World Leader Retired
I knew him when we were young. We were friends for a few months. Then we lost touch. He had a remarkable sense of direction - innate and much more powerful than most people's. It was as if he carried in his mind a very detailed map of everywhere, and he was able to consult it at any time, with no apparent effort. This meant that if he knew where he wanted to go, he could always get there. It is the only thing I remember about him. That and the fact that he could be annoying, as he often needed somewhere to stay and would show up at any time unannounced.
But he paid for the hospitality he received by facilitating travel. We would be driving at night through unfamiliar streets. From the passenger seat he would calmly announce which turn to take. He was never wrong, even though he had never been to where we were going. This was an era before the advent of GPS, the internet and mobile phones.
Now of course he is old like me, and retired. Except - unlike me, he is famous. I had forgotten about him for close to fifty years when he suddenly reappeared as a candidate for political office, and not just any office, but the presidency itself. And he won. That was some years ago. Now he is a world leader retired.
I didn't spend much time thinking about it beyond an occasional dalliance in delayed incredulity. How could he have come from nowhere to that position? It would be as if I found myself running the army one day. It could just be that I haven't been paying attention and that there is a lot I don't know.
He would not have been haunting my memories, except that I just saw him on the street and everything came back. I wondered if he was searching for somewhere to stay and hoped it was not my place he was looking for. I could imagine him ringing the doorbell while I was eating dinner.
I saw him outside OK CUTZ, which as the name implies is a low-end barbershop. I don't know if he had been there for a haircut or just happened to be passing by. As I don't work anymore and survive on a lacklustre pension, OK CUTZ seemed a good enough place for me to get groomed. I was becoming intrigued and hoped I might glean some information by going in there.
I decided to get a number one buzz cut. I think an old man with severely short hair is someone to be reckoned with. Once I overheard two young men talking. They were saying that old men always get short haircuts because they are trying to hide their baldness by embracing it. They were laughing. I'm not bald, and if I was I wouldn't care. I'm way beyond such concerns.
I took a seat against the wall to wait my turn and picked up a faded magazine from the glass table. A girl was sweeping up hair from the floor. Her expression was an acceptance of the mild frustration and boredom that came with the job. I looked beyond her around the room, half hoping to see some evidence of a presidential visit. There was none.
The magazine was quite old and the affairs it contained had long since been current but I found an interesting article about the invention of LSD and its use in psychiatry. I read of Albert Hoffman and of a woman who gave birth to the world, of a man who became everything, and of faces whose eyes dripped with worms and maggots. The article was doubly interesting, not only in its subject matter but also in the way that it was portrayed as contemporary. It made me think about time, and that flicked a mental switch.
I never had time to finish it, as the girl who had been sweeping the floor was beckoning to me. She wanted me to accompany her deeper into the room to an old chair that backed up on to a sink with a cutaway for the neck. It suggested an executioner's block. She intended to wash my hair. I hadn't bargained for that. No one had asked me if I wanted my hair washed and I suspected it was a ploy to extract more money. But I followed her anyway without complaint.
I lay back and put my neck in the slot. A certain degree of trust was required for that. She turned on the tap and gently wet my hair with both hands. Then she massaged my scalp with shampoo, working quickly, leaning close over me. Her breasts brushed my shoulder. I could smell her perfume. I closed my eyes. There was an intimacy to the whole experience. A solitary intimacy. I wondered if she felt it too. I couldn't know. She never said a word. But somehow I suspected not. It was different for her. She had to physically deal with strangers each day, massaging their heads and sweeping up their dead hair, witnessing their imperfections from close up. It was most likely a chore, forgotten as soon as possible. She gave me a towel to dry my own hair and motioned me towards the barber chair.
I am generally not one for small-talk. Like flattery it does not trip easily from my tongue. But today I was going to have to make a special effort. The barber awaited me with a half smile. Once I had climbed into the chair he quickly tucked a cloth around my neck and whipped a cover over me. My hands disappeared on my lap. He swung the chair towards the mirror.
"What's it going to be, boss?"
"Number one buzz cut."
"Number one too short. Number three better."
"If you say so."
"Number one - you bald guy. You don't want bald guy."
"Okay."
The barber had a shock of dark and greasy hair and a close-cut pointed beard of the same colour, which gave him a mephistophelean look. He pulled a buzz clipper from the counter and went around behind me.
I couldn't place his accent. I assumed he was South American.
"Where are you from?"
"Belarus. You?"
"I'm English."
"My brother live in London. When we come from our country we go first in London. Then I come here."
"Did you cut hair in your country?"
"No. I work for KGB."
This was interesting. Then I saw him grinning at me in the mirror. He was joking. A wry one. He'd convinced me. How could I know all that had happened in those Cold War years? There was a man killed with a poisoned umbrella. That I remember. Strange times. I can almost feel nostalgic for them now. But that's a stupid way to think. As if the suffering of the past is any less than that of the present. Suffering can't be differentiated. It is like water - filling up any available space.
"You ever cut hair for famous people?"
“Sure boss. Every day.” He grinned again.
"Has a president ever been in?"
"The president? Why he come here? Unless he look for my niece."
We both looked down the room for the girl with the broom but she wasn't there.
After that I lost interest in the conversation, shut my eyes and let him finish the job. When I left I glanced at my reflection in the window to see how the haircut looked. Not bad. Though in hindsight I should have trusted myself and gone with the number one.
So the ex-president hadn't been for a haircut when I saw him. I could rule that out. That left the question as to what he was doing in the area and why I hadn't noticed anyone else recognizing him. I hadn't seen any security guards either. If it had been any other childhood friend I came across, who I hadn't seen for years, I might have doubted myself. But because he had been president I knew exactly what he looked like, I'd seen so many photographs. There could be no doubt - it was Neil Godfrey. Something was just not right about it.
I couldn't put it down. As I walked home through the park, I felt like a kitten batting at a ball of yarn, catching my claws in it, causing it to unravel and tangle. Unable to stop, yet with no comprehension. Does a cat understand a ball of yarn? Not it's human purpose. There must be planes of comprehension among all species. I found the complexity almost overwhelming.
There was a lot of squirrel activity as I walked through the park, and I stopped to watch them for a while. They raced up and down trees with their jerky, shimmering motions, seemingly intent on gathering acorns. It was that time of year. Squirrels and other animals share the city with people. Our existences overlap but mostly we are separate. We occupy the same geographical space but, as with comprehension, we live on completely different planes.
It is all a matter of time, which itself is only a measurement, or really a number of measurements. There is the crude division into three - past, present and future. I could see the past as memory, the future as possibility and the present as the interstitial point between them. The present might be measured in those ambiguous units of moments. But how long is a moment? Three seconds? More? Less? Could the future be measured as a negative number of moments?
Alongside this, there is a type of calibration to different clocks – like those of genetics, light and darkness, planetary movement, cellular ageing, and radioactive half-life. Maybe you could do away with measurement entirely and see it as a flowing continuum, in which case the present probably does not exist, being just a way of watching the past become the future. As arbitrary as the way that years are organized into decades.
I had the growing feeling that Neil's unexplained appearance had something to do with this idea of time and different temporal planes. It might also justify his uncanny sense of direction, his mysterious ascent to high office and his equally mysterious disappearance from consciousness. How it could do that, I didn't know. It was intuition.
When I got home I went straight to the fridge. I was hungry. I lived alone in a small place. It was a simple life. I tried to imbue every aspect of it with beauty, and that included the food I ate. Beauty offered the prospect of happiness. I set the green bowl on the table. Lentil salad with finely chopped parsley, garlic, olives, cucumbers, avocados and feta cheese. It had been marinating in lemon juice while the KGB agent was cutting my hair. I poured myself a glass of red wine and broke off a piece of baguette with my hands. I raised the fork to my mouth and was just experiencing the tangy first taste of lemon when the buzzer interrupted me. I got up and pressed the 'talk' button on the intercom.
"Who is it?"
"I know it's been years, but could I sleep on your couch tonight? I'm sorry. I'll explain..."
“Shit!”
© Tom Newton 2018
From the short story collection Seven Cries of Delight.
I knew him when we were young. We were friends for a few months. Then we lost touch. He had a remarkable sense of direction - innate and much more powerful than most people's. It was as if he carried in his mind a very detailed map of everywhere, and he was able to consult it at any time, with no apparent effort. This meant that if he knew where he wanted to go, he could always get there. It is the only thing I remember about him. That and the fact that he could be annoying, as he often needed somewhere to stay and would show up at any time unannounced.
But he paid for the hospitality he received by facilitating travel. We would be driving at night through unfamiliar streets. From the passenger seat he would calmly announce which turn to take. He was never wrong, even though he had never been to where we were going. This was an era before the advent of GPS, the internet and mobile phones.
Now of course he is old like me, and retired. Except - unlike me, he is famous. I had forgotten about him for close to fifty years when he suddenly reappeared as a candidate for political office, and not just any office, but the presidency itself. And he won. That was some years ago. Now he is a world leader retired.
I didn't spend much time thinking about it beyond an occasional dalliance in delayed incredulity. How could he have come from nowhere to that position? It would be as if I found myself running the army one day. It could just be that I haven't been paying attention and that there is a lot I don't know.
He would not have been haunting my memories, except that I just saw him on the street and everything came back. I wondered if he was searching for somewhere to stay and hoped it was not my place he was looking for. I could imagine him ringing the doorbell while I was eating dinner.
I saw him outside OK CUTZ, which as the name implies is a low-end barbershop. I don't know if he had been there for a haircut or just happened to be passing by. As I don't work anymore and survive on a lacklustre pension, OK CUTZ seemed a good enough place for me to get groomed. I was becoming intrigued and hoped I might glean some information by going in there.
I decided to get a number one buzz cut. I think an old man with severely short hair is someone to be reckoned with. Once I overheard two young men talking. They were saying that old men always get short haircuts because they are trying to hide their baldness by embracing it. They were laughing. I'm not bald, and if I was I wouldn't care. I'm way beyond such concerns.
I took a seat against the wall to wait my turn and picked up a faded magazine from the glass table. A girl was sweeping up hair from the floor. Her expression was an acceptance of the mild frustration and boredom that came with the job. I looked beyond her around the room, half hoping to see some evidence of a presidential visit. There was none.
The magazine was quite old and the affairs it contained had long since been current but I found an interesting article about the invention of LSD and its use in psychiatry. I read of Albert Hoffman and of a woman who gave birth to the world, of a man who became everything, and of faces whose eyes dripped with worms and maggots. The article was doubly interesting, not only in its subject matter but also in the way that it was portrayed as contemporary. It made me think about time, and that flicked a mental switch.
I never had time to finish it, as the girl who had been sweeping the floor was beckoning to me. She wanted me to accompany her deeper into the room to an old chair that backed up on to a sink with a cutaway for the neck. It suggested an executioner's block. She intended to wash my hair. I hadn't bargained for that. No one had asked me if I wanted my hair washed and I suspected it was a ploy to extract more money. But I followed her anyway without complaint.
I lay back and put my neck in the slot. A certain degree of trust was required for that. She turned on the tap and gently wet my hair with both hands. Then she massaged my scalp with shampoo, working quickly, leaning close over me. Her breasts brushed my shoulder. I could smell her perfume. I closed my eyes. There was an intimacy to the whole experience. A solitary intimacy. I wondered if she felt it too. I couldn't know. She never said a word. But somehow I suspected not. It was different for her. She had to physically deal with strangers each day, massaging their heads and sweeping up their dead hair, witnessing their imperfections from close up. It was most likely a chore, forgotten as soon as possible. She gave me a towel to dry my own hair and motioned me towards the barber chair.
I am generally not one for small-talk. Like flattery it does not trip easily from my tongue. But today I was going to have to make a special effort. The barber awaited me with a half smile. Once I had climbed into the chair he quickly tucked a cloth around my neck and whipped a cover over me. My hands disappeared on my lap. He swung the chair towards the mirror.
"What's it going to be, boss?"
"Number one buzz cut."
"Number one too short. Number three better."
"If you say so."
"Number one - you bald guy. You don't want bald guy."
"Okay."
The barber had a shock of dark and greasy hair and a close-cut pointed beard of the same colour, which gave him a mephistophelean look. He pulled a buzz clipper from the counter and went around behind me.
I couldn't place his accent. I assumed he was South American.
"Where are you from?"
"Belarus. You?"
"I'm English."
"My brother live in London. When we come from our country we go first in London. Then I come here."
"Did you cut hair in your country?"
"No. I work for KGB."
This was interesting. Then I saw him grinning at me in the mirror. He was joking. A wry one. He'd convinced me. How could I know all that had happened in those Cold War years? There was a man killed with a poisoned umbrella. That I remember. Strange times. I can almost feel nostalgic for them now. But that's a stupid way to think. As if the suffering of the past is any less than that of the present. Suffering can't be differentiated. It is like water - filling up any available space.
"You ever cut hair for famous people?"
“Sure boss. Every day.” He grinned again.
"Has a president ever been in?"
"The president? Why he come here? Unless he look for my niece."
We both looked down the room for the girl with the broom but she wasn't there.
After that I lost interest in the conversation, shut my eyes and let him finish the job. When I left I glanced at my reflection in the window to see how the haircut looked. Not bad. Though in hindsight I should have trusted myself and gone with the number one.
So the ex-president hadn't been for a haircut when I saw him. I could rule that out. That left the question as to what he was doing in the area and why I hadn't noticed anyone else recognizing him. I hadn't seen any security guards either. If it had been any other childhood friend I came across, who I hadn't seen for years, I might have doubted myself. But because he had been president I knew exactly what he looked like, I'd seen so many photographs. There could be no doubt - it was Neil Godfrey. Something was just not right about it.
I couldn't put it down. As I walked home through the park, I felt like a kitten batting at a ball of yarn, catching my claws in it, causing it to unravel and tangle. Unable to stop, yet with no comprehension. Does a cat understand a ball of yarn? Not it's human purpose. There must be planes of comprehension among all species. I found the complexity almost overwhelming.
There was a lot of squirrel activity as I walked through the park, and I stopped to watch them for a while. They raced up and down trees with their jerky, shimmering motions, seemingly intent on gathering acorns. It was that time of year. Squirrels and other animals share the city with people. Our existences overlap but mostly we are separate. We occupy the same geographical space but, as with comprehension, we live on completely different planes.
It is all a matter of time, which itself is only a measurement, or really a number of measurements. There is the crude division into three - past, present and future. I could see the past as memory, the future as possibility and the present as the interstitial point between them. The present might be measured in those ambiguous units of moments. But how long is a moment? Three seconds? More? Less? Could the future be measured as a negative number of moments?
Alongside this, there is a type of calibration to different clocks – like those of genetics, light and darkness, planetary movement, cellular ageing, and radioactive half-life. Maybe you could do away with measurement entirely and see it as a flowing continuum, in which case the present probably does not exist, being just a way of watching the past become the future. As arbitrary as the way that years are organized into decades.
I had the growing feeling that Neil's unexplained appearance had something to do with this idea of time and different temporal planes. It might also justify his uncanny sense of direction, his mysterious ascent to high office and his equally mysterious disappearance from consciousness. How it could do that, I didn't know. It was intuition.
When I got home I went straight to the fridge. I was hungry. I lived alone in a small place. It was a simple life. I tried to imbue every aspect of it with beauty, and that included the food I ate. Beauty offered the prospect of happiness. I set the green bowl on the table. Lentil salad with finely chopped parsley, garlic, olives, cucumbers, avocados and feta cheese. It had been marinating in lemon juice while the KGB agent was cutting my hair. I poured myself a glass of red wine and broke off a piece of baguette with my hands. I raised the fork to my mouth and was just experiencing the tangy first taste of lemon when the buzzer interrupted me. I got up and pressed the 'talk' button on the intercom.
"Who is it?"
"I know it's been years, but could I sleep on your couch tonight? I'm sorry. I'll explain..."
“Shit!”
© Tom Newton 2018
From the short story collection Seven Cries of Delight.
Narrated by Tom Newton
Narrated by Tom Newton
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Since the word “president” occurs in this story, our discussion could quickly devolve into just another of today’s most common conversations -- and that’s stretching the definition of “conversation.” But I’m determined to avoid that. I hope you agree.
TN: Yes that’s fine. THIS president is not THAT president, though he came from nowhere and went back there after his term.
BR: In the story you introduced a first-person narrator who says he’s English and is of a certain age… much like yourself, but without a name. The only name given is the ex-president, Neil Godfrey. I’m wondering if that’s a real person you’re playing a meta-fictional gag on.
TN: I think the narrator is older than me. I haven’t retired yet. But yes, you’ve hit on something with Neil Godfrey. He’s two people in fact, but who those people are has no bearing on the story. They’re just names.
BR: I’m ashamed to have asked that last question actually. I hate it when people ask me stuff like that about my own work. It just doesn’t matter. I mean, the New Criticism told us that a work of literature functions as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. Nothing outside the page should be considered.
TN: Yeah but the New Criticism is nearly eighty years old at this point. Not exactly new anymore.
BR: Oh, right. Well, I don’t buy it anyway -- just another belief system. I shouldn’t have brought it up. So back to the story. I like the ambiguity of the KGB barber -- is he really joking, or not? It adds a strange undercurrent of international intrigue, but we can’t know. I assume that’s intentional?
TN: I assume he’s joking but you never know. Does that sound like intention?
BR: Well you’ve balanced, or contrasted, familiar images against unexpected thought-challenges. OK CUTZ -- the well-known, cheap barbershop with old magazines. That lovely moment at the shampoo station, something most of us have probably experienced. The memories many of us have of the Cold War years. These details and others, quite concrete, then seem to lead to confounding questions -- about the mind, both human and animal, or the nature of memory or time. So would you say you trade plot for philosophy?
TN: I think they both run concurrently. Why not? No trade involved. The narrator, who tends towards melancholy without being depressed... he’s an old man wandering home alone to his tiny condo, with no one to greet him but his fridge. He’s doing the best he can, and he has the tendency to think philosophically. The idea that different creatures occupy the same geographical space but live in completely different worlds, absolutely intrigues me. It’s everywhere. It may be that we have to find similarities rather than differences if we are to survive, but I can’t help thinking about it. To me it suggests multiple dimensions folded up within each other.
BR: I find that fascinating too. Some people think a writer should be able to say in one sentence what their story, or even their novel, is quote-unquote “about.” I don’t agree with that idea, but maybe you do. So… one sentence: what is this story about?
TN: Well… I wonder why a novel should be about anything. Isn’t it a little arrogant, or narrow-minded that readers should expect that what they read should be about something? And to sum it up in a sentence - that sounds like a kind of corporate mindset, where individuals assimilate corporate values without even being aware of it. Walking around branding themselves, writing quarterly performance reports, and five year plans. Oh, and summing up novels in one sentence. It’s a kind of psychic constipation. Or it sounds like Mussolini, who said he only read three pages of a book - the first, the middle and the last. He thought he was being clever but he was just being an asshole. So I’m an unbeliever like you. But, one sentence, here you go: “This story is about nothing much.”
BR: Hmm…Okay... In the past we’ve talked about how an artwork is not finished until it’s been received by an audience -- even if it’s an audience of one. So maybe it’s actually up to the reader or listener, not the writer, to say what the story is about, if they want to. So I’ll venture this… this is a story about unknowability. How does the world work? Why does someone have an infallible sense of direction? Do people operate on different temporal planes, like squirrels? How could someone you know become president, and then come crash on your couch? Questions with no answers, the best kind.
TN: Yeah, that about sums it up.
BR: In any case, it’s not about that retired world leader at all. Despite the title. Title as camouflage -- I like that!
TN: Thanks. But you don’t know anything about the world leader other than that he was president and had a fantastic sense of direction. And you don’t need to. The World Leader was a jumping-off point. I don’t know if it’s just an English thing, or if it happens in America too, but retired military people would have the word “retired” listed after their rank in correspondence. So you’d have for example: Sir Neville Dampney, VC, MBE, DSO, Major General Retired. It just struck me as incredibly funny. It didn’t take long for me to start adding “World Leader Retired” after my own name when I signed letters. That was when I still wrote letters. So that title came back into my brain one day and turned into this story. I never discovered what the recipients of my letters thought. No one said anything -- ever. So, maybe it’s what my friend Tom Reeve says -- “Its like a joke. Not funny, but otherwise like a joke.”
BR: Since the word “president” occurs in this story, our discussion could quickly devolve into just another of today’s most common conversations -- and that’s stretching the definition of “conversation.” But I’m determined to avoid that. I hope you agree.
TN: Yes that’s fine. THIS president is not THAT president, though he came from nowhere and went back there after his term.
BR: In the story you introduced a first-person narrator who says he’s English and is of a certain age… much like yourself, but without a name. The only name given is the ex-president, Neil Godfrey. I’m wondering if that’s a real person you’re playing a meta-fictional gag on.
TN: I think the narrator is older than me. I haven’t retired yet. But yes, you’ve hit on something with Neil Godfrey. He’s two people in fact, but who those people are has no bearing on the story. They’re just names.
BR: I’m ashamed to have asked that last question actually. I hate it when people ask me stuff like that about my own work. It just doesn’t matter. I mean, the New Criticism told us that a work of literature functions as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. Nothing outside the page should be considered.
TN: Yeah but the New Criticism is nearly eighty years old at this point. Not exactly new anymore.
BR: Oh, right. Well, I don’t buy it anyway -- just another belief system. I shouldn’t have brought it up. So back to the story. I like the ambiguity of the KGB barber -- is he really joking, or not? It adds a strange undercurrent of international intrigue, but we can’t know. I assume that’s intentional?
TN: I assume he’s joking but you never know. Does that sound like intention?
BR: Well you’ve balanced, or contrasted, familiar images against unexpected thought-challenges. OK CUTZ -- the well-known, cheap barbershop with old magazines. That lovely moment at the shampoo station, something most of us have probably experienced. The memories many of us have of the Cold War years. These details and others, quite concrete, then seem to lead to confounding questions -- about the mind, both human and animal, or the nature of memory or time. So would you say you trade plot for philosophy?
TN: I think they both run concurrently. Why not? No trade involved. The narrator, who tends towards melancholy without being depressed... he’s an old man wandering home alone to his tiny condo, with no one to greet him but his fridge. He’s doing the best he can, and he has the tendency to think philosophically. The idea that different creatures occupy the same geographical space but live in completely different worlds, absolutely intrigues me. It’s everywhere. It may be that we have to find similarities rather than differences if we are to survive, but I can’t help thinking about it. To me it suggests multiple dimensions folded up within each other.
BR: I find that fascinating too. Some people think a writer should be able to say in one sentence what their story, or even their novel, is quote-unquote “about.” I don’t agree with that idea, but maybe you do. So… one sentence: what is this story about?
TN: Well… I wonder why a novel should be about anything. Isn’t it a little arrogant, or narrow-minded that readers should expect that what they read should be about something? And to sum it up in a sentence - that sounds like a kind of corporate mindset, where individuals assimilate corporate values without even being aware of it. Walking around branding themselves, writing quarterly performance reports, and five year plans. Oh, and summing up novels in one sentence. It’s a kind of psychic constipation. Or it sounds like Mussolini, who said he only read three pages of a book -- the first, the middle and the last. He thought he was being clever but he was just being an asshole. So I’m an unbeliever like you. But, one sentence, here you go: “This story is about nothing much.”
BR: Hmm…Okay... In the past we’ve talked about how an artwork is not finished until it’s been received by an audience -- even if it’s an audience of one. So maybe it’s actually up to the reader or listener, not the writer, to say what the story is about, if they want to. So I’ll venture this… this is a story about unknowability. How does the world work? Why does someone have an infallible sense of direction? Do people operate on different temporal planes, like squirrels? How could someone you know become president, and then come crash on your couch? Questions with no answers, the best kind.
TN: Yeah, that about sums it up.
BR: In any case, it’s not about that retired world leader at all. Despite the title. Title as camouflage -- I like that!
TN: Thanks. But you don’t know anything about the world leader other than that he was president and had a fantastic sense of direction. And you don’t need to. The World Leader was a jumping-off point. I don’t know if it’s just an English thing, or if it happens in America too, but retired military people would have the word “retired” listed after their rank in correspondence. So you’d have for example: Sir Neville Dampney, VC, MBE, DSO, Major General Retired. It just struck me as incredibly funny. It didn’t take long for me to start adding “World Leader Retired” after my own name when I signed letters. That was when I still wrote letters. So that title came back into my brain one day and turned into this story. I never discovered what the recipients of my letters thought. No one said anything -- ever. So, maybe it’s what my friend Tom Reeve says -- “Its like a joke. Not funny, but otherwise like a joke.”
Music on this episode:
Gymnopédie no.1 by Erik Satie
License CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun by Claude Debussy
License CC BY 3.0
