The Silent Plea of Claude Depussy

 

I haven’t posted any of my short fiction here in a long time. In case you’re interested, there is quite a lot of such stuff down in the dusty annals of this blog. There’s links to my stories on the right-hand side of the page you’re currently on. Some of them are even almost okay, I think.

This piece was written for an RTE Radio One Programme last year, but it wasn’t accepted. There was a word limit for the submissions, and a choice of themes were offered. I like to have restrictions like that sometimes; it seems to help me write.

The theme I chose was 'The Patron Saint of...'

 

The Silent Plea of Claude Depussy

Don levels a teaspoon of instant coffee then tips a little back into the jar. He adds water from the kettle and milk from the tiny plastic bottle. He pulls his chair close to the kitchen table and draws his tablet towards him. On the radio, the classics station is playing that Sarabande it often plays. He enjoys the music but resents how all the adverts are directed towards old people. He knows he is old himself.

Out on the window cill, Claude Depussy catches Don’s eye and mews silently. Don knows that the plaintiff appeal would be completely silent even if he was outside. Claude Depussy is not a vocal cat. His mew generally signals a demand for some breakfast. But Don is behind schedule, and he knows that Claude will have already scored his meal from one of the neighbours. Any offering from Don now would be sniffed at, rejected, and disdainfully left for the swifts to argue over.

The social media forum opens easily on the tablet after a few curt swipes. Don reluctantly quit the other one after you know who bought it. Some of his friends had followed him over to this new frontier but he missed connections and the reach he had cultivated in the old place.

He opens a new message and types, “Today is the feast day of…” and then he brings up the online encyclopedia and checks.

“Saint Nicholas Owen helped the persecuted Catholic priests of England find hiding places. Arrested a final time in 1606, Nicholas Owen was tortured and killed.”

Claude Depussy paws at the window. A little rain spatters the glass.

Don copies the text and pastes it into his message. He pares the words down to fit the character limit, adds an illustration showing the unfortunate saint in extremis, then hits send. The message consolidates itself somewhere on a faraway server and then appears on his screen as a formatted fully compiled fact for the entire world to appreciate. Don sips his coffee and waits for possible responses. Claude Depussy slips off the window cill to seek shelter from the rain.

Don was never a person to frequent churches but, on the occasions of the death of each of his parents, he was required to attend. At each of the two ceremonies, the elderly priest had spoken briefly about the deceased, using snippets he had hoovered up in the porch beforehand, and had then slipped into a rather lengthy account of the life of the saint whose feast day it was. The two saints that Don heard about in this way, Ultan of Ardbraccan and Martin of Tours, both presented interesting and challenging life stories. It wasn’t long after the second funeral that Don assumed the practice of posting daily online updates about the Saint of the Day.

He quickly discovered that there wasn’t just one saint for every day. There were many. The lesser of them clamoured for attention on all the minor saint-filled days. This allowed Don to provide a different saint for most days each year so that his readership would not grow jaded. The superstars like St Patrick and St Joseph were gifted days all to themselves.

The classic station on the radio is now playing something that could hardly be defined as classic at all. Don’s coffee has petrified, a milky film forming on the surface. He refreshes the display on his tablet and scans for replies. There are never any replies, not since that man bought the other place and Don quit it on principle. He wishes principles weren’t so costly. But that’s how it seems to be with the daily saints and also with him.

Don stands up and moves stiffly to the sink where he empties the remains of the coffee. The liquid adds something miniscule to the brown stain that is already established around the plug hole. Claude Depussy reappears startlingly at the window and performs a loud silent mew to Don, to the glass pane that separates them, and to the backdrop of misty rain.

Behind him, the tablet pings. He turns and moves back to the screen.

The message is from a woman who calls herself ‘Bess_on_Wheels_67’. Her profile picture shows a fully clothed person, which is, in itself, an encouraging sign. Her text reads.

“Your daily ‘Saint of the Day’ postings bring me comfort and pleasure. xx”

She follows rapidly with another message, “You are the Patron Saint of Patron Saints.”

Don bends and types out the words, “Thank you.” His little finger hovers over the return button that will transmit the message to ‘Bess_on_Wheels_67’ and to the world.

On the window cill, Claude Depussy raises a plaintiff front paw.

Don withdraws his finger and cancels the message. He moves around the kitchen, silencing first the radio, then the tablet, returning finally to the kitchen sink. He stretches over the taps to the window, works the handles, and pushes on the sash to open it a little.

Silently, elegantly, Claude Depussy eases in.

Haunted by Katz’s Pastrami on Rye

In case you’re already wondering where I’ll end up going with this, I’ll tell you. Save you a little stress. This will be a post about Instagram. So, now you know.

Onward.

I’ve never been to Katz’s Delicatessen in Manhattan. I’ve been to Manhattan (wow) but didn’t get to go to Katz's. But both my sons did. Even better, they went together. Sam was living in Brooklyn and John was visiting him. So off they went. I believe Sam went for the Pastrami and Rye and John had the Reuben. Katz’s is a very popular attraction in New York but it also pulls off the magic trick of apparently being beloved by many of the inhabitants of that city as well as the blow-ins. Many people know of it on account of the movie ‘When Harry Met Sally’ and particularly that scene where Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal have lunch together and Rob Reiner’s Mother says, “I’ll have what she’s having.” It’s quite a brag and lots of visitors probably go there for that reason alone. But, interestingly, Katz Deli doesn’t seem to trade on that at all. Not one little bit, as far as I can see. No. They trade on their food, and more specifically their sandwiches. That’s why my sons went there. They are both ‘foodies’ and they were both keen to experience the place, the food, and the sizable bill. They both enjoyed it and when they were home at Christmas, they told me about it and it sounded great and now I want to go there and try it and if I ever get back to New York again, I believe I will.

So there.

We come towards the point. Having heard some stuff about Kat’s Deli from my sons, I must have looked it up on the internet. Or maybe my phone just heard me mention it and did the rest. Whatever the reason, and the level of justified paranoia attached to it, my Instagram account sprung into action and showed me a little video of a person ordering their sandwich at the counter in the Deli. It went on to show the guy making the sandwich and that was very interesting to me so I watched it all.

Then another, quite similar video came up, then another, then another.

Now, some months later, if you provided me with the raw materials, I feel I could whip you up a Reuben with Cheese with relative ease. I am continually bombarded with videos of Katz’s people making their sandwiches. I have seen, literally, hundreds of them sail across my Insta feed.

I guess the simple fact is this: when the Insta algorithm figures out that you might like something, it shows you lots of that thing. Lots and lots of it.

And, in all fairness, the making of a Katz sandwich makes for a pretty compelling video. A huge chunk of cured meat is landed on the cutting board and the person making the sambo trims at least one third of the thing away in very few samurai-like sweeps of the blade. The cuttings are swept unceremoniously to the floor and the remaining chunkette is trimmed into slender slices with consummate skill and then piled extravagantly onto nice bread. A swipe of mustard, a huge gelatinous blob of melted cheese, if so desired, and up it comes.

Here are three things I learned from my Katz video watching, just in case you ever get there.

Leave a tip and you get a sample of the meat on a plate while your order is being magicked-up.

Go to the further counters for less queue length. (I don’t really know how this works in reality, but it does seem to be a thing.)

There is free drinking water on tap available somewhere in the back of the deli. This is the biggest secret I know.

Of course, Instagram doesn’t just show me videos of sandwiches being made. Other forced enthusiasms present themselves regularly, very few of them welcome. I am glad that the AI Cat stuff has now receded and hate that it has been replaced by copious bearded elderly men doing chair yoga. Swings and roundabouts.

The latest Insta Thing, for me at least, is people selecting and showing their favourite books. This is odd for a number of reasons. Mostly because the people making the videos don’t seem to generally care very much about the books and also the vast majority of them seem to select from the same tiny catchment pile of novels. ‘East of Eden’, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, ‘Lonesome Dove’, ‘Crime and Punishment’, and ‘No Country for Old Men’ all keep on coming up and the people waving them around, after initially hiding the covers like they have some big secret to tell, don’t seem like people who have read these books at all. I kind of feel like I am missing something with these book recommendation videos but I don’t think it’s anything more than that these folk are trying to get hits and views and will use any device to get them, books being their current side hustle.

There are exceptions to every rule and there’s a young person called Rhia who turns up to discuss her favourite books and she is clearly passionate and clearly knows what she is talking about. Her books are riddled with little coloured bookmarks and she always seems honest about what she likes and doesn’t like. Rhia is the acceptable face of Instagram book reviews and no higher praise can I give.

Instagram is a good corner of social media, in my opinion at least. I see lots of friends there and love checking out the photos they share. But the ‘forced stuff’ is a bit too much sometimes. I makes me scared to glance at a particular ‘thing’ for fear that a plethora of clone ‘things’ will follow me around for the next six weeks.  

Fourth world problems… where would we be without them?

Up or Down?

I’ve written quite a bit about the more positive aspects of my recent waltz with GBS. I suppose I should also mention, rather obviously, that there were some less-good parts to the whole affair.

But, when I think back to my hospital and rehab stay, and when I think about writing about the worst parts rather than the best parts, I always stop myself short. Nobody needs to be hearing about all that, I reckon. Not in the level of grisly detail I could write it in. But there’s still a part of me that feels it is only right to cover it in some way. To not just leave a written record for myself that seems unremittingly positive and ‘almost-fun.’ There were definitely times when it wasn’t ‘almost-fun.’ Not even close. But, like I said, the telling of that end of things is just too sinewy and gristly to be getting too deep into.

But this week, I got to thinking that the sides of the bed might serve as a manageable metaphor for all that other unmentionable stuff. It’s a true part, it’s fairly sterile in the telling, and ultimately it seems like it started me on a path towards a ‘narrative-for-life-as-it-currently stands’ which is both positive and good.

So, let’s try that, shall we?

On my first night in the hospital, the attendant staff put up the guarding rails on both sides of my bed. This was apparently for my own safety, to stop me from falling out. But I didn’t like it very much.

Not having been in hospital for over 50 years meant there was a lot of things I didn’t immediately like, but with most of them I tried very hard to suck it up and keep going, as you have to really.

But the bed rails were a bit more of a problem. It’s not a phobia, not even a ‘thing’ per se, but I do have a mild dislike of being confined or pinned down. Tight, tucked in, sheets in a hotel room, for instance, will do my head in and I’ll have to go around the bed perimeter and pull them all out before I can get in. On top of everything else, the raised guardings on both sides of the bed had some air of finality about it that just didn’t work for me.

So, I bargained. I promised I would strive very hard not to fall out of the bed, and could they please consider leaving just one side of the bed open? They were kind, they were considerate, they left one side down. The fact that I had promised not to fall out might have helped but, in actuality, I was not able to move myself very much at all so the falling out was really a pure impossibility.

The bed rails were thick moulded plastic affairs, not at all like the chromium plated bars one might see in a Carry-On Doctor film. They were sleek and space-age and clean and bright… but still they were there to hold you in, and, for the first few days, I was glad to always have one of them down.

But by the time I was transferred to the Rehab facility (on a stetcher, in an ambulance… another new experience) a couple of weeks later, I had learned a lesson or two about guardings and beds… and me. Answering a series of written questions upon admittance, I was asked if I would like to have the bed guardings up or down at night. I immediately answered that I would like both of them up please. This was met with a little surprise. I was told that, at this point in my treatment, the raised bed guardings were regarded as a form of restraint and I would have to sign a release to allow the staff to do that for me. I took the pen and made my incoherent scribble without hesitation.

What had changed in me in those few weeks? Had I become beaten down by my time in the general hospital? Had I given up all traces of independence? No. It was quite the opposite. I had learned a trick or two and I had also become a little stronger.

The truth was that although my legs still weren’t co-operating very well, I had very good strength in my upper body. With the guard down in the night, even on one side, I couldn’t manage to shift or turn in the bed. But with both guards up, I could grab hard onto those moulded plaster handholds on both sides and drag myself around into a more comfortable position. In the night, if I slipped too far down the bed, I could haul myself back up to the top, inch by inch, in a mere matter of a couple of grunting, sweating, minutes.

I had soon realised that this confinement was to my advantage and the pleasure in being able to move myself just a little bit outweighed the discomfort of being closed in.

This situation didn’t last for long. The regaining of some command over my legs came back much more quickly that anyone expected and, pretty soon, the bed guards were not an issue anymore. In fact, they no longer existed in my world.

But now I find they come back to me sometimes, in my head. Not as any fearful negative thing but more as a lesson in resilience and resourcefulness. I see how scary things can sometimes be lassoed and mounted and tamed to one’s own advantage. And, on a somewhat wider perspective, I see how I sometimes get to choose my own narrative, not just for the bed guardings but for this entire episode of my life.

When it comes to the telling of this story, I could have chosen the ‘pity me, I was locked up in my bed and couldn’t move’ narrative but, instead I choose the, ‘I turned a shitty thing into something good for me’ narrative.

On the wider scale, when it comes to my overall illness, I could have chosen to tell myself a story which goes something like, “I am damaged goods now. I have 24/7 nerve pain. I walk well but with care. My legs sometimes feel like they are encased in lead. I get tired and distracted. I am not the man I was 4 months and 1 week ago.”

To hell with that. No. I choose another narrative.

I am doing great. I can do everything I could do before. I have made a brilliant recovery, and, over the coming months, I will only get better and better. And even if I never get fully better, I will be able continue to live my wonderful life on my own terms.

I am a lucky, lucky guy and that’s the story I will continue to choose to tell myself.

Would you like the guards up or down? Would you like your story served up or down? Different questions, same answer.

Up, please.