Diary: Barry Yourgrau, Three Stories

Katsushika Hokusai, Feminine Wave (1845)

Peril

A monster is loose in the neighborhood. There are orders to evacuate. A fist bangs on my door, a voice shouts. I open up a crack. It’s the building super. “You gotta get out—” he pants hectically. His obese face is shiny with sweat. “No thanks,” I tell him, “I’ll be okay.” He starts arguing, then abruptly turns away at the screams resounding from the floor below. He lurches off toward the stairs. I stick my head out the door a moment. I watch the super reach the staircase, and then scream himself, and start to flail. I pull my head in and shut the door quickly and throw the lock. I lean there, heart pounding.

Then I walk slowly back to my desk. I pick up my soiled earplugs. I fit them back in. In the vague, muffled distance I hear the cries, shrieks, roars, the frantic running that suddenly goes dead quiet. I just hunch at my desk, resuming notes for a set of tales I’ve been writing, for as long as I can remember, about a man who drifts around the world in a glistening soap bubble he has managed to blow for himself. It’s an enchanting life, this guy’s; but also fraught and precarious … floating continuously on the edge of catastrophe … of his fragile craft at any moment bursting at a perilous height.

At one point a ferocious pounding erupts at my door. I gasp in my chair, heart leaping. A blood-curdling bellow makes me cry out involuntarily. But then the noise and violence move away down the hall, and then onto the other floors again. Trembling, I recommence my notes, my glistening little travels on the wind, at the mercy of the wind.

On the Flood

I'm so tired. I find the nearest boarding house and fall asleep in a room in the back. My window overlooks the bulrushes of a riverbank. Fed by upstream rains, the river rises, and spills out of its channel, and surges up against the pane of my window. I sleep on in dreamy ignorance, even when the water breaks through and lifts my bed and carries me off, under the cries of the landlady, on the cresting tide.

I float downstream on my mattress raft, snoring. The wreckage of calamities swirls around me. Cows spin ponderously in the water and bellow in slow panic. A clinging family shouts down from the perch of a roof. A great fallen tree trunk, a behemoth, jolts and shudders against the piling of a bridge. I sail under the stone arch, my fist under my pillow clutching wallet and valuables in the night grip of a voyager. A turbulent moon rises in the dark sky and bathes my headway in a lurid gloss. At some point, I awaken in the bedclothes. I blink. I sit bolt upright, eyes wide in disbelief. A chest of drawers from a child's room pirouettes beside me, loosing a dribble of toys into the current. I stare at them. I stare rumple-headed at the cluttered tide all around. I decide I have to be dreaming. Any actions best should wait for the clarities of daylight. I drop back onto my pillow, and wrench the blankets over my head and my thudding heart, and squeeze my eyes tight for sleep.

My bed sweeps along, bearing its wilfully unknowing cargo past the destruction of piers and jetties, past the collapsed bulwarks of villages and towns, on toward the distant turmoil of the sea.

Teacup

I dig about in a pile of bomb debris outside. Finally I wiggle loose a teacup. It’s a frail thing. So frail. Its cheap prim floral decoration is shaggy with dirt and cement grit. I brush it off. I slosh it in some kid’s pail I’ve filled with my tears. I wipe it with a cuff of my sleeve, and I regard it as, what…an artifact of the precious banality of life … Mornings, a kitchen table … someone yawning, slowly drinking their tea … the sun glowing in the cheap yellow curtains of the kitchen window …

I hold the frail cup in hand, my gaze seared again with tears, and another bomb explodes. The cup is torn away into oblivion. I’m hurled into the air, up into a half-shattered tree. I sprawl unnaturally in the ruined branches, like an exhausted contortionist who’s fallen asleep mid-act, and has been pelted scornfully with dirt and grit.

My ghost appears down below me. It plods over to the debris that's now shifted and enlarged somewhat, to resume digging about. The pail is gone. The ghost finds a bent-rimmed tin bowl and shakes it out, and leans over it to weep and weep. But its tears are a ghost’s tears, without substance, and they cannot fill anything.

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Barry Yourgrau's books of brief fiction include Wearing Dad’s Head, A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane, The Sadness of Sex (in whose film version he appeared) and Haunted Traveler, as well as a memoir, Mess. He is the only American author who has published short fiction on Japanese cellphones (keitai shosetsu).

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