as he slipped into sleep for the last few hours, aware (darkly so) that it was better than he'd written in years.
He got home - the apartment - late. The night was quiet and thick and deep, dawn several hours away and the driver cared absolutely not other than getting the hell away. He opened up his email to a message from the editor which was not nearly as damning as she'd been previously and he shut the laptop and went to bed with a bottle of wine and a notepad, enough raw material to keep him going for a few more weeks - and a class reading list.