This is the first story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. You can read our Flash Fiction stories from previous years here.
George Floyd is dead while I write this story. If I had written these words a little more than a year ago, G.F. alive. In a year, he will not be alive, whether I write or don’t write this story about him. Except perhaps alive in the way stories live, or alive as people say people are alive in stories. People saying that as if they do not understand: dead once, dead forever. As if they don’t know that once is all the time a person ever gets to be alive. As if they don’t know that G.F. doesn’t hear, doesn’t desire mourning, clamor, and cries. As if they do not comprehend that their millions of bodies piled up or kneeling in prayer or prostrate in the street next to G.F. all weigh less than this sheet of paper on which I scribble, and that the commotion, agitation, exercise of their millions upon millions of hearts and minds will not summon a single breath of air when G.F. needs it.
I will not pretend to bring G.F. to life. Nor pretend to bring life to him. G.F. gone for good. Won’t return. No place for G.F. except the past. And the past is not even past, a wise man once declared. Same abyss behind and in front of us is what the wisecracker writer signifying, I believe, and, if I truly believe what he believed, where would I situate G.F. if presented with an opportunity to put him somewhere alive? Not here. Not here in this story where I know better.
Better to forget G.F. Better to let go, or simply leave G.F. alone, thank you, than attempt to invent the point of view of a person not here, not where I am, a person who somehow possesses the power to see G.F. breathing, moving around, to hear G.F.’s thoughts. A person also able to observe me here, myself performing this grief, this terror and anger, this attempt to console myself and define and control and locate myself, establish myself as one who is offering a story about G.F., a true story confirming my suffering, my connection to him, a story about who he is, who I am, a story about myself, as if I am not here where I am and he is not where he is. As if the two of us not permanently separate as life from death. As dreams from objects dreamed.
Better to acknowledge impenetrable darkness surrounding G.F. and me, black darkness blinding me when I pretend I can speak with the authority of a being I imagine whose perspective absolutely reliable. Why write as if I can access the power such an angelic being might possess. As if I am able to employ that power to see, to enter G.F. Power to convince myself, or anybody who might be paying attention or reading or simply curious, that my feelings for G.F., my performance, my outrage, my rituals of claiming and disclaiming an unbreakable relationship to him are authentic. Serve some useful purpose. That my eyes, words reliable, convincing as words, eyes of that imaginary observer I proposed a few sentences ago. Why call upon some sort of supernatural observer to bear witness. Attempt to own that point of view. Imitating it to move closer to G.F. Move outside myself.
I find each move unsatisfactory. A kind of presumption. Wishful thinking at best. Guilt and avoidance at worst. Pretending not to be here where I am, here with many millions of others upset over G.F., people who watch online, who march, throng avenues and streets, behind mikes, on TV, in front of TVs, assuming they may be rightfully, righteously blamed, perhaps, but also hoping to be spared, forgiven. Given another chance. Here in this place where I am, too. Whether or not I pretend I can inhabit some impossibly different space. A place elsewhere in which I am neither exactly dead nor alive, where I am suspended, invisible, yet able to observe myself and observe G.F. as neither living nor dead. Despite absolute darkness, to observe G.F. here, to observe myself here, despite or because we are not present here, but elsewhere, nowhere in fact, or wherever anybody chooses to imagine or not imagine she or he might be. Wherever I’m pretending I am.
For example, pretending not to breathe. A cop knee (I know him—know the motherfucker’s name) pressing down on the neck. Choking, suffocating me. How long. How long. Hands cuffed behind back. Cop body sits on my body pressing it down in a city street. Many shoes, boots shuffling too close to eyes. Wonder if they will stomp my eyes. Wonder what street. What city. Wonder how long dead while wondering.
How long. How long. How to make it real. Not to bid a victim, loved or unloved, adieu. Not to say farewell. Not leave-taking, not goody, good, goodbye. But return to scene of crime. Recount each blow like a senator on the Senate floor who produces cinema verité for his colleagues—pounding rostrum POW-POW-POW-POW-POW—fifty-six times in eighty-one seconds—like cop fists, cop feet striking Rodney King’s body fifty-six hard, loud times—for eighty-one seconds—ignite cities. Like the four hundred blows—les quatre cents coups, as the French saying goes—dirty tricks delivered blow after blow in a black-and-white movie for viewers to silently regard—four hundred uncountable blows beating a boy to his knees. Different strokes for different folks in different countries. Same pain always. Whose. Whose blows. In whose language did the recorder hear Truffaut saying: I demand that a film either express the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not interested in anything in between.
As I read, I learn more about goodbyes, farewells to the dead, about narrative art, about protests, protesters, protestations, learn that the singer Esther Phillips, née Jones, born colored on December 23, 1935, in Galveston, Texas—two days later and you could call her an Xmas present—learn she recorded “No Headstone on My Grave,” a Charlie Rich song, in 1962, eleven years before G.F. was born, with all his live years ahead of him before he’s on his stomach on hard concrete or asphalt of a Minneapolis street begging for more breath, more life than he’s going to get. Wondering how he hears, of all things, a blues/church-voiced woman singing words he can’t quite make out, words gone quick as they come, quick as they go, but slow, too, and sad words, no doubt, very gotdamn sad brushing past, he whiffs thick sad on them, sad in a voice sad as blues and church, sad, slow, quick as a very last breath nobody ever hears anyway neck squeezed in a vise or not. . . . Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t / Don’t put no headstone on my grave / All my life I’ve been a slave. . . . Just put me down and let me be / Free from all this misery. . . . Tell my mother not to cry. . . . Tell her that I’m finally free. . . . Don’t put no headstone. . . . Words passing, dangling, no place to go like the man seen dangling from a rope ain’t going no place else but there where he sways in that old South story old people tell and some soul long ago snapped photos, scared the shit out him, but ain’t him, ain’t me, is it exactly that she sings to, sings for. Timing all wrong, and, anyway, another country, bro, and besides the wench dead (August 7, 1984). And we outlive King, too, don’t we—drowned (June 17, 2012) in his own swimming pool.
"story" - Google News
July 08, 2021 at 05:00PM
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George Floyd Story - The New Yorker
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