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    Jonas in Frames: an epic
    Jonas in Frames: an epic
    Jonas in Frames: an epic
    Ebook171 pages2 hours

    Jonas in Frames: an epic

    By Chris Hutchinson

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    Jonas in Frames is [choose one]: A) a series of loosely connected narrative fragments written in poetic prose; B) a maze of postcard stories bursting with literary in-jokes; C) a delicate sequence of prose poems interspersed with narrative interludes; or D) haunted by the ghost of Samuel Beckett. In its esoteric glimpse into the disassociated, Jonas in Frames contorts time and space. Rootless, nostalgic, socially inept, Jonas is the modern questless hero, an exemplar of generational anxiety eternally on the brink of pitching into a graveyard spin. A volatile amalgamation of identity crisis, fitful employment, and fanciful poetic imaginings delivers Jonas from sterile offices to anarchist squats, from skull-shattering saloons to faux-edgy hipstervilles and back again to capital-N Nowhere. As Jonas navigates an onslaught of geographical, mental, and temporal turbulence, his lives collide, splinter, and too often shatter. Jonas in Frames does and does not cohere. Its sense is clandestine. Its form is fractal.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGoose Lane Editions
    Release dateMay 6, 2014
    ISBN9780864925794
    Jonas in Frames: an epic
    Author

    Chris Hutchinson

    Christopher Hutchinson, a young artist and Connecticut native, ran for Congress as a socialist in 2010.

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      Book preview

      Jonas in Frames - Chris Hutchinson

      Jonas in Frames

      Also by the author:

      A Brief History of the Short-lived

      Other People’s Lives

      Unfamiliar Weather

      Copyright © 2014 by Chris Hutchinson.

      All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

      Edited by Evie Christie.

      Cover and page design by Chris Tompkins.

      On the front cover: Business Superman photo detail bizior photography,

      www.bizior.com; Urban Teenager photo detail www.istockphoto.com; Inquisitive photo detail www.sxc.hu; Grungy Paper www.deviantart.com. On the back cover: Banana photo www.sxc.hu.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Hutchinson, Chris, 1972-, author

      Jonas in frames : an epic / Chris Hutchinson.

      Novel in poetic form.

      Issued in print and electronic formats.

      ISBN 978-0-86492-435-3 (pbk.). — ISBN 978-0-86492-579-4 (epub)

      I. Title.

      PS8615.U823J65 2014          C813’.6        C2013-907306-X

                                                                   C2013-907307-8

      Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture.

      Goose Lane Editions

      500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

      Fredericton, New Brunswick

      CANADA E3B 5X4

      www.gooselane.com

      Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst.

      — Aristotle

      ¹

      Ah! is there one who ever has been young,

      Nor needs a monitory voice to tame

      The pride of virtue, and of intellect?

      And is there one, the wisest and the best

      Of all mankind, who does not sometimes wish

      For things which cannot be, who would not give,

      If so he might, to duty and to truth

      The eagerness of infantine desire?

      — William Wordsworth

      ²

      The bottom of the sea is cruel.

      — Hart Crane

      ³

      CONTENTS

      Prologue

      ONE

      Shivers and Shakes

      Lab Notes

      Jonas in Paroxysms

      The Psychiatrist’s Office

      Lab Notes

      Jail

      Bananas

      Lab Notes

      The Desert

      Mercer

      Scar

      Lab Notes

      The Pigeon

      TWO

      New York

      Frank’s Place

      Lab Notes

      Relationship

      Lab Notes

      Too Far North

      Lab Notes

      One Year Drifting Backwards and Forwards through Time

      Factotum

      Lab Notes

      Back in the City of Broken Glass

      Lab Notes

      Gymnastics

      THREE

      Mr. Sock

      Self-Diagnosis

      In the Freezing Rain

      Lab Notes

      All You Get

      More Bad News

      Lab Notes

      Cab Ride

      Forgetting

      The Good Life

      Lab Notes

      Jonas in Frames

      Fuck It

      The Ferry to the Kingdom of the Afterlife

      Lab Notes

      Back on Land

      These Happy Carefree Days

      Smack

      Village Life Nostalgia

      Lab Notes

      Notes for a Poem (Revised as a Flashback)

      The Heron

      Lab Notes: Addendum

      Epilogue

      Acknowledgements

      Prologue

      It is not an extraordinary existence at the corner of West Twelfth Street and Nowhere. How can he justify the air moving through his lungs, the blood through his heart, the sweat through his pores?

      Jonas lives in a small ground-level apartment, which wicks the summer’s late afternoon sun through the living room window. Dusky heat spills over a frayed floral brocade sofa and floods across the length of the unvarnished hardwood floor.

      A Leo, twenty-nine as of today, he is average looking and of medium build — though he sometimes worries that his head is too big for his body, and dreams of one day owning a blue felt fedora that actually fits. He’s got a real melon, a planetoid, a brain with a veritable mind of its own, and an imagination that won’t quit. His sofa, he sees, is fizzing with dust motes — punctuation marks of his life’s invisible script!

      To beat the heat and to celebrate the evening, Jonas drinks Chinese cooking wine with ice at his kitchen’s bar counter. He wishes Helen of Troy were here, or Cleopatra, or a young Jane Fonda. He wishes he wouldn’t wish so much, or at least wish for practical things like stocks or government bonds. But money is the obsession of people other than himself — the word career, an echo from a faraway universe, from a time before the cursèd deluge known as the Devil’s Water.

      He peels the label away from the bottle, revealing a window of dark glass.

      Bananas, he read somewhere, contain a natural antidepressant, their soft flesh a materialized form of sunlight. So he tries to remember to mash half of one into his Corn Flakes each morning, but too often he forgets. His freezer, subsequently, has become a morgue for black bananas he can’t bring himself to discard.

      So so so…cracking another ice cube into his glass, he fills the tray’s vacant squares with water then tops up his wine. He’s not sad, just resigned to his solitude and poverty, and the steady purr of traffic along Twelfth Street lulls him into a feeling of detached security as night comes on . . .

      A siren cuts the air, warping into the far distance to indicate yet another otherworldly emergency. Someone’s chamomile tea-drinking aunt must have fallen asleep while crocheting, and her menthol cigarette, dropping from her ashtray into a cardboard box full of newly made doilies, must have set the whole house ablaze.

      Or someone’s cousin must have gone off his meds and wandered into traffic thinking the oncoming headlights were the welcoming eyes of ethereal beings.

      Or someone’s ex-husband’s lone journey through time must have ended with manuscript pages ripped into shreds and tossed like so many suicide notes over the guardrail of the Lions Gate Bridge.

      Jonas thinks: Disasters surround me! Seas of confusion! He refills his glass, sets sail to swelling breakers — but forgets to tie himself to the mast . . .

      The moon comes up full and squints through the branches and heart-shaped leaves of the chestnut. Now is the hour when silence unfolds its want ad for remembrance, when Jonas must resist punishing himself for everything he’s either never attempted, or tried and failed at.

      His father used to shout at him, "name one thing you can do, one thing that’s useful, one thing you’re good at!" Then his teachers joined in, his gurus, his guides, and his friends.

      The Voice in his head wants to speak, taunting him with the line: In the Kingdom of the Afterlife, nothing’s ironic —which he thinks to write down, but doesn’t. Not yet.

      Instead he swims out to his sofa, now floating in moonlight, where the dust motes have turned to vibrating stars. Draining his glass, then stretching out and closing his eyes, he begins: It is not an extraordinary existence at the corner of West Twelfth Street and Nowhere . . .

      [Here several pages have been lost.]

      Shivers and Shakes

      Jonas, what is happening to you? What is this hammering in the blood, this bullet ricocheting through your brain, this force that seizes and shakes you by the limbs? Your thoughts are all Celtic knots, and your stomach quakes. Perhaps it was something poisonous you drank?

      It’s as if you are freezing, these tremors rippling through your flesh wanting to beat warmth back into your blood. And your skin is cold — the surface of your body feels like the surface of a mirror — while your insides burn and roil.

      It started like this: you were dozing in half sleep, in the spotlight of your mind, and haunted by the astringent scent of silver polish which seemed to be emanating from your own breath. At the window two moths fluttering around the moon’s reflected light were casting crazy shadows across the wall above the foot of your bed, and as you watched them morph into trembling hands you felt a bolus of sorrow welling up behind your solar plexus, then moving through your esophagus and into your throat.

      The prospect of tears panicked you — it had been years since you wept — until you heard the disembodied counsel of that well-meaning presence, not the Voice, but a feminine whisper soothing with assurances: go ahead, laisse-toi aller, you’ll feel better soon, voilà un gentil garçon, tiens, tiens, mon amour, there you are… You hadn’t thought to argue with or resist this incorporeal self, though maybe you should have. Maybe if you hadn’t relinquished your strength, if you hadn’t floated in that brief moment of acquiescence, then those first stumbling sobs wouldn’t have pitched you into this full-throttled seizure.

      Your crying feels like dying. A pitiless power attends the storms of electrons embodied in the mystery of your nerves. O Heavenly Muse, what fun! Maybe you have epilepsy, or cerebral palsy? Is this how your story ends, having never begun? You are under attack from invisible enemies. Something has short-circuited, the movie of your life all jitter, stutter, and skip. Ganglions gone gaga, you shudder, twitch, blink hot tears. Enslaved to Saint Vitus. Body in revolt. Teeth clenched. Paroxysms . . .

      Lab Notes

      Our subject in question, Subject X, though volatile and often in flux, has yet to transgress the parameters we have set. In fact, Subject X’s squirming and surging and struggling against our boundaries, as well as his secret wish for a FTW bicep tattoo, only serves to reinforce said boundaries (engineered to approximate muscle tissue, to grow stronger through the resistance of force) and to weaken the subject’s own strength over time. This is a positive result. As expected, the more virulent the mutation, the more rigidly it is contained.

      Jonas in Paroxysms

      On Vancouver Island, in grade three, Jonas marries his rosy-cheeked sweetheart, Gretchen Snyder, between the rows of bike racks beside the Big Hill. This is Friday, after school. (Yes, Jonas, sometimes life is grand!)

      He rides home at top speed, the peeling paint on his BMX bike’s rusty handlebars vibrating in the wind. Perhaps he even feels the hair follicles on his arms twitching in the rush of air, fluttering through every golden superlative.

      On Monday, at morning recess, Jonas discovers Gretchen pushing Scott Gamble up against the Kissing Wall behind the gym. Life is over then. Something breaks and slips loose like a chain off a bike on a downhill ride. Jonas loses focus, swerves, and falls through a Jonas-shaped hole in the world . . .

      There is the acrid taste of failure, a confusion of depth, the jewelled eyes of minnows, the caressing seaweed strands where breakers wing to shore, and the sun above, a phosphorescent lure.

      Next, the Blue Heron is the neck tattoo of choice of the clownish art-school dropouts whose figures sift the air made soft as flakes of gold in the last rays of sun on Saint-Laurent Boulevard. They are trying to ignore a furrow-browed man who shakes coins inside his cup. It is the remnants of himself that he is rattling,

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