The soviet TV

Buildings here had the habit of looking old even when they were new. You could never quite tell driving past a shell of a house if it was in the process of going up or coming down, and this particular one was exemplary.

            “I like this house,” Ash’s host-father said, skipping up the first few steps. A rough looking guard dog clamored to the end of its chain and offered a few unconvincing growls before slinking back into its ramshackle doghouse. A chain must take all the fun out of being a guard dog, Ash thought.

            It was a three story house with a walkout basement, or would be anyway if they had left room for a door. Homes here were fashioned from a baffling set of architectural rules, completely unknown to Ash’s American eye. It seemed they went up a room at a time, and no thought was given to the next until a door was built in the former. Take the TV workshop for example. The entrance was through a door that hung two feet off the ground. The step up was awkward enough with a hundred pound knock-off SONY, but the step down a foot and a half later into a three-foot square foyer made the transaction quite the workout. How a business managed to keep its customers was an incredible trick of culture and science – they would be on their way with a newly functioning TV for six dollars and forty-five minutes of their time.

            The shop was a mess. For lack of any clearly defined workspace, Janybek had spread his tools on one of the piles of dusty TV parts. It was a miracle that he could find the screws to put one back together again, Ash thought, and as would be confirmed in a minute not all the same screws went back in a disassembled TV. There just happened to be a large enough collection lying about to finish any one job.

            As Janybek worked he chatted about the “good ol’ days” of the Soviet Union. “Things were good back then. The streets were paved; schools were well taken care of. I studied in Moscow and my parents never worried about me being up there all alone. It was safe to travel – and cheap. You could get a bus ticket from Bishkek for 3 som, forty tyiyn.”

            Ash asked how much a monthly salary was.

            “Sixty som for the very poorest. But teachers were paid well. They made a hundred and fifty.”

            “I heard it cost seven som for a flight from Bishkek to Osh,” added Ash.

            “Yes, if you were a student. A normal ticket was fifteen. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the country just went to pot – young people got all these crazy ideas from movies and gangs – people were spray painting schools, tossing their trash in the road – nobody took care of things anymore.”

            The irony of the room they sat huddled in suddenly shouted in Ash’s ear but seemed to fall short of the gentleman with the monologue.

            “Those were good days. Now we have skinheads up in Moscow. Not safe for a Kyrgyz student.” Janybek worked with incredible skill, unsoldering little pieces off the green and dusty circuit boards from the back without checking to see what was on the other side. He had studied electronics at university and had kept up with the changing technology, though a lot of the stuff people brought in were from a dead and buried technological age.

            “I built a light-bulb when I was in eighth-grade. A radio in seventh. The telephone switchboards were this big.” He motioned with his hands.

            Janybek had four daughters, the youngest being a senior in high school. Her name was Aisezim and somewhere in the back of Ash’s mind the name flipped a little switch. The signal hadn’t made its way up to the front yet when she walked through the door.

            “Aisezim! Ah – how are you?” Ash extended his hello in English. She had called him for a week straight to ask about English clubs a couple months ago. “Where were you this past Saturday?”

            “Oh, I was, busy. Yes, well, ah, good to see you.”

            Her preparations weren’t going as well as hoped, though her father had big plans. “She’ll study at Manas University; work overseas,” said her father. It was a heady and practical dream – in one and the same moment – for any parent, especially one with the means.

Trough

He reached up from navy depths, racing the rush of bubbles to the surface. Being this far underwater always gave him that feeling--you know--the one that starts around the edges of your heart and spiders outward to your limbs making them thrash for lighter space. It wasn't panic, per se, it was...it was like sitting on the edge of a cloud without a parachute. You got the sense of unknowable depth below you and could almost feel the monsters of the deep rushing for your ankles, your torso, just a taste of skin, just a toe here, a finger there.

He pushed wide arcs through the loosening wall and broke on the edge of a swell. Sliding quickly down he waited for the bite that wouldn't come. It was easy to imagine this point teeming with life. Every aquarium he had ever been to was crawling with life to twenty feet and back. But not here. Here, he was truly alone.

Pushed and run along

Making his way down to the stadium he pulled a cigarette, nestled up against its neighbors, wantonly from the shelter of the pack. Bypassing the locked gates he climbed the dirt hill settled against the stadium wall and hopped the cement barrier. They had dropped four dozen or so truckloads of fresh earth in pyramid precision on the football turf, but this had been weeks ago. The stadium stood unused.

He eased himself onto a flat section of the crumbling cement and gazed past the far end of the stadium. There, past the trees, past the fields sewn with potatoes and barley, thick, slate colored mountains heaved up out of the valley, stabbing at the sky. It was August but a thin dusting of snow lay hidden in the fissures in the rocks. He took a drag and held it against the panorama. As his shoulders dropped he watched it be coated in a rising cloud of breath and disturbed air, the dust now mixing with smoke.

It was a sizable park that circled the stadium, wrapping around it like a horseshoe settled on its spike. He had paced it the week before, laying out potential golf holes, dreaming of a perfectly shaped shot cutting the gaps and running the pin. An altruistic farmer had seeded the ground with crops for the government, growing vegetables and animal feed on public land. The caretaker of the property told him it would be impossible to play here and why don't you go play over in the stadium there? Next time he'd come with a few discs and show her how far they could fly. But now he was just kicking at little clumps of dirt, nicking at the little knobs of yet eroded soil, pushing out a hundred micro landslides, watching the crumbs tumble and shake and quiver along ancient river beds carved into the hill below.

Bloated

Bloated. Eight blinis, two boiled eggs and a packet of ramen poking out here and there between thin muscles stretched over a pushed out belly. Pushed.

Stretched wallet over a beer and two eggs and a packet of ramen. The money comes slower than the food. At least the chickens keep laying.

Slow steps in slow rain drops and tarps pulled loosely over grassy bales, heavy and heavier with rain.

A night of breath-rite strips and the smell of a late night slim jim snack, snuck, sneaked in a bag from the land of the slim jim, that little packet collecting what's left, coagulated loveliness, coerced into slim little packets of salt and spice.

A burp. Two shakes of the pepper had been enough. One would have done it. One here, one strip across the nose, opening the senses to a days worth of collected smells, seeping slowly into blankets and carpets and curtains, curling about the floor and settling into clothes unfolded, unstacked.

Curled in one place, one solid space, one clear path of air and roadway dust--air for brain, air for dreams, light falling from stars falling from falling grace and--

Scrolling

I lost an edge. Somewhere, in between the monitor-lit nights of scrolling. Somewhere there we lost that tone of adventure, that heaviness of Technicolor painted across swathes of sky too vast to be contained.

We oo and ah at the latest advances in screen technology.

HD sharp enough to cut your retina they say.

Your life won’t be complete without 60” of wall covered by our screen…no 70”…why not make it 105? And we are impressed.

And we cheer. And we roll out in the millions to place 60” windows on our inner walls, noting the grass stains and stitching on the butts of tightly clad balls of muscle called football players.

Windows to worlds we label reality, hoping, hoping that this larger-than-life-sized scripted reality would shine its light deep into our living rooms, bathing the couch in dreams we thought real. Dreamed real. Desperately pleaded to be real.

Has the irony not yet dropped? Is it still falling like the way the glass in the screen is falling, its viscosity unnoticed and unperceived until our eyeballs have fused with eyelids and we’re lying in our Sunday best below the sweet grass, grass in RD—Real Definition—that unabashed yet unproclaiming earth?

Does the sky not stretch beyond five-feet? Can we capture it in a room?

Does your child not sparkle with ten-trillion pixels in every smile? Can we capture it in a lipstick commercial?

Does the air not move past your skin in euphoric unbridled chaos? Can we capture it in a box fan?

Where does interruption end and production begin? Where do light flickering shadows leave their mark? Where can my fingers be worn by the reigns of a coaxed beast and not by the scrolling of a little rubber wheel, promising me the world?

Going back to what was

The campus looked wildly different. The old student union had been demolished and the new one was raised a hundred yards back and off the center of campus, opening up the campus mall in a sea of fresh cement and plant life. The muddy little creek that used to run by the parking lot now flowed through the mall.

Inside the student center everything looked fresh as well. It even smelled fresh. As He made my way along the hallways, he discovered that everything was still called the same thing, but nothing looked the same. “The Cabin,” a dark and dusty windowless lounge reminiscent of an old dive bar was now pushed out to the exterior.

He made his way over to the library to at least physically orient himself to something that was the same. Same bricks, same layout, even most of the same paintings were still on the wall. Yet here there were small nuanced changes, like exercise rooms in the center of the library floors sporting an elliptical, a treadmill and a bicycle. “Mind & Body Fitness” it said on the door.

Many of the buildings indeed were the same from his days there at the turn of the century. Yet he found that none of the old feelings were. None of those feelings of timidity or bashfulness. He realized he was no longer afraid to succeed. Afraid to simply approach life and say, “Hey.”

He used to dread the thought of approaching someone, afraid of pushing out over new ground and opening a conversation. Afraid to open his own weaknesses and shortcomings to the cutting edge. Afraid to let that block of wood be touched by the sharp blade that would loosen the masterpiece within. Those days where he sat hunched, defending himself against the knives that wanted to cut away the corners and chip away the dross—the very things that held him captive inside its walls.

Even as he was afraid of success, he was afraid of failure. Afraid of what it would do to him if he tried and came up short. So instead he never got started.

He was suddenly overcome with the desire to go back. To wipe out the dreams that haunted him—the ones where he showed up to class to discover he had missed half the semester and was now receiving a failing grade. The ones where five years had simply slipped away and vanished.

He would open those nightmares to reality. Ground them in the truth. Drown them in movement. Create in time a physical reality that would stick, even in his dreams.

A look

He held it for awhile and then looked out over the dying hill. Exhaling he could just make out the swirl of dusty air that quickly unfurled like a flag being lifted in a breeze.

Groundness

No one knew where the turnings would take him. Not above, not below, though maybe just to that point where sinking, sputtering, the world would spin and ebb and flow and he'd travel just that like--half in and half out, bobbing along in the currents circling a full earth. Many were like that, adventures that is, like that full circle, or full Y, drifting that way then rounding back and moving off again to return years later to familiar waters, old haunts, packed ground trod by the footfalls of a million others and yet beneath it all still recognizing his own faded impressions upon the soft ground.

It's hard to make yourself return. It's hard to retrace and recover ground you thought you'd never lose. What is it that makes us yearn for the old patterns of our thoughts, the ruts we thought we had finally pressed on and over, the ones where we had worked up the courage to climb out of the trench and force our feet over contested ground, the bullets whizzing and popping over our heads. How do we make ourselves look back down that hill once gained and see the bodies we left behind, the ones we said we'd never leave, even if we had to drag them over miles of enemy ground? Sometimes we look back and see our own body lying there and are glad it died, glad it left itself among the thousands of others who also fell on that hill, on that battle ground. Glad we could let our souls leave the once occupied shell that we thought we could never leave, never escape.

Pushing on made him feel better. Better but with that tinge that always starts in the bottom of the gut and works its way to the edges of temples, raising microscopic hairs like the planting of a flag on newly captured ground. Missing, if for nothing else, familiarity.