A Prayer and Two Parables

The short stories of Paul Maliszewski are laser-focused and perfectly terse, but they are also enigmatic. Anyone who knows anything about the form will recognize these as ideal traits. Last December, Vice published Paul's "The Parable of Wood and Fire" in our annual Fiction Issue. It was part of an ongoing series that began in 1995 and has now been collected in Prayer and Parable, which is out this month from Fence Books. The stories largely fall under two categories: humans hating and loving each other (the prayers) and more oblique narratives that go nowhere but say everything (the parables). It was only logical to excerpt a few of the stories and couple them with three new photos from Jason Fulford, who shot the cover of Prayer and Parable and whose work, like Paul's, is confounding in the best of ways.

PRAYER FOR THE SAFETY OF THE PUBLIC SCREAMER

From my window, I can see the bus shelter. A woman is walking away from it, and there's a man underneath, standing. Both are dressed in the clothes of the season, and both are angry. The man I have seen before. I call him Screamer. I hear him before I see him. In this way he is not like a jet fighter. Today, Screamer has a splint on his nose, making it longer and more pointed. When he screams, his splint quivers. Much of what he screams is profane, curses and swears. He often screams, Asshole fall off the fucking earth. In the mornings, I hear him coming from the west, walking toward downtown. Later, in the evenings, he returns, walking toward the suburbs. He keeps a fairly tight schedule, Screamer does. In this way he is not unlike people who work at jobs downtown. Always he is angry. Always he is screaming. I have seen Screamer look over his shoulder, back at the suburbs in the morning or back downtown in the evening, and I wonder what to make of that looking back. My first thought was that he was being followed. Someone was after him. He had made someone angry. My second thought was that he just believes he's being followed. Whatever the case, Screamer is always yelling at the place he leaves, yelling at what he leaves behind. In this way he is not unlike you, or us, those, say, who have ever felt disappointed by the most recently passed experience, the last big letdown, that time we let ourselves think we were lucky, blessed, made from gold and promises. Precious stones never did rain on us. Which brings me again to what I see from my window. The bus shelter. The woman walking away. Screamer standing underneath. The woman is angry. Screamer, she thinks, screams at her. And why shouldn't she take Screamer personally? Perhaps he told her, Asshole fall off the fucking earth. The woman bends down to pick something up, and I think she's going to throw something. I think, She's going to hit Screamer. But it's just snow, and the snow is so powdery and dry, it scatters immediately after leaving her hand. She might as well have hurled a handful of dust. And Screamer still screams. The woman's hair has come undone under her scarf, and she pauses a second to fix it. Screamer curses her, more loudly this time. Asshole, he says. Fall off the fucking earth. The woman walks away, and then the woman comes back. She walks to the corner, and then she comes back. This time, the woman spits at Screamer. And still, Screamer screams. Once more the woman walks away and comes back. And once more she spits at Screamer. As she walks away, I hear her say, I could kill you. From my window, I see the woman crossing the street and walking along the hillside. Screamer is still at the bus shelter and still cursing. Maybe this will be the last time I see him. Maybe someone will kill him. Maybe some people will return for him and do what, I do not know. Fuck him up good. I wish I could intervene. I want to manifest myself on the ground, between Screamer and the woman. I want to move between them. I want to say, Wait, please, you don't understand. Hold back your blows, OK? Stay, for a second, the stones you've selected for this man's skull. And what if the woman then came upstairs to my apartment? What if she could see what I see? Look, from my window. I'm asking you. Perhaps something would come of it: me, on the ground, meeting Screamer, while she sits upstairs. With the woman may come the hundreds, maybe the thousands, of people who will ever meet Screamer outside, on the streets and on the sidewalks. They all can crowd into my apartment, jostling for a view, a seat, a spot by the window. But can I say, really, that I wouldn't feel insulted? Asshole fall off the fucking earth.

There is spit, and then there is the anger, like fingertips gripping my scalp.

PARABLE OF A MERCIFUL END TO DREAMS OF FIGHTING UNDERWATER

My opponent always announces himself the same way. He says, I have a bum. Warning. I know he means bomb, but he pronounces it in the pinched way of the British. Bum. Warning. I have a bum. Yet he is not British. He has, in fact, never ventured outside the States. He does, however, have a bomb. That is why he's my opponent, my dear enemy.

The city is our battlefield. Streets and avenues have, for me, pugilistic significance, a long history of beatings and many losses. You may walk past these sites without knowing it. I have met my opponent in fields, in parks, in city squares. He has met me on board buses, subways, and monorails. We have fought under overpasses and over rivers. I have struggled against him amidst the carnivals of summer. He has found me cowering in the beverage aisle of a grocery store, hiding in the shadow of a pyramid of Coca-Cola. In tropical restaurants, cool rooms, windy vistas, on snowy heights, there is, we believe, no place we haven't already fought. Were you unwittingly in attendance at some of our more celebrated bouts? We have wrestled atop buildings, decorating the skyline like two feisty hood ornaments. Always the game is simple, as my opponent takes pains to point out: one fall, mano a mano, me or the man with the bomb. When I fight, however, I am at an immediate disadvantage. When I try to punch him, there's no force behind it. I draw back my arm, but that's it; that's all I have time for. When I try to run, I escape from nothing. I am always caught in midturn, pivoting and pushing off with my strong foot, but no more. Caught and then hit and then hit again, I fall. There is something in me that works against the punch, against my flight; it subverts each of my attempts. It is like misdirection. It is like the fact that water is at its thickest, its most dense, seconds before freezing. It, I say, because it hasn't any name. It is all effect and no identity. In my most productive moments I come up with descriptions of it; I test them against my experience, comparing them against my bruises, measuring them alongside my memories of the man standing over me and laying into my body with whatever happened to be handy—a socket wrench, a golf club, a tire iron, a stick. It is like second-guessing raised to the power of ten. It is like an interior monologue as loud as a rock concert. It is like the flashlights of a hundred righteous accusers. Everything I do, anything I try, whatever I can manage, it is in double slo-mo. This is the cruelty of fighting underwater. Do I even need to tell you that my opponent is not similarly afflicted? Other opponents trade in casual menace. They like to say, I've been watching you, or, I know where you live. My opponent says, I know what you feel. He describes my small, daily failures to me. As if I didn't know. His assessments are pinches that leave marks on the inside of my skin. He tells me, You are the Neville Chamberlain of your extended family. Or he says, Your love is like the plastic cups left over from a party. My body serves up for him a set of ready metaphors. Your stomach is a growing pit, he says, down which fall the snakes of your seven indiscretions. They are like arrows, their heads like arrowheads, and they move, constantly, one over another. Are you feeling that? he says. When I don't answer, he asks, Don't you understand? I'm not sure, I say. Then, after some thought, No, not really, I guess. I'm talking about your insignificance, he says, as if it could all be so plain. I get what you're saying, I tell him. In general, I mean, but you lose me on the specifics most of the time. My opponent actually looks sort of hurt. Should I be less gnomic or something? he says. I shrug. It would, I guess, be a start. Consider arrows, he says, speaking more slowly this time. Arrows in an empty stomach. Now do you see why I fight him? Even though my moves are slow? My efforts futile? I fight him because I must. I have no other choice, I think. When I'm not fighting my opponent, I see other people whom I imagine are fighting their opponents, on other nights, in distant parts of a darkened globe. Between dinner and dawn, the city is turned over to these fights. A long fight card every night. Many matches and many falls. Who are these people? How can you recognize them? They are those who misbutton an article of clothing. They are those who react last and late to a joke. We are the people whom you find always looking down and seemingly in. Eye contact is for the foolish when it is night and an opponent is about. We stumble frequently, unfazed. We step into traffic, neither surprised nor frightened when we realize our mistake. Not a day goes by that we do not find ourselves stopping people like you and asking for directions in the city of our birth.

PARABLE OF BEING INSIDE

The new nightclub opened last week, and now everyone is trying to get inside. The new nightclub is fabulous, according to every indication, offering entertainment beyond measure, joy and conviviality in unparalleled quantities. Consider the new nightclub's stereo. Its sound system, speakers, mixing board, and turntables are together larger, more expensive, and more powerful than the stereos of the top five most popular nightclubs combined. The stereo's wiring would, if stretched end to end, run for seventy-seven miles, connecting cities to their suburbs. It loops underground, beneath the glass dance floor, and then circles overhead, in the rafters and around the exposed beams of the building, which, once upon a time, was a warehouse or a tannery, a potato-chip company or dress-shoe factory, something, in any case, that did something for someone, back when. Nobody can remember now. The new nightclub's wire is bound together in thick, menacing coils, blue wires and black wires all feeding into intricately webbed nodes and impressive muscular bunches. It is as if the club powered itself off the flayed body of a giant. The new nightclub's blue wire is the blue of 4 AM seen before sleep; its black wire is truly black indeed. I haven't yet been inside the new nightclub when it's turned on, when the lights are up and people pack the open spaces and drinks are being drunk. During the day, I worked on the second auxiliary electrical crew, brought on board by one of the subcontractors, this guy I know who used to date my sister. I wired up a set of lights mounted on these robotic arms, metal appendages, starved in appearance, that supported these other things that someone else, hired by another subcontractor, worked on. The DJ booth in the new nightclub can unleash various special effects, the sort that would not seem out of place in large-budget movies. I've heard talk of lasers and holograms, even green screens. Supposedly parts of the club can be rear-projected into whole other areas, like scenery. Also, the bar is actually three bars, three bars each on three separate levels, each decorated according to a unique style or mood. The owner of the new nightclub is a stickler for details, so the moods of the bars are very much like the moods of people, very lifelike. The new nightclub is where the old nightclub used to be, before the old owner closed its doors, boarded the windows, and sold off all the furniture and stereo equipment in an auction sparsely attended by bargain hunters and just some curious lookers-on who felt they had some connection to the place. Nothing from the old nightclub survives in the new one. People who have never even given a thought to going to a nightclub feel the inkling or perhaps pressure of having to go to this one, of needing to go, if only to see it, maybe just once. To see what it's like, they say. For something to do, they say. They all have their reasons, and their reasons are the same three or four. It's a childish wish, this desire to be inside the new nightclub. Childish not in the sense of being simple, but rather because it reminds me of times I overheard my parents and their friends at parties. It was usually someone's birthday or anniversary, the occasion was never all that clear or important. What mattered was that I could hear their voices, the sound of their voices, but I could not discern the words themselves. I would hear laughter and I would think, Someone just told a joke. Who told a joke? Who was it? What was the joke, exactly? How did it go? The laughter went on. Laughter carried, words did not. I could hear nothing except sounds of what I knew to be conversation. It was incredibly frustrating, this feeling. Inside the new nightclub there is another, smaller, more exclusive nightclub, and inside that smaller, more exclusive nightclub, there is a smaller nightclub still. Five nightclubs at least are nested inside one another like so. After work one day, a few days before we finished and the foreman, as they say, let us go, I was talking to a guy who worked alongside me, this guy who put the things on the ends of the metal appendages I was working on. Anyway, this guy swore that there are at least nine nested nightclubs inside one another. He personally knew of at least nine, and he suspected there could be even more, each smaller, each more exclusive, each located inside the other. And at the center of it all, at the center of this series of clubs within clubs, there is a room, supposedly no bigger than a large box, like the sort of box a refrigerator comes packaged in. The owner of the new nightclub has had this room decorated sparsely, with a table and a chair and a candle on the table and a pillow on the chair. The table is not larger than a pad of paper. The candle is the size of a dime. The chair is plain. The pillow is more suggestion and gesture than pillow. What's more, the walls around the table are not in fact walls. On closer inspection, they reveal themselves to be speakers that look and feel like walls. Solid speakers. From the floor to the ceiling of the room, nothing but speakers. When the stereo is on, and the music is going, a person admitted to the room that lies at the center of the series of clubs within clubs can hear nothing else, nothing to indicate that there's anything else anywhere else outside or inside the room, nothing other than the room itself and the person inside it.