Manhattan, and Curry, and Memory

John Russell Herbert

He ate some chicken curry in some Indian joint in Manhattan.

For the twenty-thousandth time, though decade had almost passed, he thought of the long-gone and fallen Sindhi Princess, of her exquisite acquiescence, of her graphic shamelessness, presumably still occurring, but not for him, not in such a very long time.

In the Indian restroom, he thought of her … Some nights he thought of her tearfully, or almost so. He'd at least moved past literal tears. His thoughts grew more cool and abstract, in the sun, in the sun, half-or-more-busy with a variety of goals and distractions.

He dreamt … a multitude of things, of bourgeois pop liberal bitches slamming the front door, of building logistics, of seeing this, of not seeing that, of seeing something because some unreal mirror cast unreal x-ray-reflection visibility thr'around some nuance of night architecture, allowing him to see … some meaningless passing-on of buildingmates, wasted, at 3 a.m., blind and ignorant of his sleep disturbance, and blind to all else, paranoid at their potential vulnerability to his individual nature, or … both, as the slack pre-dawn hours of wastage wore on.

All of it was … the estrangement of the proletariat from its pop liberal fellow travelers.

The old sister knew he was halfway all right.

The bourgeois hipster cunts knew … nothing.

There were disintegratory nightmares I'll leave out of even this exposition, and there were dreams of exquisite loved ones, gone, and the melancholic despair of which reveries were only broken by fleeting glimpses of other women, exquisite, unknown, in strange chambers, in plots beyond his comprehension, and certainly beyond theirs, and there was time, and there was decision, and there was the slipshod happenstance of fate,

Fate, fate,

Meaningless and gone;

Traffic slipped north on Calvert Street, and he was gone.

He dreamt of some convention, in a sweet hotel, but also sprawling over elaborate grounds nearby, in tents, “authentic Puritan tents", presumably like those used by the Roundheads in the English Civil War.

The German Swiss was there, and he wanted to show Iantos something over some great earthwork away from the hotel, somewhere down near and along the line of tents.

Though the German Swiss marched his fat ass straight up the earthwork, our Iantos used his hands as well as his feet to “boulder” up over the thing.

The emankment's steepness rounded off near the top, and the climb became easier.

He listended to twangy-picky renditions of the suffering of the world, accompanied and deeply enrichened by lyrics in a language he didn't really understand.