PUSH OR PULL?

Narko woke up at one o’clock in the afternoon and quickly ran through his head the tasks he had for the day but having planned nothing he went back to sleep. An hour later he woke up again and got out of bed this time because he was itching to brush his teeth. He used the washroom, then he ate a limp banana that looked roasted by its peel.

He opened his laptop and logged onto his chess.com account and played a few games of chess. He lost eight and won three. He decided to stop as he had lost four in a row and was frustrated at the other players for having memorized all sorts of tricks and tactics and being nowhere near him in talent and intellect.

‘All they do is memorize and plan and kill the game. It’s dry, pathetic, and destroys the point,’ Narko thought.     

Then he launched a first-person shooting game and played that for a while, but eventually became bored of dying and respawning and didn’t want to live such ephemeral lives. He snickered when he lost games and told himself it’s quite useless anyway, and all the while he felt dreadful and more emotionally vested in the games, and told himself he wasn’t, and as a consequence – though he wouldn’t admit this – he felt like a water bubble about to burst.

He slammed his laptop shut,

(No, I closed it gently, why would I slam it?)

and lay down.

Narko could not sleep because he had woken up three hours ago and had slept more than eleven before those three. So, he lay in bed thinking what he could do.

He thought about studying – he was a high school student – but immediately pushed away such dirty ideas. It was a Saturday, and he was at home and had to find something in which he could invest his time. He got out of bed for the third time that day, restless, and laced up his basketball shoes, which were shining like Jordan’s head because he had purchased them a week prior and had not worn them since.

The court was empty. He spanked rather than dribbled the ball and tried shots. The ball would faint as it left his hands, and the arc was flat, and whenever he missed a shot – which was the most likely result – he would fetch the ball himself. Then he sat on a bench and drank water and waited for other players to arrive. Awhile later a guy came and jerked his head in greeting to Narko and Narko promptly lifted his eyebrows, and then the new guy started dribbling the ball.

It looked beautiful to Narko. There was rightness to the basketball in his hands. His arms were long, and hands were big, and he snaked the ball between his legs and behind him, and Narko was hypnotized. Then he made elegant shots with form to them and made almost all.

“Hey!” he said.

“Yes?” said Narko.

“Game to eleven?”

“Okay.”

Narko was tortured to eleven as he fumbled with the ball and was paralyzed and lost pieces of his soul. He fell once as the guy charged at him, who was quite muscular, and even called a foul which annoyed Narko.

“Score?” asked Narko, after a certain bucket.

“Oh, that was it. Let’s play again?”

Narko declined and took his things and went back home.

‘It’s not for me…’ he thought as he unlaced his shoes for the first and possibly last time. The situation was clear to him. Short, not particularly athletic, and having never played the game as a child – as he was too old now – there was no future for him in it.

Tall guys with long fingers and arms, and rocks for a stomach belonged on the basketball court. He had tried to play, hadn’t he? He didn’t need to keep playing and work at the game because such a pursuit would involve careful planning and pointed effort, which would mean that the pursuit was unnatural to him in the first place. 

He thought of the guy on the court, and how he looked right with the ball, the way the moon looks right with the stars garnishing it, or how a sunflower looks graceful looking towards the sun rather than shrinking away from it. He was a blue whale sitting on a chicken egg, a lion eating an apple, a flying octopus, a smiling spider, a thin teddy bear, a king starving to death.

He pondered such truths in the shower, and then he stepped out and dressed. He downloaded a music sheet from the internet as now was the time to play piano.

This piano, or rather a keyboard, Narko had purchased a month ago, and by now it infuriated him.

It had started out very well for him. One day, not a week after he had started playing, his mother came up to listen. She had a laundry basket in her hand and was on her way out to hang the clothes to dry.

“That sounds wonderful!” she said.

“I know. I’m a natural.” Narko said.

“That’s really, really good! Who taught you?”

“No one.”

“Come on, tell me.”

“Beethoven.”

“Hah! Let me try.”

“What?”

“I’ll try. Scoot.”

Then Narko got up and his mother sat down with an extremely vertical back and was able to play as good as him.

“Oh! Look! You must’ve gotten it from me! You know when I was your age, I took music classes for a bit, and can you guess which instrument I learned? Yes! But I gave it up after some time, I don’t really remember why…” said his mother, then thoughtfully got up and went out with the laundry basket, still thinking about why she had stopped playing.

But Narko understood that neither of them knew how to play well, and the piano sounded good just because the instrument was naturally melodious, and it sounded alright if you pressed the keys in a reasonable order.

The following days he had tried downloading music sheets and learning how to read sheet music, but falling back on his earlier theory of a natural disposition to playing piano well, being a pre-requisite for it to be worth his time, his practice sessions became more erratic and he only used the heavy and sad keys to whimper out his pain.

Presently, he was forcing himself through the piano session and was irritated at everything around him. He stopped playing and went back to his room, then had dinner, then he slept.

***

Then he tried his hand at all sorts of sports – despite his own admission that he wasn’t particularly athletic. At least if it felt correct and the act in itself was effortless, it would be his calling.

So, he tried cycling, because that felt right. Then one day while he was cycling, he thought, but who doesn’t find cycling natural? You get on the bike and pedal on and on, and when you get off the saddle you march away to your activities, but never realize that you were maintaining a delicate balance the whole time.  

This new realization – of many possible callings being natural to everyone – made him sad. Right away so many options were gone. For instance, Narko loved eating, and was thinking about becoming a food critic. But since everyone liked to eat, this was out. So was becoming a film critic, or a reader at a publisher.

As everyone was comfortable indulging in those things, you needed to develop complementary skills to actually do something in such fields, and these other skills were, unfortunately, not fun, and therefore did not conform to his ideology. A reader at a publisher had to not just read and drink coffee, but they had to edit and analyze and stop people who plagiarize and keep turning pages until reading lost all meaning. If you were a film critic you had to describe exactly, exactly and with no breathing room, what you liked in the movie and why, and you had to botch the whole thing up and make it impure by thought.

There needed to be something that drove him mad at the first touch or feel of the thing. It only had to be done if it needn’t be done by him at all, but instead done to him by the craft.

He tried table tennis, continuing to expand his sports expertise. That was a no at the onset because he had tried badminton before table tennis and anyone who has ever done the same knows that the racket seems too small and therefore the instrument to perform, the table tennis racket, was unnatural in his hands and useless, like chopsticks given to someone who can’t do without a spoon. 

Narko, after trying everything, sports of all kinds, art, music, writing, reading, decided that there was nothing for him. Nothing that tickled him, nothing that consoled him.

***

Narko was sitting in the stands of the football field in his school. He didn’t have any purpose in sitting there. It was lunch break and he had eaten his lunch in the cafeteria and had come out to sit and watch the players struggle through pain and trudge through the practice sessions. He saw a thin kid, shorter than him playing line-backer. What was he doing there? There was no point, he would get beaten and prodded and picked on till he rolled over and panted and died on the ground, sticky with grass and blood. So, he was sitting there, feeling quite embarrassed for the other untalented kids trying to squirm their way through the world, when he saw a few boys grouped together in a small space under the stands. He saw this when he detected some movement to his right.

Looking closer he saw that they were smoking and there was one guy who was keeping watch, and was looking every which way and once in a while he would smile and the others would smile alongside him, and they all generally felt tough and sexy which glued them together. 

After some time, another guy joined them, and he had a thermos bottle. Then he passed the bottle around and everyone took a sip and wrinkled their faces whenever they took a sip, but after the bottle seemed to be over, they were all grinning together once again.

Then the break ended, and Narko went back to his classroom.

In the evening Narko left his house, and told his mother, who happened to inconveniently come upon him as he was leaving, that he was going to run. His mother believed this as she knew Narko liked to “do many things and be multi-faceted.”

He went to a liquor store. He had money. That was the main reason he could invest so much in trying out all sorts of things.

The shopkeeper looked Narko up and down.

“Yeah?”

“Bud.”

Narko didn’t know what brand to buy but had picked at random.

“ID?”

Shit.

“I don’t have any ID on me right now.”

“Then you won’t have any beer on you either.”

“Come on, man. I’m legal.”

Narko said this with a level of familiarity that the shopkeeper didn’t seem to like.

“You’re a kid. Get out. This isn’t for you.”

It probably isn’t…it seems like most things aren’t.

“I’m no kid. Here’s the money.”

Narko took out his wallet and took out tight notes. The shopkeeper looked at the money and then at Narko.

“How many you want?”

“Six-pack.”

“Alright…”

Then Narko took the pack, and carefully placed it in a bag he had brought, then he slinked off.

He found a park and it was getting dark, and there were no lights in the park. That was good. He opened his bag, and without taking out the carton, he pulled out one bottle from the bag and opened it. He had brought a bottle opener from home.

He took a swig. It wasn’t good. He scrunched his face and swallowed, and it burned. Then he drank extremely fast, gulp, gulp, gulp, and finished the bottle. He took out another bottle and finished it too. Another and finished. By the third bottle he was beginning to feel good and hard, and was ready to dance and brawl. But he also had to use the washroom after all the beer.

He went about, slightly awkwardly and shiftily, searching for one. Then he found it and completed his business and came out. What power! The night looked good, and the sky smelled lovely, and his head was light. He was the king of the jungle and the people were his foolish servants.

A man could live on this, he could get through this world and move on to the next one without even feeling this one.

But that lacked courage and moxie, no? No, Lacking courage was to not accept that he wasn’t worth anything. The people who were really worth something, found it out at a young age. It ran through their blood, it oozed out of them. It crazed them, dazzled them, was a pincer to sustain their heartbeat.

At this point there was nothing. Nothing but beer! What a wonderful thing, sex on the Himalayas, a picnic on the mountain of God with grape vine and music.

Narko finished the six-pack and threw away the bottles in a trash can and tottered back home.