Cary Tennis: Stories, Poems, Works in Progress

My problem is, I lack focus. Like way back in high school too. Drifting mind, can’t sit still, rather smoke pot in the parking lot, six of us in a VW bug in the ridiculous Fort Lauderdale sun, sure beats Jane Austin I thought, I just couldn’t focus. Also I can’t finish stuff. Accordingly, wrote the book on finishing stuff, with Danelle Morton, Finishing School, still can’t finish stuff. Lead workshops telling people how to finish stuff but can I finish anything? Sheesh. Golly! ... and etc. ... a freeform post, fun to listen to, gets me out of a jam deadline-wise!--ct

When Norma came out she said, "Guess who gave me the vaccine?" "Who?" I said. "The mayor?" "No," she said. "A guy in a gorilla suit?" "No," she said. "Then who? Who gave you the vaccine?" "The man who gave me my vaccine was the doctor who saved your life!" "No!" "Yes!" "Darn," I said. "I wish you had gotten his name." We drove a ways and I said, "Look. It's not too late to go back and get his name. I want to thank him for saving my life." I wanted to thank the surgeons, too. I understand that in my anesthetic-induced psychotic delirium I gave the surgeons kind of a hard time. For which I am sorry. "You think?" "Yes. We must go back. Must get his name. I want to thank him. I am parking."

"Leaving San Francisco" is a chapter in a longer book I've been working on for far too long called "The Stones of Le Santucce," about how a trip by train from Orvieto to Milan in 1952 starts a cascade of events that transform a family, a town and a medieval convent. In this episode, the author and his wife decide to sell their San Francisco house and move to Castiglion Fiorentino, home of the Convent of Le Santucce, now rebuilt into a magnificent guest residence.

The Traveler, or, Meditations of a Company Man, illuminates the inner life of an assassin trained as a child in the art of murder and employed by a shadowy company whose national allegiances are forever cloaked in mystery. The short pieces that make up The Traveler weave in and out of time in an organic pattern more akin to music than to narrative fiction. Its pleasures lie in the joy of words heard and felt for their own particular, undefinable magic.

The Traveler, or, Meditations of a Company Man, illuminates the inner life of an assassin trained as a child in the art of murder and employed by a shadowy company whose national allegiances are forever cloaked in mystery. The short pieces that make up The Traveler weave in and out of time in an organic pattern more akin to music than to narrative fiction. Its pleasures lie in the joy of words heard and felt for their own particular, undefinable magic.

The Traveler, or, Meditations of a Company Man, illuminates the inner life of an assassin trained as a child in the art of murder and employed by a shadowy company whose national allegiances are forever cloaked in mystery. The short pieces that make up The Traveler weave in and out of time in an organic pattern more akin to music than to narrative fiction. Its pleasures lie in the joy of words heard and felt for their own particular, undefinable magic.

The Traveler, or, Meditations of a Company Man, illuminates the inner life of an assassin trained as a child in the art of murder and employed by a shadowy company whose national allegiances are forever cloaked in mystery. The short pieces that make up The Traveler weave in and out of time in an organic pattern more akin to music than to narrative fiction. Its pleasures lie in the joy of words heard and felt for their own particular, undefinable magic.

The Traveler, or, Meditations of a Company Man, illuminates the inner life of an assassin trained as a child in the art of murder and employed by a shadowy company whose national allegiances are forever cloaked in mystery. The short pieces that make up The Traveler weave in and out of time in an organic pattern more akin to music than to narrative fiction. Its pleasures lie in the joy of words heard and felt for their own particular, undefinable magic.

The Traveler, or, Meditations of a Company Man, illuminates the inner life of an assassin trained as a child in the art of murder and employed by a shadowy company whose national allegiances are forever cloaked in mystery. The short pieces that make up The Traveler weave in and out of time in an organic pattern more akin to music than to narrative fiction. Its pleasures lie in the joy of words heard and felt for their own particular, undefinable magic.

We went up high in the mountains where it was quiet. There was an unused cabin up there, off the grid, not on Google maps, strategically hidden from the satellite scans, with no cellular footprint, having been lead-shielded from the start, no phones ever used up there, no trace of anything, just our analog trail, our knowing that it was up there, and we went up there, just a few of us, after the leader died, because it had gotten so crazy at the end we really started to lose it. Us. We who were trained to maintain at any cost, we’d started cracking. Each of us knew it. Each of us knew, in his own way, that he was showing damage, that all we knew about PSYOPS, about torture techniques and the manifold ways of disordering even the most resilient and resistant psyche, was of no help here. It surprised us. It surprised us and humbled us. We had thought we were prepared.

The room of my dry hiding away has a window onto snow, the man who I am looks out on it from a chair by a table, He feels lucky like he won at blackjack but he hears a warning The messenger’s knock, the hotel worker, the hamper of laundry

There is a sign in the mess hall that says, “You are being watched.” We laugh about it because we have never known anything else, not since we were babies left alone perhaps for a few hours. I have glimpses now and then of that early me, the one before the training, before the constant surveillance, before the surrendering of all self to the company. It feels alien to recall that before I stood before the leadership and swore my oath to the company, I was a raw embryo, ambitious to exceed its limits and dependency, to leave its home and fall to the earth somewhere, not knowing where, just eager to be expelled from that omnipresent heartbeat and amniotic embryonic sea of swishing sounds. And then after the birth a sense of betrayal. But in between the birth and the betrayal was a blissful period of napping in a bassinet and chewing everything, of suckling and being cooed at, of being wooed and tossed into the air and swaddled and transported always like a little king in my own vehicle pushed by slave-like parents. After the betrayal of course I was reshaped, like a strip of leather into the usefulness of a handbag, or a shoe for the government to wear, for the agency to travel the rocky shore upon. For I am now the thousand feet of the centipede that crawls across Europe silently looking for defectors. I am the eyes of a brutal but smiling nation. I am the knife of the silent predator seeking out infidels among the chosen. So here I am. Being watched always. Like a performer, I match my pantomimes to the camera angle most suited to my physique. I clean my gun in clear view of the omnipresent surveillance camera. But cameras are the least of it nowadays. We’ve all had the implant though everyone pretends we haven’t. We all pretend we’ve never heard of such a thing, that no one would allow such a thing, that even we in the academy have certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and I can hear the commander already laughing with joy at our naive faith in the catechism of democracy. I only half-believe these things about democracy, but I do believe them. I can’t get much farther with such a belief because I’ve seen the success of the authoritarians with their lockdowns and their contact tracing, how no one bats an eye when told to give their contacts, their whereabouts, their most intimate details. I imagine that more than one marriage is faltering as the chain of infections includes mistresses, assignations, faltering drunken kisses outside a bar at closing time, a tumble in the backseat of a roadster, the river of drunken passion running through a man’s town, sweeping decency and caution away like oxen and lumber in a mud flow. So I don’t care. They know everything about me. Whatever dignity I had I’ve handed over with my shaving kit and my name. I’m a happy cypher now, cleaning my rifle and reciting Rilke, hoping for a chess game I’ll strategically lose, all the while seeing the checkmate like a crime photograph developing in a tray.

Every once in a while a curious feeling would come over me, while walking in the woods that bordered the inn, or sitting in my room doing paperwork. People don’t realize how much paperwork is involved in a job like this. They think it’s all shooting people and running through the woods with dogs chasing you, but that’s only a small part of it. We also gather intelligence, naturally, because of the incidents we witness and the conversations we are privy to, so when I would rather be relaxing solving chess problems or reading a novel or (lately, I guess my journal writing has led to this) composing poems—instead of those things, I am often filling out reports. We also are not profligate with our spending. There must be controls on expenditures. So for instance I might be hankering after a new rifle sight, or a listening device said to be superior to anything on the market, but I have to consider the cost, as most such work-related expenses are covered by the company. Anyway, I’ll be sitting there, or walking, and a feeling will come over me that I am an ancient being, a thousand years old say, and a feeling of weariness with the world, but also a sense of peace, as if this has all happened many times before and will continue to happen many times in the future. In fact, in such a state, and it only lasts for a few seconds, or sometimes up to two minutes, but during that state nothing matters; it is as though I’ve left my body and am viewing everything from a point just to the right of my head. I can see myself, I can hear the birds in the forest, I can hear crowd noises. That’s the other thing, when this happens, I seem to be everywhere in the world simultaneously, not just walking in the forest or sitting in my room but also driving in a jeep across the African desert and wandering in an Istanbul bazaar, sitting in Yankee Stadium watching a game, and paddling a canoe across a lake, all pleasant activities that have nothing to do with where I am, or where I think I am, and what I think is actually happening. I cherish those moments. There is no way to plan for them or produce them artificially. I’ve tried meditating, prayer, duplicating routes—you know, I followed this route through the forest at this time of day and had that experience, can I duplicate it in that way? Nothing seems to work. It seems rather that I occasionally fall into some other dimension where time is simultaneous. And in that world I am wise! In my day-to-day life that is that last thing people would say of me. They would say I am efficient, kind, dependable, and sometimes brave. But not wise. That doesn’t go with my outfit. But when these otherworldly experiences occur, I feel as if I see the history of the world and understand it both in detail and with a kind of large and generous compassion. And then it stops and I am back in my room, filling out an expense report, or walking through the woods with my camera. I dislike the return. I would like to go permanently to that other world where I do not exist as distinct from others, where the furniture in my room is nothing but waves of energy, where the boundaries between my body and the air are not so distinct, but a feeling of permeability suffuses everything. I would like to be at peace, and in these moments of strange dissolving of what I take to be my being, where I cease to exist as an individual and am more like a disembodied presence, I am at peace. But the moments never last. I have come to accept that. They last only long enough to remind me that this is not all that there is, that my activities which I vainly consider so important to the balance of world power, that my expertise, it is all like the chirping of a bird on a wire, lost in the wind coming off the ocean, an atmospheric noise, something disregarded by surfers heading to the beach and a family eating a picnic lunch on a blanket spread out among the dunes.