Pondering the Length of Forthcoming Days | J. J. Steinfeld
We agreed to meet in a downtown bar. Not a bar I’d ordinarily go to. In fact, I’d never been there at all. A little too rough part of town for me. But this, for whatever was churning around in my mind and libido, was my idea for a little excitement and stimulation. Not that I’d been without ideas lately, but I’d been spending more and more time writing love sonnets, a poetic form that never used to interest me. Not that I can get those poems published either. They were a little too overwrought and caught up in weird fanciful ideas about the saving, redemptive aspects of love. I wasn’t going to spend a great deal of time analysing why my creative psyche was peering into the dark. Maybe this little excursion would turn me in another direction. A forty-one-year-old intermediate-school teacher for fifteen years, married ten years, trying to get my poems published for five years, exactly five published, all of them in online magazines, and I recently received my hundredth rejection letter, counting both snail-mail and electronic-mail rejections. The neatness of the years and numbers caused me a bit of discomfort, abrading my sense of self.
I didn’t tell my wife at all about the e-mails, let alone the rendezvous, if it could be called that. My e-mail correspondent called it a tryst in the e-mail inviting me to meet her. What an archaic word, I wrote back, and she said her sexual fantasies and turn-ons were postmodern. What would you call postmodern sex, I asked her, and her answer was rather strange: “Molly Bloom having sex with Samuel Beckett in a Jane Austen novel, as James Joyce was off at a Barenaked Ladies concert simply because he loved the way the syllables of their name danced on his tongue." Impressively witty, yet not postmodern sex in my estimation, but I didn’t have a better reply. As much as I wanted to, I was afraid to mention that fascinating yet baffling e-mail to my wife, who had gone to a Halloween party dressed as a character from an Austen novel on the night I had received that first enticing e-mail. Talk about eerie coincidences. My mysterious correspondent e-mailed me that she would be there on the last Tuesday night of the month, at 10:45 precisely, but she wanted me there around 10:15, standing at the bar and having a beer. Order a pitcher of beer and two glasses and she would join me. I don’t know who was more eager for the meeting, me or my e-mail correspondent. It had started innocently if not mysteriously enough. Before going off to teach, I was checking my morning e-mail, deleting the abundance of spam, an especially large quantity that morning, and there was a one-sentence e-mail with the subject header “YEARNING”: I am a small piece of a broken ancient artifact, a tiny token to accident and the chance of enduring love—to live fully is to be a flower, to love fully is to be the garden.
Initially I had no intention of responding to an unknown and unseen stranger, even if I was fascinated by what she was writing to me. It felt poetic but pleading. At first I thought it was one of my students, playing some sort of mind game with her teacher. I assumed it was a female almost immediately, even though it wasn’t until the third e-mail that the person sending the messages made that explicit. Then exactly a week later—I checked the time and date of the previous e-mail—I received a second and longer e-mail: I am the hands of the clock trying to turn from time, not to see my ticking captor, and trying to be eternal as Hell, only to be tossed into the boiling fluids soon to be evaporated into the nothingness of Heaven. I am part of the clock I despise and lie too dramatically, locked into its fixed scheme for an instant for an instant for an instant...
I could hardly be sure what she meant but I studied her e-mail, looking for clues to her identity and her intentions. Then I started to suspect that she was quoting from something existing. I searched on the internet but couldn’t find anything specific.
The third week, again, exactly a week later, I received her longest e-mail to date: I am a buffoon of bleeding and wounds, creating unwritten myths as I walk unnerved, saying I stroll calmly as I gallows walk forward past the past caught in days toward more abhorrent days in ways foreign to my nature; both enraged and enfeebled, made to think madness is safe, I was sickened into sanity as each dense moment, frightful as slow death, drew me even more unsure, left me even more uncured. I ponder the questions as a sentenced woman ponders the length of forthcoming days…
I became more suspicious that the e-mailer was using words from literature, maybe not good literature, but the internet again didn’t reveal the source to me. I had certainly discovered plagiarized work by my students, but maybe I was wrong about the e-mailer. I guessed she was in her early twenties, maybe immersed in goth culture, and I imagined that she would cultivate such a look, with dark clothing and dark make-up. In my previous e-mail to her I asked for a name, even a fictitious name would please me, but she wouldn’t give me one. I asked her how she knew my name and e-mail address, and she wrote that Cupid had e-mailed it to her last Valentine’s Day. I assumed this was her sense of humour though it wasn’t as witty as her earlier words about postmodern sex, but there was no getting around that most of what she wrote was anything but humorous. I found myself e-mailing her several times during a week, but she would e-mail me only once a week.
On the fourth week, I sat expectantly at my computer, certain an e-mail would arrive at the same time the messages had arrived in previous weeks, and it did: Before I take my gallows walk, as much metaphoric as literal, I want to spend a night with a sympathetic soul. I want to engage in the physical, to discard any prudence or good sense. I want to give my body as completely as humanly possible to another person. You can free me from my personal burdens or change what has to happen, but we can give each other pleasure for one night.
I put together all the messages she sent me in one long prose poem and I suggested she submit her writing to a literary journal, something interested in the avant-garde or surreal, but what did I know about the avant-garde or surreal. Again I asked her who she was, begging for a hint or two. “Identities,” she wrote on the fifth week, “interfered with true passion." It wasn’t as if I had already committed adultery. I could always leave after meeting her.
There they were, a dozen men, none of whom I knew or even recognized, each with a pitcher of beer and two glasses in from of him, all, I assumed, waiting for her. I watched them and started a poem, not a love sonnet but a poem about the unpredictability and frightfulness of everyday life. At closing time, the dozen men, in different stages of inebriation, left the bar. At least one, I thought, would dream about the mysterious e-mailer tonight. I know I would.
“Pondering the Length of Forthcoming Days,” in a slightly different version, was first published in Bottom of the World.
We agreed to meet in a downtown bar. Not a bar I’d ordinarily go to. In fact, I’d never been there at all. A little too rough part of town for me. But this, for whatever was churning around in my mind and libido, was my idea for a little excitement and stimulation. Not that I’d been without ideas lately, but I’d been spending more and more time writing love sonnets, a poetic form that never used to interest me. Not that I can get those poems published either. They were a little too overwrought and caught up in weird fanciful ideas about the saving, redemptive aspects of love. I wasn’t going to spend a great deal of time analysing why my creative psyche was peering into the dark. Maybe this little excursion would turn me in another direction. A forty-one-year-old intermediate-school teacher for fifteen years, married ten years, trying to get my poems published for five years, exactly five published, all of them in online magazines, and I recently received my hundredth rejection letter, counting both snail-mail and electronic-mail rejections. The neatness of the years and numbers caused me a bit of discomfort, abrading my sense of self.
I didn’t tell my wife at all about the e-mails, let alone the rendezvous, if it could be called that. My e-mail correspondent called it a tryst in the e-mail inviting me to meet her. What an archaic word, I wrote back, and she said her sexual fantasies and turn-ons were postmodern. What would you call postmodern sex, I asked her, and her answer was rather strange: “Molly Bloom having sex with Samuel Beckett in a Jane Austen novel, as James Joyce was off at a Barenaked Ladies concert simply because he loved the way the syllables of their name danced on his tongue." Impressively witty, yet not postmodern sex in my estimation, but I didn’t have a better reply. As much as I wanted to, I was afraid to mention that fascinating yet baffling e-mail to my wife, who had gone to a Halloween party dressed as a character from an Austen novel on the night I had received that first enticing e-mail. Talk about eerie coincidences. My mysterious correspondent e-mailed me that she would be there on the last Tuesday night of the month, at 10:45 precisely, but she wanted me there around 10:15, standing at the bar and having a beer. Order a pitcher of beer and two glasses and she would join me. I don’t know who was more eager for the meeting, me or my e-mail correspondent. It had started innocently if not mysteriously enough. Before going off to teach, I was checking my morning e-mail, deleting the abundance of spam, an especially large quantity that morning, and there was a one-sentence e-mail with the subject header “YEARNING”: I am a small piece of a broken ancient artifact, a tiny token to accident and the chance of enduring love—to live fully is to be a flower, to love fully is to be the garden.
Initially I had no intention of responding to an unknown and unseen stranger, even if I was fascinated by what she was writing to me. It felt poetic but pleading. At first I thought it was one of my students, playing some sort of mind game with her teacher. I assumed it was a female almost immediately, even though it wasn’t until the third e-mail that the person sending the messages made that explicit. Then exactly a week later—I checked the time and date of the previous e-mail—I received a second and longer e-mail: I am the hands of the clock trying to turn from time, not to see my ticking captor, and trying to be eternal as Hell, only to be tossed into the boiling fluids soon to be evaporated into the nothingness of Heaven. I am part of the clock I despise and lie too dramatically, locked into its fixed scheme for an instant for an instant for an instant...
I could hardly be sure what she meant but I studied her e-mail, looking for clues to her identity and her intentions. Then I started to suspect that she was quoting from something existing. I searched on the internet but couldn’t find anything specific.
The third week, again, exactly a week later, I received her longest e-mail to date: I am a buffoon of bleeding and wounds, creating unwritten myths as I walk unnerved, saying I stroll calmly as I gallows walk forward past the past caught in days toward more abhorrent days in ways foreign to my nature; both enraged and enfeebled, made to think madness is safe, I was sickened into sanity as each dense moment, frightful as slow death, drew me even more unsure, left me even more uncured. I ponder the questions as a sentenced woman ponders the length of forthcoming days…
I became more suspicious that the e-mailer was using words from literature, maybe not good literature, but the internet again didn’t reveal the source to me. I had certainly discovered plagiarized work by my students, but maybe I was wrong about the e-mailer. I guessed she was in her early twenties, maybe immersed in goth culture, and I imagined that she would cultivate such a look, with dark clothing and dark make-up. In my previous e-mail to her I asked for a name, even a fictitious name would please me, but she wouldn’t give me one. I asked her how she knew my name and e-mail address, and she wrote that Cupid had e-mailed it to her last Valentine’s Day. I assumed this was her sense of humour though it wasn’t as witty as her earlier words about postmodern sex, but there was no getting around that most of what she wrote was anything but humorous. I found myself e-mailing her several times during a week, but she would e-mail me only once a week.
On the fourth week, I sat expectantly at my computer, certain an e-mail would arrive at the same time the messages had arrived in previous weeks, and it did: Before I take my gallows walk, as much metaphoric as literal, I want to spend a night with a sympathetic soul. I want to engage in the physical, to discard any prudence or good sense. I want to give my body as completely as humanly possible to another person. You can free me from my personal burdens or change what has to happen, but we can give each other pleasure for one night.
I put together all the messages she sent me in one long prose poem and I suggested she submit her writing to a literary journal, something interested in the avant-garde or surreal, but what did I know about the avant-garde or surreal. Again I asked her who she was, begging for a hint or two. “Identities,” she wrote on the fifth week, “interfered with true passion." It wasn’t as if I had already committed adultery. I could always leave after meeting her.
There they were, a dozen men, none of whom I knew or even recognized, each with a pitcher of beer and two glasses in from of him, all, I assumed, waiting for her. I watched them and started a poem, not a love sonnet but a poem about the unpredictability and frightfulness of everyday life. At closing time, the dozen men, in different stages of inebriation, left the bar. At least one, I thought, would dream about the mysterious e-mailer tonight. I know I would.
“Pondering the Length of Forthcoming Days,” in a slightly different version, was first published in Bottom of the World.