Mr. James > Recent Status Updates

He felt himself being drawn into modes for which he had neither aptitude nor will. They were both watching him. The tears were gone. Their eyes seemed filled with expectation and he'd nothing to give. He'd come to take. -- C.M.

A room where the mad sat at their work. [...] He'd never been among the certified and he was surprised to find them invested with a strange authority, like folk who'd had to do with death some way and had come back, something about them of survivors in a realm that all must reckon with soon or late. -- C.M.

In the madhouse the walls reek with the odors of filth and terminal ills they've soaked up these hundred years. Stains from the rusted plumbing, the ordure slung by irate imbeciles. All this seeps back constantly above the smell of germicidal cleaning fluids. -- C.M.

The Wallet: A grandfather’s hand on his grandson’s forehead; the boy looks up. The old man lowers his hand to the boy’s nose, extending his index and middle finger. A gesture superimposed onto a round face resembles what the old man fears most: a clock.

"But why do you want her?" Kino urged. "Because she makes me laugh," Jiya said. "It is she who made me forget the big wave. For me -- she is life." -- P.S.B.

She had knelt beside him and nibbled at his ear. Her soft breast against his arm. Why then this loneliness? -- C.M.

He surveyed the face in the mirror, letting the jaw go slack, eyes vacant. How would he look in death? For there were days this man so wanted for some end to things that he'd have taken up his membership among the dead, all souls that ever were, eyes bound with night. -- C.M.

Her ablutions were endless. In her bright metal haircurlers she looked like the subject of bizarre experiments upon the human brain. And she was growing fatter. She said: How'd you like to live in a whorehouse? You'd eat too. -- C.M.

"Until now you could not cry because you were not fully alive. You had been hurt too much. But today you are beginning to live, and so your tears flow. It is good for you. Let your tears come and do not stop them." -- P.S.B.

He had been shot through the head with a .32 caliber pistol and he was twenty-one years old forever. -- C.M.

He crossed the cold buckled linoleum with puckered feet and stood naked by the window and watched the Monday morning traffic in the streets below. A different slant on life here. Old whiskey bottles with their bleached labels lying on the wet tar of the rooftops. A glass skylight covered with chickenwire. The cold winter rain failing everywhere over the city. -- C.M.

Suttree gradually going awash in the sheer outrageous sentience of her. Their glasses clicked on the tabletop. Her hot spiced tongue fat in his mouth and her hands all over him like the very witch of fuck. -- C.M.

"Yes, he will be happy someday," his father said, "for life is always stronger than death." -- P.S.B.

“Do you mean the ocean and the volcano cannot hurt us if we are not afraid?” Kino asked. “No,” his father replied. “I did not say that. Ocean is there and volcano is there. [...] [The] ocean may rise into storm and volcano may burst into flame. We must accept this fact, but without fear. We must say, ‘Someday I shall die, and does it matter whether it is by ocean or volcano, or whether I grow old and weak?'” - P.S.B.

Jiya lived in the last house [...] toward the ocean, and his house did not have have a window toward the sea either. "Why not?" Kino asked him. "The sea is beautiful." "The sea is our enemy," Jiya replied. "How can you say that?" Kino asked. "Your father catches fish from the sea and sells them and that is how you live." Jiya only shook his head. "The sea is our enemy," he repeated. "We all know it." -- P.S.B.

How the snow fell cherry red in the soft neon flush of the beersign like the slow dropping of blood. [...] Blind Richard sits with his wife. The junkman drunk, his mouth working mutely and his neck awry like a hanged man's. A young homosexual alone in the corner crying. Suttree among others, sad children of the fates whose home is the world, all gathered here a little while to forestall the going there. -- C.M.

Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this. The thousand brawls and stoven jaws, the clubbings and the broken bottles and the little knives that come from nowhere. For him perhaps it all was done in silence, or how would it sound, the shot that fired the bullet that lay already in his brain? These small enigmas of time and space and death. -- C.M.

When I die he's goin to come to sleep with me. We're to be buried together. It's done arranged. It is. [...] What if the dog dies first? What? I said what if the dog dies first? [...] I mean if the dog dies first are they going to put you to sleep? Why hell no that's crazy. I guess maybe you could just have him frozen. [...] The old man hugged the crazy looking thing to him. Of course I could, he said. -- C.M

We're all right, said Suttree. We're all fucked, said the ragman. [...] He sat with his back to a tree and watched the storm move on over the city. Am I a monster, are there monsters in me? -- C.M.

They squatted on their haunches side by side like buzzards and smiled around. Suttree looked at them. He looked at one and then he looked at the other. They were alike to the crooks in their stained brown teeth. The creases about their eyes, the quilting of their dry bird necks. They squatted there and bobbed their heads and smiled and spat at the fire and said howdy howdy. -- C.M.

These lovers lay crumpled in the dripping wood and listened to the fall of the rain heart on heart. Her wet hair lay across his face like black seaweed. She said his name. He moved as if to rise but she held him. You'll catch cold, he said. I dont care. -- C.M.

... Suttree had found a stack of moldering books and he read through them one by one without regard. [...] He read Tom Swift and His Motorcycle and he read The Black Brotherhood and he read Mildred at Home. There were about a dozen titles and when he had finished them all he started over again. She read Mildred at Home and a story about nurses. She said that she would like to be a nurse. -- C.M.

A frailly structured matriarchy showed itself in these latter days, and Suttree reckoned it had always been so. Crouched there under the ledge in the wind's lee while the flames of the small fire lapped back the dark and all around and ceaseless fell the rain in the forest they could have been some band of stone age folk washed up out of an atavistic dream. -- C.M.

At night she watched him with eyes full of questions. All were brought into such close and constant communion by the rain that the configuration of the family seemed to alter. -- C.M.

The coachman came back, but at the moment he stopped in front of Swann, Swann did not say to him: "Did you find the lady?" but: "Remind me, tomorrow, to order more wood; I think our supply must be almost exhausted." [...] and would have gone on talking to him about supplies of wood in order to hide the emotion he felt and allow himself time to separate from his uneasiness and give himself up to his happiness. -- M.P.

Objectification + Possession = Love

Swann left for Prevost's, but at every step of the way his carriage was stopped by other carriages or by people crossing the street, loathsome obstacles that he would gladly have knocked down if the policeman and his report would not have delayed him even more than the passage of a pedestrian. -- M.P.

He lay down in his blankets. It was growing dark, long late midsummer twilight in the woods. He wanted to go down to the river to bathe but he felt too bad. He turned over and looked at the small plot of ground in the crook of his arm. My life is ghastly, he told the grass. -- C.M.

They drove out through the small streets and struck the highway, Reese and Suttree passing the bottle back and forth and Reese giving the driver a history of himself no part of which was even vaguely true. -- C.M.

It dont even smell like coffee. They done emptied the coffee out and filled the sack back with old leaves or somethin, said the woman, nodding her head and looking about. Bring me a cup of it, Willard, the girl called. Reese cut his eyes about. It might be poison, he said. Put eggshells in it, Mama, the girl called. That'll rectify it. Where's she goin to get eggshells at, dumb-ass? They aint no eggs. -- C.M.