PURPLE - a short story by Christopher Klinges | copyright 1992, all rights reserved

This story was written as an experiment in deconstructionist composition (or some such excuse.)  CJK

PURPLE
by Christopher Klinges

I

Object fixation - Object obsession - it's a sin. Temptation is the goad that pushes us to disintegration, it's the magnet that draws us from our rightful place. The shouting, insistent demons place before us just enough to cause us to deviate from our true course -- perhaps an extra glass of wine, or sight of the incredible beauty of a scantily clad nymph, or covetous knowledge of our neighbor's excess of fortune. Then, as we open to those seeming delicacies - seemingly absent in our lives - the crafty agents of ill enter swiftly inward, enchaining ever-after our inmost desires to aberrations we ought never to have thought about.

I am lying flat on my back; looking up at the ceiling; looking at the tiles in the drop-ceiling above my head; looking at the little black holes fashioned in the tiles; at how they're really glowing purple in the cross light from the fluorescent fixtures that are up there in the ceiling too. For a moment I'm afraid my brain is playing tricks on me - expectations of black static reality are not ready to confront new purple realities.

Then I realize something. I can let those black holes become purple. I can let the purple spots coalesce into pointillist clouds. I can let the clouds swirl purple in the sky over my head. Then, I feel calm again. I affirm with broad generalization that I can be creative from the translucent glow of purple points in heaven.

The four final things: death, judgment, heaven, hell. Somehow striving to acquire a Rolls-Royce of one's own; or aspiring to live in the biggest house in the choicest neighborhood; or having it all - so to speak - doesn't mean a whole helluva lot when confronting the endgame parameters. 

I've heard something about Leonardo da Vinci. Supposedly, he painted his masterpieces in rooms darkly lit by light filtering through windows draped in purple curtains. Supposedly, purple light resonates with the dominant frequency of the mind's creative chakra, giving energy to the birth of new ideas.

I am inert at the moment, but thoughts of Leonardo and purple light stir me. They give me some rationale for coping with my doubts concerning the significance of one life - my own; doubts about how any action is justified judging from the relative impermanence of results. Master Leonardo was perhaps the greatest natural genius ever born naturally of woman - an artist, inventor, scientist; the consummate Renaissance man. He was a wizard; a diviner of future times. He envisioned the shape of things to come - airplanes and submarines - and gave report of these wonders to his own age. He was the first "artist of the soul"; acknowledged a Master by his contemporaries, and every generation since. But in the coda to his notebook, clues abound that he questioned the value of what he had done. He regarded his own incredible achievements with doubt and dissatisfaction. There, on the last pages of his journal - in what amounts to the final testament of his brilliance - he wrote repeatedly, "Was anything ever accomplished? Was anything ever accomplished? Was anything ever accomplished? ... "

It so happens I know why he had his doubts, and why he's entitled to them. You see, Leonardo, the wizard, was time-travelling just before he wrote those desperate words. He was cruising a warp in the space-time continuum, and paid me a visit. It was just a moment ago. He found me lying flat on my back. He found me doing nothing here in this quasi-utilitarian age where use determines value, but where nothing much is deemed useful. He found me with my mind screwed-up by this age - an age capable of lumping acknowledged masterpieces like The Last Supper and Mona Lisa together with Dog Turd Decaying at Fifth and Fifty-seventh and Piss on the Madonna under the broad label of " art ". It's a contemplative age of non-doers pondering the existential meaninglessness of Mona Lisa and dog crap.

If you have a chance to meet a great man you want to do it right. You want to be taken seriously. You want to ask and say the right things.You want to be prepared for the intensity of the encounter with near- angelic humanity.

Leonardo visited me by some accidental twist in the metaphysical universe and caught me by surprise pondering purple ceiling tiles. He got to see the amorphous purple shape of these future times. He saw the effect of centuries of entropy on culture and intellectual discipline, and I know his hopes were deflated. I know he left with a feeling much like my own in that moment. I gave him the chance to see and feel what it's like to be a modern man. When he went back to his own time - back to his own room draped in purple - he asked himself, " Was anything ever accomplished?".

Before he left, I wanted to talk to him; to reassure him that he really had achieved something; that all he had done was not for naught. But he took one look at me - the cultural representative of my age - assumed I had nothing worthwhile to reveal to him, and went back home via an express reverse time-warp.

If I'd had the chance, I wanted to tell him that the malaise he found here was his own fault. (The reason I and many others are idle is because of his achievements: the net oeuvre of Leonardo da Vinci - which are, by general consensus, utterly unsurpassable.) No one wants to labor for something at which he can't be the best, and, in an age of cultural indifference, no one is ambitious enough to believe he can surpass the genius of da Vinci. I wanted to thank him for that, thank him for being the reason we all can sit on our asses and appreciate how incomparably great the works of Leonardo really are.

Now that Mr. da Vinci has departed, I am inspired to make an artistic gesture. I eschew my inertness, embracing animation. I leap up from the floor and grab a camera. I will drive over to the park and shoot some footage of dogs doing their duty in random spots on the lawns and sidewalks. Afterward, I will edit the images. I will make everything in the frames black and white except for the dog turds. Dog turds will be purple. Everything in the world captured in that video will be black and white, everything except dog poop -- that is going to stand out iridescent purple. Upon completion, I intend to give the work of this day a title that makes sense to me but to no one else. I'm going to call my accomplishment Ceiling Tiles Since Leonardo da Vinci.

It is possible to mold shit into all kinds of pretty shapes. It's a real trick, however, to make it smell good.

II

Fulfilling my ambition, I go to the park. I arrive to hear a woman screaming loudly for help. I run toward the screams, which become increasingly urgent as I get nearer. As I run toward her I see others responding as well: dashing down hillsides, dropping out of trees, catapulting from grassy knolls and ponds. When I reach where she is on the ground, I find her propped up on one arm with one leg outstretched. She is posed very much like a centerfold, but - unlike that analogy - she is completely dressed, and about seventy years old. She keeps shouting, "Help me! Help me! Someone HELP me!" (I figure she is having a heart attack because I've never seen anyone actually have a heart attack, and her screams just sound like she is having one.)

About the same time that I get to her, several joggers, cyclists and a policeman reach the place where she is lying on the ground; so I opt to stay out of direct action, electing to stand back and watch.

Even with help alongside her, she keeps crying out, "Help me! Someone please HELP me." Someone - I think it is the COP - tells her to calm down and tell him what is wrong. Actually, after hearing her screaming nonstop for a couple of minutes, I think what he finally says is, "Shut the hell up, lady, and tell me what happened to ya."

" My ankle. My left ankle.", she cries out. "I fell and broke my ankle."

The policeman stoops to take a look at the woman's injury. Gingerly, he pulls off her sneaker and sock. He doesn't show enough care, however, because the woman screams out in paroxysms of amplified pain.

Upon exposure, the ankle is obviously broken - maybe even compound-fractured: the kind of thing that might have warranted amputation in the days before advanced medicine. There is massive swelling, and an apparent hematoma - looking all nasty and purple - that obliterates the normal contours of the joint. The purple of the injury coordinates with the violet and blue varicose veins on the calf of the worn old leg.

Having seen the worst, I feel my anxieties for the woman's well-being eased by the realization that she is not having a heart attack. I am glad for her. In the back of my mind, I am happy too that she has not been mugged or raped in the park in broad daylight. I am really glad that - with others there to assist her - I can continue on my way.

Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? And he said, Legion: because many devils were entered into him. And they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the deep.

III

I next envision my thin body being torn in two. Two strong , disconnected, hovering hands - maybe those of God - appear in front of me. They push through my soft belly as if it were dough, grabbing at my lower ribs. The hands tear at me, left and right, moving in opposite directions. They pull me apart with a clean efficient jerk. My ribs crack audibly, piercing my lungs as they rip away from my sternum.  Abdominal organs - my bloody viscera, my purple guts - protrude through the hole in the middle of my torso. I collapse forward, suffocating and turning purple from the dual pneumothorax of my punctured lungs. I am almost grateful; I am not afraid. It seems I've been expecting this.

I've become a work of modern art - a body with a hole through its middle. You can put your hand through the space in my belly. You can stand on one side of me and look through the hole to see a friend standing on the other side. You could shake hands with a friend through the frame of my eviscerated body.

I wonder why I can't be happy, and then rephrase the question, and ask myself again, "Why can't I be happy with what I have?"

Then, in a dream I see the head of Abraham Lincoln. It is a sad vision - after the trauma of the fatal shot that sealed his doom. My view is from behind the left ear. The wound (and the blood spilling from the wound onto the pillow) are purple. For some reason Abe's forehead is glowing. I contemplate his archetypal beautiful ugliness. I contemplate the finality of his unexpected sentence of doom pronounced irrevocably, without appeal, by the purple blood and the hole in his head from which it pours.

The demons are all around us; and many are inside, constantly looking for ways to make themselves happy in our flesh. The demons talk to each other the way friends encourage each other in the face of adversity. They tell each other, "Be patient. Never give up. If you don't give up before the job is done, the job will get done."

IV

Later that day - it must have been last Saturday - I became really horny. I was feeling deep down sexual urges; craving sexual arousal; looking for a good roll between the sheets. Sadly, I was without another with whom to consummate my carnal desires.

Consequently, I went down to the local book store, and purchased a couple of men's magazines - or what once euphemistically were called men's magazines - what are now called magazines thanks to political correctness. Anyway... when I took my selections to purchase them at the check-out counter, the woman who rang my sale looked at me with a look that left little doubt that she looked upon me as being a miserable masturbator. I suppose her reaction was meant to evince shame, but I maintained steadfast resistance to her attempt to manipulate my self-image.

"I can see by your look that you believe that I am going to go home now and play with myself ", I said to her with surprising directness. "Well, you are quite right about that. I'm not proud of the fact, but that is what I am planning to do."

She blushed a very becoming shade of purple, and chose not to respond to my comments - that is until she gave me the change for my purchase. Then, as I was leaving, she said, "Have a nice day."

The demons of the air crowd around the head of a pin waiting for some weakness to show in our behavior; some momentary lapse in behavior-management that allows them to enter, takeover, and possess us. One detour from the path of self-focus, one side-looking glance, one inconsequential lapse of being true-to-oneself, and we find ourselves hosting a legion of demanding, noisy, demonic guests. One little mistake, one slip along the way can turn a real nice guy into a different kind of guy beset by flaws that menace his person and mar his personality.

V

Saturday night, two friends and I went downtown to a nightclub where some folk group was playing. This particular club is well known, and usually draws a good crowd on weekend nights. Saturday was no exception. On entering, pleasant music mixed with the casual character of the patrons held promise of a relaxing evening.

My hopes of a laid-back night out were dashed early on however, when one of my friends goaded me into making an overture toward an apparently single, decidedly lovely woman who was seated at the end of the bar adjacent to the table at which my friends and I were seated. My libido was somewhat diminished by an afternoon with magazines. Still, the prodding of my friend was so insistent that I finally opted to mosey over to where the woman was seated and make a move on her.

She was drinking a Manhattan, enthralled by the music, and oblivious to my approach. Judging by the hypnotized focus of her gaze into space, she was probably on her second or third drink at that point. Anyway, I introduced myself. She seemed agreeable, and we talked cordially for several minutes. We were even getting to the point where I thought I could like her, and could probably get her phone number, and maybe formulate plans to call her and take her out on a date sometime.

Then I noticed her hands, and specifically her fingernails, and especially her purple metallic fingernail polish. Something so resplendently striking seemed to invite comment, so I said to her, "You have luscious fingernails". That's exactly what I said, nothing more, just, "You have luscious fingernails."

Her attitude changed instantly - which is to say abruptly and dramatically. She looked aghast at me as if I were the biggest freak show ever born.

"What's with you?", she said. "Are you weird or something? Do you have some bizarre fetish for fingernails? What is it with some guys anyway? I can't stand it. I'd like to believe that maybe, just maybe, there's one normal guy somewhere. But every one of you blow it. You all have weird hang-ups. Some guys are ape about my feet. Some just want to drool over my breasts. One freak actually asked if he could enshrine my underwear in the file-fold of his briefcase. Now here you are having an orgasm over my fingernails. I am sorry, but I just can't deal with you, and your decidedly sick mind."

And just like that, with disdain, she waved me away from her; never allowing me an opportunity to protest her judgment.

When I returned to my table and told my friends what happened, they laughed at me with scorn for minutes. They concluded that my line about "luscious fingernails" was the worst approach and dumbest thing they ever heard. I was so ashamed that I felt my face blushing purple.

After the demons get inside, they begin to use you. Sometime later, you realize what's happening, and start asking yourself why you are doing the things you're doing. But the demons won't let you get an answer to the question; and they won't let you stop. So, after a time, you begin to feel it's not your life anymore, and in a legion of ways it really isn't.

CHRISTOPHER J. KLINGES  (copyright 1992, all rights reserved)