The Communist Manifesto: A Thematic Anthology of the late Elijah Browning’s work

 

 

1. The award ceremony

A story by Elijah Browning

               

                ‘Do you spend long writing?’ another old lady is asking.

                I am watching (Claire?) refill her glass.

                ‘Yes.  Yes, I spend most of my spare time writing...’ in fact, I have no social life whatsoever and I’m a total hermit and I came here thinking I might be able to find someone else like me but so far only old ladies like you have spoken to me.

                Claire, I’m sure that’s her name, she’s one of the other winners - I’ve got reason, at least, to talk to her.

                ‘What about you?’ I hear myself asking.  

                I won.  I won the award.  I should be ecstatic.

                ‘Well since I retired I’ve had a lot more time for it...’

                You never retire, I tell myself, if writing’s your real passion it is your life.  I tune out.  Claire is standing by herself in her blazer and tie, her eyes considering and each movement, grace.  Why is she so beautiful?  And how do I get over to her?

                A pause in the old lady’s account.  I’ll never see her again; I shouldn’t be worried about being rude.  ‘That’s great,’ I say, ‘It’s been nice speaking to you, but there’s someone I’ve really got to talk to.’

                She smiles sweetly at me and watches me walk (hunch shouldered) toward Claire.  The old lady’s probably thinking, how romantic.  I’m thinking what a nerd I look and how I hate my mess of curls and my itchy shirt and my pimpled face and my stooped posture, and the smile that I’m giving Claire that’s screwing up my face.

                ‘Hi,’ I say, ‘Congratulations.’

                ‘You too,’ she says with a bourgeois tipped voice.

                Her blazer is heavy with badges.  Cultural Captain, Debate, Prefect.  I’m way out of my depth here.  Have you read Marx? I suddenly want to blurt out.

                ‘Claire, isn’t it?’
                She nods.

                ‘I’m Elijah,’ I say, when she fails to prompt. ‘So, you go to St Hilda’s?’
                She smiles indulgently. ‘Indeed.’
                Her eyes shrink me so small that she could pick me up in her hand and play with me like a doll, but she doesn’t because I am not worth even that.  I try to think of everything I know about St Hilda’s;  I met a girl from there once who was telling me how they get their skirts measured.  That’s not really something I can throw into this conversation.

                Instead, silence, awkward silence as I look around her, anywhere but into those eyes.

                ‘I go to Albany Senior High,’ I finally say, desperately.

                ‘Oh.  Long way to come, isn’t it?  Excuse me,’ she says and she walks off.

                I look around me but the only person free is the old lady I was just talking to.  She looks invitingly at me and I turn, striding purposefully toward the toilet.

                I stand at the urinal for years, trying to remember how to piss and trying to stop the tears.  I come out, finally, and stand at the edge of the crowd.

                ‘You right to go?’ Dad asks.

                No - I’m far from right, I want to stay here and find a soul mate, but I say, ‘Okay,’ and follow the entourage of my family outside.  As I get into our van, I see a merc pull up and Claire steps in, a man in his twenties with his arm intimate around her waist.  My heart sinks a little lower.  It must be somewhere underfoot.

 

*

                I’m seriously messed up.

                I’m walking the Queen’s Gardens, crying about Claire.

                Lilies float in pools of stagnant water and I dream of Claire.   I dream of conquering her, the ice queen.  Of making those cruel eyes melt...

                I hate her and I want to sleep with her.  I want to sleep with someone I hate. 

                But I don’t hate her; she hates me.  I love her.  I need her.  I’m so alone.  So totally alone.

                How do I connect?  How do I end this loneliness?

 

*

 

                This story has no end.  I go back to Albany, I go back to loneliness. 

                I keep on writing.  I write about distant, untouchable ice maidens.  I write about love denied. 

                It’s about the best catharsis I’ve got.

                I keep on seeing Claire step into her merc and I try to work out why she’s stuck in my mind when she was just a cold snobby bitch who I spoke to for maybe eighty seconds in total

                If you find out, do tell me.

 

 

2.  The Communist Manifesto

 A poem by Elijah Browning

 

obsessed with grammar girls

ice maidens with ties & stockinged legs -

pass them in the street & shrink away

in your senior high rags

your burning pimples, your mound of hair

 

feel so dirty and low next to them

like marx was right

and you’re one of the filthy proles

 

and revolution would be to

meet those silk lips with

your sandpaper mouth

blending fluid + flesh till

there is just one;

tamed, possessed

they’d bulge with your children

& we’d begin again with a classless society -

one without unconquerable virgin mountains

 

& you wouldn’t feel so low for their heights

& everyone’d be just as caliban as you

 

but all this is a fantasy and all that will actually happen is a little more silence till the end

 

 

 

3.  The Revolution

Another Story By Elijah Browning

 

                You have to understand that usually I don’t ever go to parties. I don’t want to spoil that image of a hermit writer despised by everyone.  Okay; I talk to people at lunchtime and they don’t dislike me; it’s just none of them are wildly enthusiastic about me either, that’s all.  So, anyhow, a lunchtime friend - acquaintance, make that - invited me to his party and I didn’t have any excuses so here I am sitting on a mouldy couch on someone’s back porch in the thumping music with what is apparently called a Ruskie in my hand.

                I am making it last as long as possible.  I am not going to get drunk.  I am Sartre, sitting, observing the nauseating de trop existence of these people: I am observing them celebrate their own emptiness.

                But a girl stumbles across me, sprawling next to me on the couch and my cocoon dissolves in her presence, her proximity, her beauty.  A pregnant, frightening fullness.

                ‘Hi,’ she says.

                ‘Hello Marjorie,’ I say.  She is on my school bus.  She goes to the grammar school and she is drunk. 

                ‘Whatcha doing?’ her posh accent slurred.  I smile at such a degradation.

                ‘Watching,’ I reply.

                ‘Watchingn gullies):

 

It’s time to start living.

- Easter Sunday 2002

He Came, As They Say, Out

 

i

 

last night my good friend, he

came, as they say, out

and alchemically

i had new words for him:

 

‘gay’ -

 

                                the different contours,

the label spreading over his face,

his name and his deeds -

revisionists, each memory transformed

by and in my shocked little mind.

 

 

ii

 

not that i hadn’t suspected.

but that the category had only ever been

the subject of outrageous insults in change rooms,

then the stuff of abstrac what?’
                ‘The circus animals.  The parading clowns... you know.’

                ‘Ohhh... you’re just saying that because you’re not pissed.’

                ‘‘Pissed’?’ I say, ‘Funny word, really, isn’t it?’
                ‘Never really thought about it.  You know, you’re so weird.’

                ‘Yeah?  Is that a compliment?’

                She throws her head back and laughs like a bad actor, her mouth opening to reveal rows of sweet teeth.

                ‘There was a but after it,’ she says, ‘Wanna hear it?’

                ‘Love to.’         

                ‘But, but, but.  But I think you’re cuuuuute, Eli-jah Brown-ing.’

                It is a warm blood filled blow and I stutter: ‘Th-thanks.’

                We sit in the delicious silence.  The cool night air.  I can smell her.  Her scent tells me stories: glimpses of massive edifices rising into a future nightblue sky, the outlines of a quest in a strange land spanning a thousand years compressed into pheromones.  But these give way: this night, this life is suddenly full not of fantasies, but of possibilities.  Junctions, junctions in the night air.

                She stretches out, resting her head on my shoulder.  I tense and I feel her long hair spilling out against my neck, brushing my cheek.  She toys with my hand.  Her skin is smooth and warm.  We talk.  She is dribbling, delirious.  She’s going to kiss me, I think.  She’s going to kiss me.  I am finally going to be kissed.  There is nothing unconquerable about her. 

                ‘What’s your favourite teletubbie?’ she asks. 

                ‘The red one,’ I say, ‘Yours?’

                ‘It’s not called the red one!’ She laughs hysterically.  ‘You’re so funny.’  I play along with her crap, all the time laughing inside.  Delirious myself, with joy, with power.  At my fantasy come true.  I wait for an opportunity.  I know one will come.  I am shaking.  I run my hand hesitatingly over her arm.  She doesn’t protest.  I wonder how I’m meant to do it.

                Suddenly she clutches at her stomach, and twists her whole body around, and her face is right up against mine.  She looks vaguely at me, her eyes glazed.  I look back at her and try to turn the moment into a pinnacle of romance.  Now, I think, now.  I cannot wait any longer.  As if suddenly struck by fault lines, little tremors run through my body and my hand makes jerky movements.  I make a leap, I leap right out, I push forward to find her mouth, and my eyes are closed and I’m just blindly guessing, hoping, but I taste air and her mouth is not there and nothing happens.  I feel her head drop, down, into my neck.  She moans.  ‘I feel sick...’

                She staggers up, violently and I swear in my head: the agony, the agony of denial.  The tremors rush onto to something beyond tremors, something I didn’t know possible: a reeling pins and needles, not just in my hand or my foot, but through my whole body, my whole entire unreal body.  I stand with her in the bathroom as she throws up, twice, and then I wait as she washes her face and her hands.  I look at her in the mirror, her face pale, and try not to think of vomit.  The tiles are sticky from an overturned beer can.  Dirty yellow light.  Feel so stained, so tainted.  Trapped, trapped in squalor.  Trapped in a prison of black lust...   ‘A spectre...’  ‘ A spectre is haunting...’

                She takes my hand, ‘Come on.’

                The reeling pins and needles: she wants me.  This is great, I tell myself.  This is everything I’ve always dreamed about.  She takes me back to the couch and I follow.  I awkwardly face her and wait, wait for her to do as she will.  I become a mannequin, a rag doll, a nothing.  Casually, with disconnected hunger, she grasps my neck with her hands and kisses me, passive me.  My mind contracts and all I can think about it is how many other people she has kissed, the multitude’s saliva I am surrendering to as her mouth opens and I feel her tongue, pushing, probing, sliding, sucking.  My body is made of nothing but pins and needles and this wet investigating tongue that is not mine and a moment later I taste sharp bile and frothy spit. 

                Time slows... I want it to be over so that there’s no decision to make.  So I cannot ask: why am I doing this? 

                Why am I doing this?

                Because of the blazer heavy with badges, because of the merc, because of loneliness, because a pretty girl’s tongue is inside my mouth....  The bile hits me anew and I pull my mouth away, looking into her eyes, my hand gripping her arm.

                 I must face the decision.

                ‘A spectre is haunting Europe...’  I don’t know anything... I never even finished Marx... he’s just a fashionable set piece, a gush line...  Illusions shattering in my mind... I’m the conquered, not the conqueror; it’s a dirty anti-climax, not the end to loneliness...

                I let go of her arm and move back.  She looks at me, imploringly, disorientated.  The power shifts, again.  She sits here in front of me, mine for the taking...

                And the moment turns into something profound.  I look into those eyes, those shallow murky eyes, and I smile. I don’t have to do this. 

                I don’t have to do this.

                I don’t have to do it!  This is not the revolution!

                The analogy twists in my head, so much literary striving... trapped, not by her, but my lust for her.

                I keep on smiling, I just sit there smiling idiotically and she looks at me weird because she doesn’t get it, she doesn’t understand that I’ve just been set free, that a long struggle is over.  I stand up, still smiling and I say nothing because there is nothing to say.  I have fought and won a silent, epic battle and now I walk away, I walk away and banish the spectre, the pathetic spectre that is the product of lust and bad analogy.

                ‘Elijah!’ she calls after me but  I do not turn.   I walk through the busy house, carefully shutting the front door behind me and I start walking home, alone in the quiet of the night air.  As I walk, I imagine the sheets of my bed.  They will be cold, crisp and clean.  And when I wake up, there’ll be sunshine.