Nocturne 1: Jack Step in a Kansas Diner
The Arrival
I sit in a Kansas diner, looking out a grime-streaked window. I do not know what I’m doing. I am thinking of something but I cannot say exactly what, and finally my thoughts focus on nothing. I am unable to focus. With my mind empty, deliberating no point or purpose, my eyes settle on the sky as it sets beyond a field sodden with early spring. The field buds with winter wheat, a variety descended from plant species brought over from Ukraine in the 19th century.
A farm road cuts through here, just outside the diner, and I hear the occasional whir and rumble of a car or truck pass by. It is the time of day for headlights, and as the sun drops, I see a few motorists switch them on as they whoosh toward their destinies. Now, as the darkness rises out of the ground, the glint of headlights against the windowpane becomes an irregular way for my mind to retain some sense of time, as I stare out with no purpose into the vacant darkness. I think maybe those cars and trucks are heading into town. Or maybe they’re driving farther still, toward the Interstate, to other cities and towns farther out, or even to places outside the state.
When the traveler arrives at the junction, he has to slow down, or stop at a light, and perhaps wait on an overpass before choosing an onramp or turn. The silence, the darkness, locked in his vessel. At these intersections, there is an arrangement of road signs that is uniform throughout the country. Nothing changes. No matter where you go, it is always familiar, and everywhere very much the same. The driver reads the signs, the highways he can choose from numbered and stacked in the appropriate and expected order before him. The cardinal directions to aid his navigation are also provided. The moment is so constructed that his choice is silent and calm. There is no need for panic, as it is quietly made clear that panic can lead to ruin. Death. His mind is emptied of anything to say, except for the sound of the voice making the decision, which breaks the terror. At least that is the feeling – one of heavily exhaled breath and relief. But the feeling does not last. Across the entire country, it is all very much the same. Or have I said that already? Perhaps the endless repetition is the terror.
Within the devised system, everything is provided for, laid out in self-evident logic and all very simple and easy. But then those moments come when it all seems strange and unreal, an insanity increasingly bereft of all the sense and logic and goodness and benefit and advantage with which the system was first constructed. Anxiety, paranoia replace the calm, which had been artificial, and had therefore artificially kept subdued the anxiety and paranoia, which had always been there – thanks to the system. The system does not want to do these things, but it cannot help itself. By its very existence, the system provokes the responses it had come into being to avoid.
The mind becomes the mirror of what it perceives. Right there, at that very instant, in the car. The foot hits the gas and the driver floors the pedal, as if to tempt fate in the face of certain destruction, like a demented child provoking the knowledge of the future, willing the outcome, and in seconds that recount a lifetime, the car careens toward annihilation. Somewhere in the mind, in a way the driver was not aware of, the voice making the decisions decided death was preferable to the never-ending terror – created unwittingly by the system. Or maybe the system wanted the terror, as evidenced by the results of its coming into being, rather than by its professed intentions. I think the system wanted the terror. I am certain of it.
Sometimes, instead of moving on, toward the next town or the Interstate, a driver turns off just before the diner, onto a lane far narrower than the main road, cutting through another field. It is very nearly a dirt road that heads to some place even more remote than here, connected only by a telephone landline and TV. There is no Internet or mobile phone.
And I think… What do I think? A question with no answer. Whether it’s a good question, I’m incapable of judging. It’s not important.
And I think… these meditations, meandering and aimless, overlapping, layering to no order or purpose, and dissolving; thoughts and half-formed thoughts, notions and half-notions, reconfiguring with other meditations, thoughts and notions, also to no order or purpose, millions and millions of them, never recorded, never written down, are irretrievably lost to memory, to memory in time, and are therefore irrelevant, have always been irrelevant, even before they started, and this is the only thing I become acutely aware of, inside the jarring stillness of this roadside hull, much as time is irrelevant itself.
I think time has always been irrelevant.
In our weakness, in our frailty, in our desperation, to make sense of life, because we are so made that that becomes an inexplicable goal, we construct the frameworks that are meant to give time importance, relevance, but time, really, is simply time.
I put this as a vast understatement, since words can never get it across: Time is far greater than we are; far beyond our capacity to confine within the futile structures of our making – inside a watch, the length of a day, the phase of the moon and how the stars are aligned, or where we place the sun, a season, the year, and the year-after-year; the relentless forward march of which we are so terrified.
Inside each day, we divide our tasks, from waking to sleeping, breathing out of one day and into the next, according to minutes, and hours, and we get older, and then we die. Or spend a couple of decades drunk.
But that only concerns us. It has nothing to do with time.
There are ageless things, things we do not know about, that are unaffected by time, and for which, and maybe for whom, there is no such thing. Time does not exist.
This diner is an abandoned relic from the middle of the last century, and in the darkness, if I close my eyes and listen carefully, I can just about hear the music of the era chiming out the coin-operated jukebox over there. I wonder if it still works. How much for a song: a nickel; a dime?* Is a song from the past worth the price of your soul?
I hear and do not hear – that is, I do not know if what I have heard is imagined or real. It does not appear to have been imagined, as I now hear a voice, speaking to me, quietly and incomprehensibly at first, from the seat the other side of this table – becoming clearer.
* Going on the authority of the diner scene toward the end of the 1950 noir crime classic, “The Asphalt Jungle”, a song back then would have cost a nickel – or 5 cents: KUSEB
Jack Step, March 23, 2014