I am speaking.
you are speaking.
am I speaking?
you are.
what will I say?
something by saying.
are you listening?
you are speaking.
and if I don’t?
you already did.
what have I said?
that you are speaking.

At a quarter to seven, everything was fine. He awoke a little earlier than usual and it bothered him, him being never to sleep later or awake earlier. He was one of routine and it pleased him to have Life this way, in succinct patterns and pace. But today he awoke earlier, a quarter to seven, and those fifteen minutes changed his perception of everything, even though everything was fine. His uniform looked odd and he was hesitant to even put it on for fear it would no longer fit him. It did though a part of him was reluctant to admit that, and thus his movements for the rest of the morning would be of one who wore ill-fitting clothes.
At eight, he started to prepare tea and heard Lady Blake call downstairs for him, which was odd. Lady Blake would not breathe a word to him until her first sip of tea. He walked up to the second floor of the house, a modest brownstone on outer appearances. Suddenly, however, the antiques seemed to him insultingly gaudy in contrast to its exterior. By the time he reached Lady Blake’s bedroom, his mouth was sour.
“James,” she sighed with a smile that he now regarded as inappropriate on her lips. Lady Blake was a woman of correct posture and polite manner, a woman of wealth and an example of dignity, a direct reflection of her husband, Lord Blake; a man whose name was spoken with admiration and fear. Almost wanton beneath the mauve sheets, she appeared very lavish for her sixty years. Her breast became beyond noticeable, desirous, heavy and full, even though James never had developed a taste for the such. He had always regarded legs as a woman’s most precious characteristic. There was Lady Blake now with legs that had never known ‘tone’ and James’ eyes dwelling on her pouted lips, with a sag in her neck that surgeries could no longer hide, down to the cleavage that was a deep, dark line outward pointing to him.
“James…” she whispered and he realized that this was the second time she said his name in such a way, in a manner that sent a tingling in his trousers. “..james..come and fuck me.”
It was at this point, in this reeling and replaying of her exact words, that James finally noticed that Lady Blake was naked underneath the sheets and he became panicked. A man of eighty years, as such was James, in the service of one of Manhattan’s oldest families, finding himself proposed in such a way.
“Go ahead man,” said Lord Blake as he emerged from the bathroom, naked and quite comfortable with being so, towel drying his legs, bent over and exerting. “Give the old hen a good lay.”
Aghast, James backed out of the room, muttering, “..tea.”
He turned from the doorway hurriedly, very swift and urgent for his arthritic bones, across the hallway, down the staircase, finding it, with each step, all the more skewed. At the bottom, a serene calm came over him and for intent and purposes, he would reflect on it as “wild”. Lord Blake’s journal was within view on his desk in the den and James found himself pulled towards it. He had not remembered leaving the door ajar and this fact did not strike him as odd, not even the flow of thoughts that rambled in his head. It was an old journal, actually one made to look old, binded pages of parchment and a cloth cover. He did not bother to read any of the entries but he turned to the last. Unzipping his trousers and giving no thought to it for he had felt violated, he masturbated onto the parchment for later generations to regard or perhaps quote from. Upon reflection he would remark that never had he had such a virile and potent erection, one that could’ve spawned all the children he had ever wanted to have.
He was then aware of the kettle whistling and he wiped his hand on the remaining pages of the journal, disregarding it as he finally reached the kitchen. Suddenly he found himself staring at the boiling water, bubbling and breaking the surface of itself, rumbling actually and he walked out, determined to never be himself again. Everyone would later wonder what ever happened to their tea.
James, months later, was sighted at Washington Square park, sketching madly portraits that many a customer had refused to pay for, more often than not. One could say the portraits themselves
were beyond abstract.
“In art, there are no mistakes!”, he would say defiantly. Eventually many dismissed him as a crackpot and he had resigned himself to the fact, which of course was non-sequitur, that no one breath was his breath, but that any breath was one that some one had drawn before and discarded, all already used. From that point on he drew with such whimsical severity as to suggest some thing other than the page, abandoning portraits. He slept at irregular intervals, for days on end he would sketch, on others sleep. James never paid any attention to the weather, as if he was beyond any bodily comforts such as warmth, this being past New Year’s, except for when it would snow or rain, and he’d remain seated and perplexed in front on the page, watching the lines smear. Neither one of the Blakes had ever searched out for him.
And thus, routine had again emerged for James. The routine of the unexpected of whatever image he would try to grasp with knife sharpened pencil…
Until a thirty year old once-was-a-model, long legged, stood behind him, watchful. After a few minutes, she whispered into his ear, “I love the attractive quality the lines of non-sense make.”
James stopped and looked at her, a tingle in his beaten trousers again, albeit not as strong as in Master Blake’s den. From there on is another story and this one is done.

It was unnoticeable at first, no, maybe an irritation about his comings and goings and one line replies. All had taken it as inconsideration, but nothing that he wouldn’t grow out of. Actually, he spent a lot of time at home, in his room, writing, reading or typing, with music or without, there was no set pattern except that he spent a lot of time within those four walls. When he would go out, he had the stride of one going for a pack of cigarettes and his parents didn’t think anything of it, until they would hear the jangle of car keys at the door.
“Where are you going?”
“Out” and he would close the door behind him without another word, locking it.
They talked with friends and found this behavior typical of adolescents, but for him, it continued past that age, more and more often his response became just the door closing, nothing else. A bitter fight had ensued, him not showing any remorse, but an agreement was struck and he adjusted. He started to tell them exactly where he was going and went, without any sort of concern for whatever plans they might have made. When this complaint was voiced, his reply was, “Well, let me know in advance..” and that seemed fair enough. Soon though, he was already gone before they would come home, returning earlier than the original late night outings, but they would be asleep. How hurt they felt to wake early mornings to find him asleep, only to return after work and find the scant evidence of him having prepared to go out and be gone. They had thought foul peer pressure was afoot and to their chagrin, after a number of phone calls made by his mother, his friends related the same “distancing”, as his closest friend had put it.
To be exact: “He said less and less until he would just sit there. Eventually I got the feeling that he wasn’t even listening. Sometimes he’d show up for a drink but the number of times he stood me up past the times he didn’t, and by then, he never showed again. I haven’t heard from him since. It’s like he was distancing himself from me, like he was weaning me off him.”
One night, fed up and angry with their home being treated like it was some hotel, and yet also worried, his mother had waited up for him. He arrived a little past one and immediately she was relieved, almost forgetting the business at hand. At one time he used to come home just past daybreak.
He walked slowly past the living room, never looking behind him, passing her unnoticed. She called out his name and he didn’t pause, he kept heading towards his room, holding his head and choking out a mutter, “..goodnight.”
Somehow they had to corner him to find out what was going on, what, if anything, had happened.
“Something must have happened,” his father had said, “We couldn’t get him to shut up when he was younger…”
The night when they decided to confront him, both now staying up, he never came home. They were worried but not alarmed, until two days became three. They involved the police and when they couldn’t find out anything, they became frantic. After three months of police and private detectives turning up nothing, of friends trying to convince them to start funeral arrangements, they finally resigned themselves to the fact the he was, indeed, dead, he had sent them a letter.
It was dismissed as a bill or another sweepstakes letter because of their address being typed on it and that the postage was a prepaid marking in the upper right hand corner. The day after its arrival, his father had opened it and then knew, before unfolding the letter within, by just touching its edges, it was from their son. He called his wife and both slowly read the letter, relieved and anguished over each and every word, so much so, that it haunted the rest of their lives.
It read:
how to explain the lack of any
explanation?
a tired tongue will speak of its condition. this
is a struggle
for words that look
very
uncomfortable and misplaced.
but this is not
or ever
about a tired tongue. the whole system is dead.
the throat the tongue the ability
the concept of retelling anything.
it is like asking a corpse,hey what’s it like?
Enough,
I said to myself and
Nothing came out after it.
Nothing
CAN
be said
by nothing said worth saying.
it all came to its end and
after the end you can never
go back and feel
as if it hasn’t been done before.
words
just came across to nowhere
and then
stopped bothering to. to touch
constantly this inability,
everything comes off
even the skin blisters. an imposed silence
that never
was a self-imposed condition but one that
imposed itself
making more much sense than speaking to make sense
of anything at all, out of the senses. much more
can be said of this but I limited the amount
left to say
to you, to leave something
in case of
Emergency,
and that has its own when and where and if.
I am alive
do not worry. from here on, for all intents
and purposes
I have said all that has been
left to say, to you.
,me.
Since his letter, his parents have spoken less and less but their marriage never suffered, nor their friendships. They simply became more direct and to the point, not ever completely silent, but spoke when they had something worth noting and did more, as opposed to talking about doing anything. Oddly, life became richer, fuller, more honest and simpler. This was not why they spoke less however. They wanted to, somehow, keep in touch with their son, by being silent, wherever he was, to imagine his separation and quiet and by this imagination, have someplace for him to come home to, without having to say a word.