Culture . 02/29/2008 12:46 PM . Christopher Newgent

So, I’m thumbing through a copy of Camus’s The Stranger that I picked up at the local used book store because as I read the very first line, “Maman died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know,” I suddenly felt I could relate to something – my own mother having passed a few years ago, and my own finding out taking similar form: through a voicemail left by my mother’s boyfriend while I sat taking an exam in my Latin class. I’m sure ironies could be expounded upon concerning my relating to a book generally concerned with someone who is a stranger or “outsider” in some translations. But, that’s not what I’m after here.

No, right now, I’m trying to impress you. I’m trying to do this while simultaneously making you think, “I could know this guy. We have something in common.” Now that you know I read works by French existentialists and have taken courses in a lofty, long-dead language, which although is impressive (maybe, if you’re into that sort of thing), I must tell you, I have gas sometimes (a lot), and I use Pantene Pro-V shampoo. It leaves my hair silky, with a smooth sheen that is noticeable without being overbearing. I am not getting paid to say this.

See? If I notice you’re getting bored of my rambling on Derrida and post-modernism, I can quickly interject a quick fart joke into the mix. I’m a true Renaissance man. Although, I don’t know how to ride a unicycle. Or, juggle, really. But, I can blow bubbles off my tongue. Does that count?

I hope so, because mainly, we want to relate. Something deep in us makes us want to connect, right? Having moved to a relatively new city after college, I’ve locked on to this notion, thought, idea, ontological question, what have you. I look for it everywhere. I have my theories. Like, for instance, did you know that on a sub-atomic level, we are mostly space? Matter is more space than substance. We walk around, making our days, running our errands, working our jobs, and we are wide open prairies, we are open skies, we are long roads and horizons.

And maybe this is the space we always hear about, that space everyone is trying to fill with faiths or moneys or bombs. Or ideas, maybe. Ideas about what that space is.

So, I’m driving down 86th street in my new hometown, and I’m thinking these thoughts, and I watch the couple in the car next to me at the streetlight, and I see how she moves her hand to the back of his head, and gives him a light scratching, and maybe I stare too long, and they notice me. But, I can’t stop thinking about the way she was scratching his head, and then I smile and wave, and they don’t seem as happy that I’ve encroached on their drive as I am. The light turns green. I drive home, and curl up with my new copy of Camus.

Yes. I said, “curl up” with a book. Yes. I’m a man. No. I don’t like long walks on beaches. The sand gets in everything, mainly my eyes.

Outside my window, I watch birds in flocks returning back to my humble state of Indiana, and I’m not so far from the friends I’ve always known, but we are still too far from each other now to call and simply go to dinner or meet at our local hole for a drink. There are hours involved to drive between us, or children that need watching, or sleep to be had for jobs the next day, or reports to be written for classes no one cares about.

I’ve not been in the city long—away from my friends, away from the care-free glory of Ramen breakfasts and late-night bender conversations on Marxism (pronounced “Markshishm” if it’s been a particularly barley-rich bender). The longer I’m out of college, the more I realize how few people outside the English building read existentialist novels, or contemporary poetry.

But, I’m sure, I’m almost positive, that there is something in the way she scratched his head, in the way the birds are returning early this year, in the way you save a voicemail that changes everything you knew about life, in the way that you save anything at all.

Christopher Newgent lives as a writer in Indianapolis. His work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry East, and other journals.


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