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Joseph's Pyramid
Simon Maslin
Simon Maslin is compelled to write by forces entirely beyond his
rational control. He was educated at Cambridge, though the experience has singularly failed
to help him get anywhere significant in life. He lives and works in the South of England.
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Warm death, pouring your
heart out from the gothic balustrades and falling, endlessly tumbling to shatter on the
crystal-hard piazza below. The ice-clear stars reflect all this tumult without any reproach
or hostility, as lucid and indifferent as the universe is vast.
Cold and lonely, the dream shatters.
Rudely awakened by the usual call of his mother, Joseph snaps
into conscious reality with the usual reluctance, instantly aware of the empty space in his
life which faces him with every breath.
Yeah, mum, I'm up--the morning assemblage of ritual to drag
him down into the world. She sits at the breakfast table, cup of cooling coffee at her elbow,
slow burning cigarette in her hand--smiles as he walks into the room. Mornin' love, how did you
sleep.
Like the dead.
And then the usual half hearted inquiry--where are you going to
look today? Joseph shrugs and attacks the cereal with vigour. Someplace I guess, not sure. Going
over to the job centre again.
She smiles half sadly, sensing his quiet, resigned desperation,
but she doesn't pressure him. Money isn't tight quite yet, despite her long time status as a
single mother, she still gets rapidly diminishing endowments from the fortunes of her deceased
family and alimony from an emotionally vacant, yet industrious ex husband who coughs up enough
for everyone with a charming duty of service. He's good like that, loyal, knows duty despite
the acrimonious nature of their divorce.
And Joseph reflects that unemployment isn't so bad in these
circumstances. It's not like he really wants to go out and buy stuff anyway. Not like he needs
to. No friends, no girl to lose money to, no real hobbies to consume his all important capital,
no real sense of a desperate urge to travel, to seek excitement or oblivion in equal measure.
There is his mother for company and the TV when the library runs out of interesting reads.
Yes, unemployment is ok if you don't care, and he didn't. Not
that he had much of a choice--a lower second class Bachelors degree in English didn't qualify
you for much in this life, and it sure as hell made employers dismiss him like an irritant bug
when he turned up on their doorstep. Just a game, leading him constantly into a regular ballet
of interviews and rejection letters, that is, when the sanctimonious idiots even bothered to
write to him after they bothered to meet him.
So he's finished his cereal and helped clean up, like always. Do
you want any help today? He asks, smiling. No thanks love, you go do what you need to do, I'm ok
here.
What he needs to do. And what is that?
Nothing.
He smiles the casual calm smile of one with no demands placed
on him. The only real person in his life is this woman, who sits in the breakfast room
regarding her diminishing cigarette and advancing years with contemplative indifference
and an apparent lack of care. His old school compatriots left town years ago to pursue
careers of one sort or another, get married and breed in the suburbs of the cities, whilst
he just stays, regarding the world with the gaze of poverty and richness which comes from not
having any money, yet having always had your needs taken care of.
* * *
It is summer,
it is summer and the streets are quiet, baking in the silent
haze of the planet's axial tilt. Wrappers and cans rustling under neat, dark evergreen hedges
and the slow decay of old fences, sheds and gates lining the paths and alleys. Old cars on
bricks awaiting the long-promised summer restoration, tidy lawns and rock gardens, water
features and patios. His world is one of silent and ethereal dormitory neighbourhoods that
he walks in ghostly silence, whilst the rest of the world work.
Yet somehow it is cold, lonely. Not a soul around, as he crosses
the allotments and heads into town.
| "It was a magnificent eulogy, a chunk
of randomness which breathed of art and which screamed; look at me and weep!
This is the folly that your youth drives you to! Here is final decay and the end
of the night!" |
He has told himself that he is not bothered by isolation,
boredom, loneliness and the hollow grind of unemployment so often that he starts to believe it.
The confidence of youth tempered by the dull realisation of decay and the merciless crush of
time, even as the seemingly eternal stars wheel above in calm indifference to it all. Joseph
feels their blank penetrating gaze and it gnaws at his emptiness.
Strolling along like a shadow divorced from the sun.
Swinging wildly from elation to the very edge of madness. When
you spend most of your time alone, the world fades from your eyes. His entire life was lived
behind these eyes and at times it felt like the crazy spinning of the planet would tear him
from his roots and send him out into space, in shattered, bleeding, black crystal shards….
So here we go again.
The job centre was another washout. The sullen man--mid forties,
life crisis and resentment--who checked his documents granted him his dole money without
comment, as if Joseph was a lost cause. No jobs appropriate for you at the moment, he had said
and that was an old familiar tale, as if being overqualified for everything they could give
him, suddenly marked him out as some kind of freak who could not be trusted with a simple
employment prospect.
As if, having granted him the shift work he half-heartedly
claimed he was looking for, he would suddenly go mad with frustration and storm out. As if
somehow, he knew too much to be an effective worker in the simple jobs which were all that
were offered these days.
The graduates in the dole queue increased their numbers yearly
and Joseph was a veteran of the scene. When all they told you at university was a lie and all
the hard work shrinks into a mocking poverty, you wonder why you even got up this morning, why
you even opened your eyes to it all.
Joseph stares at the familiar dramas of the Job Centre
with distaste and boredom. The washed up, burnt out, rejects from humanity who crawl here to
seek the crumbs of the mighty British economy, the last remnants of hope. These are his folk,
his kin, his comrades.
Maybe you should retrain? He is told. Maybe I can't be
bothered--he thinks with an acid twitch. Maybe one degree should be enough and you should give
me a chance to do something--anything.
But the man stares at him and can't hear his thoughts. Go on, he
says, come back some other time. I'm busy now. Joseph smiles with the sad smile of the
eternally damned.
He hears about all these people in the city making fortunes and
flagellating themselves into a paroxysm of stress over their careers and he thinks, well how do
they even start? How do you even get that far when nobody will employ you, when you haven't got
experience and you can't get experience because nobody will employ you?
His time in this place is brief and he flits into the late
morning sun with a practised motion of dull acceptance of his situation.
With ample time to kill, he heads over to his plot, the one
thing on Earth he owns. It's his last legacy from a rich farmer grandfather who made a fortune
selling off his land for housing development when the prices were good, some thirty years
previously. With the money he made, he jetted off around the world, only to manage to die of
a heart attack upon reaching Barbados where he had bought his retirement home.
And as it goes, the man's money later evaporated amongst his
descendants, who mainly frittered it away on easy living and badly thought out investments
which yielded nothing. Joseph's uncle eventually got the remnants of the farmland and intended
to build a house on it, but as it goes, he died suddenly, eight years ago, before he could do
anything at all with it. After all that, at the bottom of this food chain of diminishing
returns, sits Joseph and his mother. She got the last of the cash--just enough to allow her
to scrape by--and he got this parcel of land. It was real valuable.
It was his.
and yes, he could sell it, but that would miss the point. It
was his little piece of mother earth and for now, he wanted it just the way it was. His last
and only luxury.
It was about two acres in total, down by the dingy housing
estate which occupied the rest of his ancestral farmland heritage, a grubby, long-neglected
plot which looked like a vast abandoned allotment and which was a haven for kids
doing drugs and for fly tippers everywhere. Yet amidst the neglect and chaos,
it yielded a deep peace to Joseph, who liked to roam around amongst its scrub and
thorny bushes for hours in the afternoon, almost every day. It was where he came
to be alone and escape from the comical absurdities of the life lived by those--like
himself--who had fallen out of the bottom of society and had no way to clamber
back in.
Inside his little garden, he sits on an old garden lounger--dumped
by a local some years ago--hidden amongst the trees, content to rest easy in his land. Summer
sun soothes a lullaby and he sleeps, amidst the brambles and the crazy natural decay of suburbia.
Tumbling thoughts in a rushing torrent, the glacial roar of the
pre-sleep mind, his brain yanked out of focus by the raging storms of the unconscious night
and rent asunder amongst the cold, cold stars…
Later,
his mother alone with the daytime TV schedule. Cigarette burning
a slow death march in her fingers, slow curl of acrid nicotine tar, rising ghost-like towards the
worn and stained ceiling, her eyes damp spheres of calm indifference, as the soap opera unveils
before her. She barely absorbs it all, just sitting, staring. Lighting up another cigarette, and waits,
for a reason, with a sigh.
and for Joseph...
He awakes with a start to find the afternoon upon him and
the day waning. Wandering through his little jungle, he reaches a clearing in the centre of
the area, the only properly open ground in his little empire of weeds and twisted trees. In
the middle of this space is the burnt out wreck of an ancient Ford Escort, ripped and
shredded by neighbourhood kids and rusting alone as a forlorn monument to some
long-ago joyriding incident.
Maybe the sun was too harsh today, the light hurt his eyes but...
A shape emerged before him from the dirt and the long grass;
spiralling around the old car and up into the faded sky. Joseph realises a vision from the
old car, which was all the pleasures and desires of the suburbs, all the broken dreams and
faded aspirations of the lives which beat and breathed in the streets around him. It was a
magnificent eulogy, a chunk of randomness which breathed of art and which screamed;
look at me and weep! This is the folly that your youth drives you to! Here is final decay
and the end of the night!
The stars would look down on this wreck and see the microcosm
of humanity embodied in its form. Their cold indifferent gaze would kiss the dull rusted metal
of the car, and know it as a cenotaph to all those who had lived and lost their minds in
its shadow.
But as a proper monument it wasn’t quite right, he reflected. No, it
needed something more. Something extra. There was a great emptiness here, which fitted into the
silence and the darkness in his mind, with rusted teeth, in a synergy of abandonment. For a moment,
the old car and his empty thoughts became a locked, twisted wreck all of their own. A distant sound
of traffic noise, a train on the south western line--and this.
And Joseph saw the shape, there amidst the weeds, amidst the
damp and decay. Like a neon grid before him, an inspirational daydream had grown from the
old car in his mind.
But
it was merely a starting point for what could be. With the beginnings
of his idea taking nebulous root in his mind, he looks around for additions to the monument.
A faraway look in eyes long faded to grey and he tackles
the passing afternoon’s opportunity with a new found artistic vigour.
* * *
It’s late.
She waited until evening, then went to the cupboard for a bottle
of wine. With a reflex motion, smooth and uncomplicated, the liquid splashed deep into the
gurgling hollow gut of the glass. The TV news is on, purring away to nobody in particular,
with its tragic dreams from a distant world.
And then,
door creaks and Joseph is home - hey mum.
She turns with relief, the loneliest part of the day is over and the
wine is warming her now. Hey love, you were a long time. What you been up to?
Oh nothing much. No joy with the jobs again.
Never mind, always tomorrow. She smiles, dinner on the
way and her rediscovered purpose cutting through the haze of alcohol and loneliness
with a background TV tattoo still nibbling at the periphery of the room. Joseph,
with a distant look in his eyes, blindly watches the flickering screen and thinks of shapes,
twisting and growing beneath the evening sky, the darkness falling amidst birdsong
and the decaying leaves. Tomorrow is all he can see. Tomorrow and the land which
is his and the form, the monument.
* * *
So it grows,
and so it went, over the course of the days that followed in
inevitable succession that summer, with
| "This is the first pyramid built in millennia and
it rises in suburbia, a supplication to the ancient cruelty of the cold, cold stars and the dead
grey sky of this town, this wilderness." |
his trips, forays into the underbrush, dredging up the
cracked remnants of civilisation and hauling them into the sunlight to add to the shape he sees
evolving before him, with avian grace and divine power. He tells his mother that he is searching
for work, always searching; but a quick run into town, a scan of the empty boards in the job
centre, the empty pages of the local press and the empty, empty faces of the people he meets,
are all he needs to bring home the futility of his quest. With a shrug and a sigh he returns to the
wasteland, where the twisting lines evermore beckon him back to his task.
Here and only here is the harmony that he seeks, in this place,
as he works on the building effort.
With mind pulled tight into a buzzing point of focus, he hunts
out the bricks for his building. every discarded item is an element of his medium -
A washing machine is hauled into place against the broken
rear bumper of the car and on it is placed an old chair, a wrecked cooker, a fridge, a
bicycle missing a wheel, a busted sofa, two mattresses, a bedframe, and the remains
of a wardrobe. These items are stacked along the neon vibrant lines defining the
shapes he sees in the summer afternoon, when traffic noise and the indecipherable
hollering of local youths are muted by the gentle heat and dusty foliage of the trees
around his plot.
...and his mother just sits, alone in the afternoon, thoughts
lazily drifting back to the people she knew back when people mattered to her and to the
things that had happened back when things happened to her; half drunk bottle of wine
and innumerable cigarettes arming her against the world, as she waits for Joseph’s return.
Staring, waiting...
* * *
Days pass,
weeks pass, under the shadow of the cold eternal
stars. Joseph’s ardour intensifies as his monument grows and evolves.
As time goes by, he has to walk more and more beyond the
boundaries of his land to find the pieces of the puzzle, the girders, stays, blocks, beams,
bolts and panels of his construct. He raids gardens, tips, wasteland, streets, garages and
alleyways, for discarded pieces of the 21st century dream, for abandoned relics of the
new age, the junk culture age. He forages like an ancient hunter, taking what is already
lost, what is already gone from the lives of the people who have moved beyond, to
new items, new relics, new memories.
A pair of old car doors and another fridge, along with half a
table, old TV, boxes of cans, bottles, rusted chassis sections, wheels, tyres and another sofa,
piled up on top of all the rest, every piece stacked precisely as Joseph’s vision dictates. All
interlocking, supporting each other, forming the monument which was only half realised before.
Now the shape is beginning to assume reality, crawling into the future from behind his lazy
smile to become the grid, the artwork, the pattern of his vision.
...and the world turns
...and she watches the TV without seeing, drifting idly through
the week, with a steady glass by her side. The occasional household task, the odd shopping
expedition and the rest is silence. Hair going grey, lines expanding their empire across her face,
cigarette burning slowly away between her fingers.
Joseph is out longer and longer these days. She worries
sometimes, but he is an adult after all and his world is his own. He doesn’t seem to
have any luck finding work--so hard to understand, as he’s such a bright boy, with
a degree and everything, which is more than most people got in my day - but now
everyone has a degree and nobody will employ young men if they are sensitive,
intelligent, fragile. The hot breath of the cigarette kills another minute as she thinks
of Joseph, always of Joseph. The shopping sits in its bag in the kitchen as she watches
the gameshow and wonders where Joseph is today, where he is looking and what
he is finding out there in the world...
His world.
The man at the job centre looks at him wearily. Joseph
has barely walked in before he is told - sorry, no work for you today. How long has
it been? The man looks like his eyes are carved from coal, with deadness and disease
behind the puffy lids and sagging flash. Joseph swiftly leaves behind the piles of
inappropriate jobs and disinterested employment prospects and heads to his
magnificent work in the land he has been granted by history.
It rises like a great behemoth between the trees and the scrub -
Built in methodical correctness, the structure has grown to fit
every line and architectural blueprint of his imagination, towering up to the tops of the trees on
his ancestral land, it sits, brooding and magnificent; the cast off relics of the age welded to a
new purpose, a new template and a new vision. Every element neatly supporting every other,
all precisely knowing their role in the greater form.
The evening has arrived again, the sky is orange dusty pink
and gold in the haze. Under this sky sits the monument, like an ancient temple platform,
a Mexican pyramid of the Sun, where sacrifices and prayers are offered to ancient,
obscene gods, or memories are woven into the fabric of the world with sweat and blood.
He looks upon it with wonder, as if he had no part in its creation.
It screams of life, formed from the bones of life. Like a mausoleum to all that the people of
the town have striven for. He pushes the final sections (broken window frame, record player,
corrugated iron sheeting and old timber) into place and the lines flashing behind his dusty eyes
are sated, filled, ended.
He realises it is done.
...and she opens another bottle of wine, her third tonight and she wonders
where he is, what he will become, will he ever manage to achieve the things she wants for him? The
cigarette is comfort as the wine dulls fatigue and regret into a fug of TV, TV, TV. Here there is nothing
but the silicone whispers of the artificial age and her memories are dust within it.
Once, once upon a time,
there was a man. A family, a purpose. Joseph’s existence serves to
remind her of this purpose, but her agony at her impotent inability to help him in his search, his
desires and his dreams, crush her more and more, as the world turns ever onward, under the
cold, hard diamond drill-bit torture of the dead-sky stars...
* * *
It is night now
It is night and the task is done. His pyramid rises before him into
the streetlamp glow of the suburban sky. A palace of junk, a cathedral of discarded remnants
of the world. The old car now entombed by a mound of old beds, furniture, dead electrical
appliances, bicycle and car components, cans, bottles and trash, formed and locked around the
glowing gridlines of his revelation. Here lies society…
Trapped in the dusk
In the rubbish
In the agony of waste and loss.
He alone can see it and he alone was ready to forge it into this temple
and this mausoleum. Here is the end of time, the end of daylight and the end of the lie. This is
his statement to the world which has discarded him so readily--and it says beware, for I am
not like you and I can change this if I want to. This is the first pyramid built in millennia and
it rises in suburbia, a supplication to the ancient cruelty of the cold, cold stars and the dead
grey sky of this town, this wilderness.
It is a burial mound for false promises.
A sacrifice to the Earth.
A liberation of spirit long crushed.
It is magnificent.
On the very top of the tree-high pyramid of junk, is an old bedframe,
discarded by some anonymous local patron. It is Joseph’s bed now, the throne on top of his palace.
Carefully, he begins to climb up the pyramid, up his pile of lost memories,
putting his feet in predetermined steps on the slope, to reach the pinnacle, from where he can gaze
out over the town. Somewhere to the North, is a little office, where a man will tell him tomorrow that
there are no jobs available for people with his skill-set. Somewhere to the East, his mother sits alone
in her living room, asleep with her fourth bottle of wine half-drunk at her side.
Somewhere to the West, the sun has set over the suburbs.
He has ascended and the work is done. Joseph lies back on the old bed,
at the top of his pyramid, calmly, indifferently, looking up at the cold, dead, irrelevant stars.
* * *
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