Day 30
Let’s pretend that I went to New York for a month. Let’s pretend that I was looking at a painting while scratching my ear. Let’s pretend that this was my ear, and the beautiful burnet girl who eats organic food tried pronouncing my name three times with no luck.
Let’s pretend that I have no name, and that I wear a mask while sleeping. And when I woke up once without it, I came out of my room, turned right to walk in an empty street.
Let’s stop pretending and admit being intimidated by a tall topless skin head guy walking his big fat slobbering dog.
And when I walked to the end of the street, I befriended three guys: S’all, Irvnig, and Ishmael which they got to choose their names when they were 16.
By the time I was walking down this street, they were discussing the names that they are going to choose.
It was already midnight, and the young men just turned 16.
Irving was the tallest, with brownish hair hovering over his huge skull. When I was approaching I thought that he was the most silent tall guy I have ever seen.
And he was.
It took me 5 minutes to get near them as they were talking under a broken lamp on the sidewalk. And Irving didn’t say a word. He was just hovering against the direction of the wind, while S’all and Ishmael engaged in a whispering dialogue, looking at Irving from time to time.
And by the time I was getting close to them it rained, the dog peed, tried to pronounce my name, a French Leo Ferre’s song, and a Ukrainian parabolic antenna which sends messages into space.
S’all wanted to name himself that. He says that it is a Louisiana expression means ‘That’s all’. And that Louis Armstrong used it to organize his reel recordings’ archive.
The chubby smiley guy told us that whenever there is a space left in the reel; Armstrong left the songs list bottom empty, so he knows he has work left to do.
And when the reel is done, he would write ‘S’all’ at the end.
And he wanted to name himself ‘S’all’.
Irving also wanted to be involved in the identities game, so he just said: ‘Irving: the town in Texas that was named over the historian Washington Irving’.
S’all and Ishmael worked immediately on their I phones looking for the name. But because it was the end of times, Wikipedia was already collapsed, and Louis Armstrong was a Serbian Trumpet player playing patriotic songs in Belgrade municipality’s band.
Irving didn’t feel like talking. He was tall and thin with big fierce jaws and very small eyes.
I thought he was Asian, but he was just a regular silent American.
Ishmael said that what he could find is that Washington Irving started to write as he observed Hudson River surroundings when his family took him away out of Manhattan when he was 15.
It was 1783, and yellow fever was spreading, and the British announced a ceasefire that ended the American Revolution.
Before the collapse of the internet, Ishmael googled many names. He wanted a small name that not everyone could pronounce correctly.
That’s why he arrogantly threw the facts for Irving and S’all, and bragged about choosing the perfect name.
Ishmael was arguing that he can’t even discuss the reality of his own existence, so how others could be found in him just for choosing their names.
‘That is why I will not be intimidated by the big names and what they relate to. I can’t really believe that this man who is walking toward us is a product of anyone else. He is a product of this moment: he is just walking toward us, and if you want to freeze this moment he will still be walking towards us but in slower motion, and if you want to remember him walking towards us, your brain can’t hold but to parts of seconds’.
Three years earlier, Ishmael was looking through the net for small names when he randomly ended up reading the cultural section of a Swiss newspaper in English.
And he began to read the article entitled: ‘Raed Ibrahim occupies Aarau’.
Raed Ibrahim, which Ishmael thought it is a cool name that not everyone could pronounce correctly, did occupy Aarau and called it ‘State of Ishmael’.
Ishmael was thrilled, and wanted to get rid of the historical backgrounds, but envying him for one thing: that he lived for 137 years.
But the three young men were dead before I reached them.
The dog peed again, it rained again, and all what I wanted is sky to stare at.
