1.i’m going through changes.
my body has never been at once so familiar and foreign. looking at her body go through it’s swelling and knowing what that belly holds, what precious DNA from this paired generation, returns the gaze to myself and how much has changed and how little has. i still don’t look like what i imagine myself to be, even after 31 years of looking.
2.nights like this.
nights like this are full of dead space and yearning for sleep. perpetually restless like the urge for a cigarette but knowing that the bitter smoke will never again cross these lips. it’s almost as if it’s become out of fashion to myself more than anything else. i’d love to have one, but i don’t know, the will to smoke seems dull now.
3.shorter than the rest.
shorter than the rest and happier for it. quick and not terribly incisive either. reading websites revolving around Ellis’ PLANETARY. Good stuff, not too heady but hits all the right points. i could have done stuff like that if i only had the attention and stamina for it. it’s always been a question of stamina.
4.he walks in to a bar (something i do often).
he walks into a bar and comes up to the stool. he looks around it for a bit, spins it with his left hand. he bends down close to seat and listens to it whirl. the bartender is cleaning beer glasses when he notices this guy. he shakes his head.
it just dies there.
5.of all the things.
of all the things i could have said, of all the things i could have wanted, there would have been something like this, a lake, a highway, a tree, of all the things that could have been, part of the telling and the wanting, of all the things, just these few, a dress, a table, an apple, of all the things i should have said, should have wanted to say but for the exhaust and the storm and the laughter, wanting to tell you of all the things; that surely would have been something.
Category Archives: frags
abandoned pieces, fragments, scraps
Somehow the butter rolls
1.
And somehow the butter rolls are the best in the morning with a cup of hot chocolate and a bit of a chill. Sometimes even an arcade game while big burly men talked about lumber and cement or something. They were big and fat and wore beards. I was always invisible and always on the way to somewhere else. In the morning, when the rolls were at their freshest and the world had only just begun to roll itself out into the light.
2.
And I can be very good at this, when things come together, when the traces of the logic begin to appear it gets exciting the way this used to, and it’s quick enough and simple enough in its design that, although the task might seem daunting at first, it’s ultimately done the moment it ever appeared. And what makes it more precious is the fact I’m the only one doing it and although I’ll brag there’s a secret rush and peak of joy that I cannot translate with gloating. And it’s good.
3.
And truly things cannot be better save for the lack of money, wouldn’t it be great to have a couple of bucks more, ok, maybe a couple of thousands. Ok, a million and then it’ll set everything straight.
4.
And The West Wing, while the banter is missing, a very keen sense of tension, drama and cinematography has filled the void Sorkin has left. At first it felt very technical, but as the season has moved forward, its gotten more slick and while I’d like to write emotional, it’s not, but rather empathic, less obvious stresses and just beginning to test the waters about what it’s characters are supposed to raving about.
5.
And although the nights are certainly strange I feel a new change come over me, slow and sure but I’m not sure if it’s for good or bad, another degree of coldness and sterility, and it doesn’t quite feel like that, something else entirely, as if each cell is being slowly replaced, which its supposed to, and where does the soul hang out anyway if not in your cells and isn’t quite entirely possible that every seven days or so, every three years or so, you’re an entirely different person from the cells up, even from the soul up. Shouldn’t you change? Wouldn’t you?
6.
And a baby shower tomorrow. And women and presents and laughter. And possibly children and the hope for. And later men, men and their tales of their wives giving birth to their children. And when it’s all done there’ll be just her and her belly and me, my wonderful life locked away within the heart of this woman who is about to offer our child to the world. And to the world I say, I beg, I plead “Please be kind to this child and all the rest if we’re lucky again, please be kind.”
7.
I still dream of horrible death and anguish. I still run with his death heavy across my eyes.
a wooden one will crack if you miss
1.
It all ends and begins in tears doesn’t it? Tears of joy, of sorrow. Tears seeping out of the eye duct. Tears along the placenta, the uterine wall. Tears along the aorta.
2.
And they said unto him, ‘You will be promised many things. You will live with the knowledge that you are meant for greater things. You will live under the shadow of vast accomplishments you have yet to undertake. And it will be impressive. But take heart: the moment of your arrival will never come. You will wake everyday thinking that today will be the day of your eternal greatness, but it will never come to pass. You will sense at the edge of your fingers that you could have done something great today, but you never will. You’ve been graced only with the anticipation of what could have been. It will always nag you, it will always hang at the edge of your perception. That sense of more, that sense of greatness, that sense that you too, could have been a god, if only you weren’t you…�
3.
Barely the third day and I�m already tapped out. The fear of the meta-writing, the direct “I can’t write anymore” writing. No, none of that, but it isn’t easy. This was never easy.
4.
I wanted to spill out onto the floor like sunlight in an empty house and fill rooms with warmth and memories in the corners of walls and have stars of dust kick up and shimmer and the edges of staircases soften to the touch and the glass of the panes would not stop me and the floor boards would not stop me and even the foundations would greet me.
5.
How about a her? How about her? How has she been? Alright I guess. You don’t talk anymore? Of course we do, we’re married aren’t we? Well, you�ve both been getting around… It doesn’t mean we don’t talk, just that we don’t fuck….. Ok, that didn’t really work at all.
6.
Try again, try harder. From the book, a scribble: She collects the rent. It�s become a full time job between dropping off the kids at school and picking them up. Her routes weave in and around the West Side and she’s figured out a way to always been within striking distance of the school should the dean or the headmistress need to contact her. She also keeps an aluminum bat in the car because a wooden one will crack if you miss. It’s gotten its fair share of use, scratches criss cross the length of the shaft and the blunt tip is pock marked with craters and specks of what could have been blood. She keeps it in the trunk under the blanket that covers the spare lest the kids take it by accident and she finds herself needing it on her route. At least once a week if not a day. But today she shouldn’t be needing it all, just a stroll in the park, literally.
7.
But what happens here is, I get bored. Or I can’t see it further.
dreamed a dream
i dreamed a dream of death and
desire
and i was not alone
and i was very afraid
to think the thought of her again
think the thought of holding her tight
and for it not to be the final grasp
of her
only to leave this world with the thought
of holding her tighter and not being
able to
and not feel anything at all
but the fear of dreaming dreams of death and desire
I cannot possibly be well like this
He was ecstatic with the joy of circumventing himself, or was that circumcising? What’s the difference anyway, it’s the rounding out, rounding about, severing through and lopping off, the cutting free as it were, the relief of one little less stump to worry about.
I cried often as a child, often to myself, often to the voices that comforted me and coaxed me to live one more day longer. Now I’ve gotten so used to living that the idea of death terrifies. I’m too comfortable in living, in my tidy thoughts as erratic and dismembered as they are. I’m not getting any younger and the more my youth escapes me, the more I wish to reboot the system and start over, knowing full well that it’s too late, all too late, I’m doomed on this path and there is no hope of ever living out my writing, or leading a writer’s life: peace, solitude and a little royalty check every month to cover the expense of a little house by the sea. Yeah, none of that for you boyo. You should never have gone to Bronx High School of Science to escape all those clowns who are now doctors and lawyers, never dropped out of high school because you couldn’t bear to live and all those clowns became stock brokers and scientists, never gone off to Albany (because John Jay was a good move although you fucked up there too, you got into a program that was excellent for the likes of you, that whole parallel and lateral thinking, that interdisciplinary shit you’re so keen on) and stayed for fucking five years investing in a doctoral program that was so mired in politics and pretension that by the end of it, by the time you busted your ass through the doctoral exams you couldn’t even write anymore, what good was that?
I feel a tremendous need to struggle out of this skin, rip the meat off the bones and exchange them for something else. I’ve grown fat, I am no longer lithe (I was always fat as a child, but then sprouted up and through rooftops in my teenage years; although I was no stunner then, you could see my cheekbones and the outlines of my abs), I am lethargic, suffering the beginnings of a mid-life crisis when I used to tell people I would not live past twenty.
I want a tattoo of my wife’s angelic face on my shoulder to comfort me when all the voices have left me, as they have been, one by one, over the years, leaving back alone in the darkness where they first found me, naked and churning, shivering, crawling, raking, waiting to breathe.
Mother, father please explain to me this blood in my veins, why it runs hot and cold, why I burn bridges and freeze out corners of my heart. Explain why I want to run away, not run backwards in time, but sideways and straight out of it, I want to keep my head together in death, even if that means living another life. Explain to me why there isn’t anything more than this and why this sack of meat lives so hard and true and clear like it’s all never supposed to end. Explain to me why when the world stops, I lose track of time and there’s so little time left even when there’s all the time in world? Explain to me when exactly I went mad because I cannot possibly be well like this. This is not the way I was supposed to leave the world, this is not supposed to be the life I would give my wife, my child. This is not supposed to be how things turned out in the end, especially when the end is nowhere near in sight.
Twist and twist it all around, trying to make the old sound new again. Reverb off the common sense and make the senses work to make sense of it. Everything old is new again only if you knock it out of shape.
in view of labors twirling on his tongue
in view of labors twirling on his tongue, he writes, he wishes he wrote more, he wished he lived more, sometimes he wishes for a life more than this one, where he was more than this one now writing the lament of writing a little less than one liked to, for living a little less than one liked to, for wishing for more than one would have taken the time to have wished for.
And sometimes, late at night, the terror grips me again, plucks my heart and fingers its valves. It’s only thirty years ahead at worst, but she laughs and says it’ll be like tomorrow and this memory will be like yesterday and i push all the breath out to keep from breathing death in.
I cannot write anymore about not writing or the desire to write or the lamentation of what i was and am and could have been. I should only write and be writing and think nothing else but the pushing on and her and between the sheets the fucking how good it was the other night, not nrew years night where she fucking me to make me cum there at the end tracing her finger along my nuts as she leaned back on top of me and i thought how unfair and i wanted more of it, but i knew she wasn’t having anymore of it and that’s what her on, what brought her fingernails on my scrotum and i thought how terrible unfair and ludicrous and terrifying to be bringing in the new year in this way considering that it marks you for the rest of the year, but not that time, the time before, where she was on top again and leaning out over the bed suspended like a bridge between ecstasy and something else that’s tender and soft and ain’t that just grand to feel something real when you’re holding her in your arms, suspending her across the shaft and you feel her lips, not the lips she smiles at you with, but the lips that accept your manhood for all little that it is, and it was so good because let’s face it you felt that you were so good and sometimes you need just that.
There he walks into a room and see that chairs toss asunder. I had helped him through that rough patch with her when she was stealing from their mother who might or might not have been my mother or aunt as well in another lifetime but it wasn’t the right time to ask about it besides that dog just got amputated from cancer and hobbled around.
I wish for things to stick themselves in my head like in Nylund’s Signal to Noise, where people speak to each other in metaphor’s but there’s also something not quite right about that and even he author himself writes the obvious of our times: the increasing complexity and strength of our communication devices brings about greater degrees of i(n)solation. I wish to be done with endings.
He walks into a room and find the phone ringing. He answers it although he hasn’t answered a phone in a long time. There is silence on the other end, a tangible quality like a back end of a window pane.
No, no that isn’t right either, but near the end of the page and I’m rusty.
And
In the middle of court proceedings, he muttered.
Her attorney stopped and turned to him.
The judge looked up and said, “Excuse me?”
“Nolo…”, Nick repeated, without looking up.
His attorney whispered, “..Nick, what are you..”
The judge frowned, “Detective, this is not a criminal-”
“Whatever your honor. I’m sorry.” Nick sighed. “I just don’t want to fight this anymore…”
His attorney stood up. “Your Honor-”
“Nolo contendere, that’s it.” Nick placed a hand on his attorney’s shoulder and sat him down.
Her attorney asked, “And the conditions of the alimony-”
“Whatever she wants.”
“Nick.” his attorney pleaded.
“No.” Nick raised a palm and closed his eyes,”..no.”
The judge regarded Nick.
No one knew what to say and that was it.
***
Outside he heard her voice behind him.
“Why?”, she asked and he turned around.
Nick was ready to make a comment about the restraining order she placed on him but no one was there.
He stood there a moment and tried to remember something else about Elsa other than her voice and it hurt to do so. Nick lit a cigarette and took a deep breath. The day was breezy and warm and leaves rustled in the trees around the courthouse. It was a day for weddings, not divorces.
***
He walked out of the hearing a week ago and was standing in front of his captain. Nick’s badge and gun were on the captain’s desk. Nick couldn’t look at them.
“So..”, he said.
“Two weeks suspension.” The captain sighed and opened his desk drawer and placed first the gun, then the badge, and quietly shut it. “Think of going somewhere. The review board thought you were in the clear but the civilians felt you couldn’t just walk back on the street. You gotta remember they knew about the divorce, so that didn’t help ya any”. The captain looked at Nick. Nick seemed bored and his eyes were somewhere else. “What are ya thinking?”
Nick’s gaze fell on the captain. He replied, “I’m tired. I’m thinking that I’m tired.”
“Good”, the captain shuffled some papers around. “See you in two weeks..” He didn’t bother to stand or offer his hand.
***
2 am. Doorbell.
Nick got up, not turning on any of the lights. He picked up his Parabellum from the dresser and approached the door. Other times he awoke, couldn’t place where he was, knew he wasn’t home, he was someplace else, someplace foreign, but it would then come to him that he didn’t live at home anymore, he was living in some apartment in Rego Park. Now, however, he was fully aware of where he was from the moment he heard the doorbell.
By the door frame, gun up and hand on the knob, he asked who it was.
“NYPD..open the door”, a whisper on the other side.
Nick pushed closer to the frame, gun centered right on the door. “Prove it.”
He heard someone bend down and saw something slide from
underneath the door, black and leathery. Staying clear of the door, Nick brought what looked like a wallet towards him with his foot. Gun still on the door, he picked it up and opened it.
His badge. His ID.
He opened the door. In the hallway, a skinhead who suddenly had the barrel of Nick’s gun in his face.
“What?” the skinhead grimaced, then slowly reached in his jacket for his own ID. “Intelligence. That’s all you gonna get,” he held out the ID. “Notice? No name, just my mug, and a poor one to boot.”
Nick lowered his gun.
The skinhead came in, brushing past Nick, stopping halfway into the foyer. He turned to Nick, “Shut the door already, we got work to do.”
***
“First: forget you’re a cop. Never carry your badge or your ID or your license. They’ll get you another one. Always have a gun. If you don’t have one unregistered, they’ll get you one. If you get bagged, let it happen, but I doubt in two weeks anything will. Oh, that’s right: you’ll be underground for two weeks, the length of your suspension. After that, you can be Nick Pathos again, if you want. You got a choice. You go back again though, no one’ll know about your two weeks, even if you make a bust, which they want you for a big one, by the way. Think about it: you’ll be no one and no one will remember what you did. No clearances, no medal, no credit.” The skinhead was sitting on the couch across from the chair Nick was in. The skinhead fell quiet, eyes on Nick.
Nick put out his cigarette. “I’m in.”
***
Killshot lowered the gun.
***
Pathos was running up the staircase, two by two.
He had ten flights to go and already breathing hard.
***
Killshot, softly, “…you lied..”
She flicked her cigarette, uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “Can you blame me?”
***
Pathos made the next to last flight, his chest burning, and pushed himself even harder, three by three.
***
It was as if she hadn’t said anything.
“..you lied about the child..”
“No”, she took a drag, “I was pregnant. I had an abortion.”
Killshot took a step closer. “..I killed for no reason..”
“No”, she shook her head, “you had a job to do.”
Gun up, at her, time enough just for the cigarette to slip out of her fingertips, trigger pulled three times, upward arc. One to the stomach and brakes her almost in half, into the couch, her hips lock, calves fly up, legs off the floor, bouncing off the back of the couch; second pins her chest, bursting it, straightening her entire spine then snapping it finally in half; the third slams her forehead just over the couch, onto the wall, the wet sound of it.
Silence.
Her feet still tremble for a few seconds afterward, both shoes far and away.
***
BAMBAMMBAMM-
Pathos stopped in the hallway. The breath went out of him. Quiet, something empty in him, filling the hallway, or matching it. What would he have done anyway? He wasn’t going in there to stop it, he was running to it, to see it, to be a part of it. Pathos wanted her dead as much as Killshot, and he didn’t even know her.
***
“…why?”, Killshot said and did not move. His face does not even as he breathes. “..curious..”, he adds.
Pathos starts to feel uncomfortable having the killer here unmoving. Killshot removes his sunglasses in a very slow manner and Pathos knows that he is the first person in a very long time to see those eyes. Despite the smooth face, the eyes were very red at the edges and very dark.
Just as Pathos is about to ask again the killer’s lips move.
“you were once a ‘Happy man'”, Killshot pauses, just his lips had been moving and now suddenly, nothing.
A plane flies overhead, drowning out all sound. The two men are across from one another.
“…imagine..” the killer continues, the eyes have not blinked, “..that you were not always happy…”, the killer pauses, “…details would be telling..”, he pauses again and then resumes, “..things happen…dominoes fall and you suddenly are a ‘Happy Man’…welcome to another life, forget that you are a scarred child…gifts beneath the christmas tree..”
The killer tilts his head slightly, “..you have never been asked, ‘Why?’.”
He stops. His eyes don’t blink.
Pathos slowly draws from his cigarette, thinking how much of this is bullshit and where’s it supposed to go. Elsa pops into his mind: the first time he had seen her, in that clothing store, smiling, years ago.
“you become unalone…”, Killshot’s eyes do not blink, “you’ve become something not what you once were, what you were from…. you are a ‘Happy man’…the sun never sets and the sun always does…everything happens pleasingly…,” the killer’s eyes glaze and seem to shine, “…you learn to smile like the child in your arms…”
Pathos remembers Elsa on her piano on the night of their engagement and they were both breathing hard, laughing, sweaty. She had said, then, her feet on the keys, ‘We make beautiful music’.
“..why..is for confessions.” the killer says and the eyes blink, becoming bone dry, “..and that would be telling…finish and others end and are put away rather quickly, hurried..you are no longer a ‘Happy Man’, no longer where you were from.. all wiped away…but the white sheets stained while you slept.”
Pathos remembers the night after he had killed Estevez. He had awakened and Elsa was sitting in the far corner of the hotel room, away from him, watching him, shaking with the phone in her hand, weeping.
Killshot puts his sunglasses back on. He stands smoothly but slowly, very tired. Pathos remembers the dead open eyes of Ricky Estevez on his couch, looking at the floor.
“I’m going to have to arrest you..”, he says, weak.
Killshot stands over Pathos. “..but I know you..”
Pathos looks at the killer, exhausted. “And?”
The killer tilts his head, whispers, “..that would be telling.”
Killshot turns away.
Pathos’ Browning, the same one that had killed Estevez, right there in front of him, on the coffee table, big black ugly metal. He remembers Estevez, the look on his face, Elba screaming, ‘good god–you jus-YOU-oh god–ARE YOU MAD??!!’.
Pathos hears the killer close the door behind him, gone.
i said to her i wanted this
I had said to her that I wanted this, I wanted it right here in the palm of my hand. I wanted to be able to reach through into the screen and move it about, move her face into the right positions, select filters off the menu and tune up the shades. I want to touch in ways that a keyboard and mouse don’t do. I want to be intimate with it. Perhaps this is why I exploded with writing when it was a typewriter, there was a new interface to write into with and yet still accessible, you could do things with this other things you understand.
I sat up, I had been dying for some. I had been writing the last I remembered. The room was dark, but I could tell it wasn’t night. I had to get out of here, I was stifling or they were trying to kill me. I had thought of you as I slid open the window, I had thought of the taste of the barrel of the gun you had placed in my mouth before the lights went out, or I went out. It’s difficult even now to remember who did what, where it was done, when and even why. But I knew this, scrambling my fingers against the sill in the dark looking for some lock or lever, some mechanism to get of this stifling place that I had been dying in for some time, more than yesterday, weeks perhaps, that I had to get out and find you. Not kill you exactly, but find you, maybe even one last kiss goodbye, with a barrel between your teeth instead of mine.
No Myth
“Who am I?
Where am I?
Why do I feel this way?”
-“Who? Where? Why?”
Jesus Jones
***
I: Action and Reaction
“Pleased to meet you,
Won’t you guess my name?”
-“Nature of My Game”, Rolling Stones
“Though this be madness,
There is method in’t”
-William Shakespeare
It’s gonna happen again, thought Joe Gallagher, fiddling with the clasp of his watch.
Just like on the RR in ’73…
On Steinway street in ’65…
In Greenwich Village in ’51…
Just like in 1947, when he was fifteen, ‘just off the boat’ and it happened to his parents…
But each time it was a little different, each time it was closer to home. First it was just threats: when you didn’t know the language, but you understood the open palm and menacing scowls… When you learned some of the language and used the word ‘no’, they taught you the clenched fist upside your face. So you spoke English and knew how to pretty much protect yourself, and they showed you how a steak knife can still empty out your wallet. Now, from what Joe Gallagher read in the papers, they first shot you, then took your money…
And each time it happened, they got younger. Men had robbed his parents, with beards and dirty faces. Three kids, about his age when it first happened, staring at him, laughing, as they get on the D train at 59th Columbus Circle.
It was two a.m.
The train car was empty.
The train started pulling out of the station ever so slowly…
Joe Gallagher hoped that the kids won’t do anything till 7th Avenue, the next stop. That way, he get off and hop on the E to Queens and be safe…
One of the kids blurted:
“Yo, time to get paid.”
Then all three, in oversized jeans, football jackets, and baseball caps, started coming towards Joe Gallagher.
* * *
in another car…
out of, in-between…
wisps, unseen…
intangible, floating…
coming together.
like smoke, gray…
so easy to blow away…
becoming thicker…
can almost touch…
coming together.
something like skin…
substance, form…
blood, tissue so soft…
(THIS is NOT happening)
thoughts…
coming together.
light…the flickering of subway lights…
sound…the moaning of steel on steel…
smell…the musty cool air-
stale…like Fear…
coming together.
(almost THERE, my GOD)
and touch…
and screaming with no sound…like a fuse box overloaded with a million lights-
-but it doesn’t blow…
pulse, no heat…
memories, no past…
Life, but no breath…
together again…
Alive again.
the pain had passed, but the smell…of Fear…
stale…
coming from the next train car-
go to it.
* * *
It was like what Joe Gallagher saw in “Death Wish”… Bronson sitting there as three punks come up to him then, through the newspaper-
-BAM!
-BAM!
-BAM!
-But it wasn’t like that. Joe Gallagher’s newspaper was by his side. His hands weren’t feeling a hidden gun in his long coat. They’re still fiddling with the clasp of his watch. A watch that they didn’t take away from his father back in 1947 or from Joe Gallagher any of the other times…
And these kids want it, waving a gun in his face, taunting him.
Joe Gallagher thinks of how he never had kids because he didn’t want this to happen to them. He thinks of his wife Gloria, waiting for him to come home from work.
Joe Gallagher closes his eyes and starts, for the first time in thirty years, to pray…
“Yo man just pull the trigger and just take the shit,” one of the kids bark.
Then, the door between cars, at the far end, kliks-klaks open and the three youths and Joe Gallagher look to see-
…alive again…
-and it’s just a young guy. Thin white kid in a worn black biker jacket, faded jeans with a tear just below the knee, and a black tee-shit. A silver cross on a leather string catches Joe Gallagher’s eyes. It only looks like a cross around the stranger’s neck, but as he moves closer, it’s just one of those Egyptian crosses with a circle on top of it. An ankh. The young man’s hair is black, short on the sides and long, unkempt on the top. The stranger moves closer, ignoring the stares. To Joe Gallagher, the stranger seemed ignorant to the world..
Because of the young man’s eyes-
-like black smoke.
Then the muggers turn back to their old man. The watch, they say, or your life.
The stranger keeps moving towards them..
They snicker..
And the stranger is practically right behind them..
And the gun is right in front of Joe Gallagher’s nose..
The lights go out.
Joe Gallagher can hear ever so softly:
snap..crackle..pop
The lights come on..
The first kid, the one who talked the most, is slumped against a pole, on his knees. His head is crooked and unnaturally bent back, like an upside down ‘v’, skin broken revealing red and bone. The second kid, the one who had the gun, sprawled right in front of Joe Gallagher, his forehead completely crushed, gray and bloody. The third, the one who was quiet and behind the other two, across from Joe, his mouth open and eyes wide. A round hole, the diameter of an index finger, neatly placed in his right temple.
Joe Gallagher wants to throw up..
And thank God..
And cry..
But all he does is watch the stranger move on to the near by in-between car door and klik-klak it open and close.
With a sudden rush, Joe Gallagher gets up and runs to the door-
-and sees no one.
No worn leather jacket..no torn jeans..no stranger in the next car.
Joe Gallagher braces himself as the D train screams to a stop and gets out at 7th Avenue. He looks to his left, then his right. No one, nothing.
He remembers the silver ankh on the leather string around the stranger’s neck..
It’s a symbol of Life.
That much Joe Gallagher knows for sure. He looks behind him. The doors close.
The D train pulls out ever so slowly…
Joe Gallagher goes home and, for the first time months, makes love to his wife Gloria. He won’t ever mention about this attempted mugging to his wife, not like before. Joe Gallagher won’t tell anyone about what happened on that D train, won’t even take home anymore. He’ll start taking a cab at the company’s expense. Joe Gallagher’s learned his lesson…
At fifty-eight, Joe Gallagher wants children.
* * *
“It’s time”, says Thelma Wilkins, as she rises from her warm bed. She doesn’t need to take a shower this fine morning, Thelma Wilkins took one the night before.
“burr…It’s cold”, Thelma Wilkins says, under the chatter of her teeth, all five of them. Wrapping her mamma’s cashmere
scarf around her neck, Thelma Wilkins then buttons her fur coat and heads out the door.
Thelma Wilkins is going to the grocery store for some bread. At the token booth, a business man, his wife and their child
wait on line. Rush hour started a little early on this Thursday at West 4th Street.
Staring at the black lady walking through the orange slam gates, the little boy smiles.
Thelma Wilkins smiles back.
Grabbing his mommy’s coat, the blond child shouts joyfully, “Mom! The bum smiled at me! Hi, bag lady!” And his mother turns to scowl at Thelma Wilkins and holds her child close.
“Don’t look Timmy, then she’ll leave you alone.”
Thelma Wilkins stops smiling and raises her head. She wants to say something but-
What could she say..?
It was the truth.
People are beginning to stare and shove past her and she wants to cry…
Thelma Wilkins then remembers the bread and hurries on, ignoring her papa’s snobby guests and leaves her front porch.
The one in her house…
-Not in New York City.
No, Thelma Wilkins is not walking out of a train station in lower Manhattan-
In her mind, she’s walking through the white screen door, a bounce in her step…
Back in Missouri.
* * *
A cabby trying to blow a red light, slams on the brakes, his passenger nearly flying through the back partition.
“What the hell’s a matter with you!?!”, yells his passenger, some business lady.
The driver watches a little black woman, with a dingy scarf and a matted down, shredded fur coat, scurry across Sixth Avenue.
“Sorry..”, he says with a heavy accent, “Ees a bum, sorry.”
* * *
he walks through the park…
Washington Square Park…he thinks.
and pauses:
he can actually think again-
and see: the amber sun, so bright, rising in the east…hear: the sounds of nearby traffic and people bustling through crowds…taste: the air, as it rushes into his lungs, fresh…and the cigarette between his lips…harsh, burnt nicotine…feel: the cold concrete beneath his black boots and the purpose of his movements…
but smell: that was different than what he remembered…it was more like emotion now, adding a third dimension to his senses…like-
-there-
bitter-sweet…like honey roasted nuts…
sweet, yet overpowering…
a gray-white pigeon landed on his shoulder and cooed. he pet
it and glanced in the direction it came, west. a black woman, on one of the benches, feeding a crowd of twenty pigeons.
yes, he thought, there…
he knew what the smell was:
Sorrow…
* * *
Thelma Wilkins sits in her garden, feeding her papa’s pigeons. She thinks of how rude the grocer was, wouldn’t even take her money. It figures, he was white.
-Never will Thelma Wilkins admit that she had gotten the bread out of a dumpster, stale and half eaten; or admit that the white grocer was just another bum who said the dumpster was his.
No-
Thelma Wilkins bought the still warm loaf with her allowance. So she sat in her fur coat, on the marble, waiting for Jesse.
He was white too.
Then Thelma Wilkins hears the scuff of boot on concrete. She
looks up and just for a moment-
-She’s in Washington Square Park, in New York City, in the beginning of winter. Thelma Wilkins sees a thin white man walking towards her. Tall with messed up hair, in an old biker jacket and torn jeans and a black shirt and on the shirt, she sees a cross. A silver cross…
Like at the wedding…
Her and Jesse’s wedding…before they came to New York…and Jesse left…
NO-
Thelma Wilkins shakes her head and looks again and it’s Jesse. A warm smile underneath sparkling blue eyes and top it off
with wavy blond hair.
Oh Jesse…
And he smiles and the birds don’t flutter away and he kneels before her and asks her to marry him.
“Yes…”, Thelma Wilkins answers and her heart flutters, “Yes Jesse…”
(…the stranger takes off his round black sunglasses as he kneels before the woman and doesn’t say a word.
he doesn’t understand it, yet…)
And Jesse takes her away, Thelma Wilkins’ parents mad as hell and Jesse buys a van with the last cent he’s got and says that they’re going up north. Gonna be New Yorkers, Jesse says with a smile.
(…the stranger stares into the woman’s eyes and…)
“You sure it’s a good idea..? What are we gonna do…?”, Thelma Wilkins says nervously.
(…begins to shake his head slowly…)
But Thelma Wilkins is sittin’ in a run down apartment,
waiting for Jesse and she just had her baby and the baby girl’s crying and Thelma Wilkins knows Jesse won’t come back because-
“It ain’t my fault her legs are longer than mine!”, shouts Thelma Wilkins.
(…the stranger takes her trembling hands in his. he is beginning to understand…)
“Or that she’s smarter than me…or whiter than me..”,
whispers Thelma Wilkins, then starts to sob. Suddenly, Thelma
Wilkins shouts:”I HAD TO GIVE HER UP! I had no money! How was I
gonna feed that baby!?”
-And Thelma Wilkins knows where she really is and becomes slightly frightened by the young man before her. She can’t see his eyes behind those round black sunglasses but his hands, a man’s hands, hands that have fought not to be worn, that have fought time.
But the stranger cups her hands closed and a tear runs down his cheek. Thelma Wilkins feels that his hands are so warm, almost hot. Then the heat moves into the palms of her hands and she wants to let go-
…but the stranger just shakes his head and keeps her hands together for a second longer…
-and Thelma Wilkins feels something like a butterfly in her hands and she tries to see-
Then the stranger lets go and stands up. The cross Thelma Wilkins thought she saw, wasn’t a cross at all. It looked more like a ‘T’ with a circle on top of it, like a stick figure Jesus. She doesn’t know why she thought it was one to begin with.
Thelma Wilkins then looks at her hands…and there’s a photograph…of a beautiful light skinned black girl…
With blue eyes, Jesse’s eyes…
“My baby!”, Thelma Wilkins starts to cry happily. “She’s alright…she’s just fine…How did you kn-“, and Thelma Wilkins looks up, around, and behind the bench.
The stranger has disappeared, so have the birds.
Thelma Wilkins will take a shower and look for a job today. Eventually, she’ll get one as a waitress and find an apartment. Eventually she’ll get in touch with the daughter she abandoned twenty years ago and they’ll become the best of friends. Eventually, Thelma Wilkins will learn to forget that she was ever homeless but she’ll still come early mornings, to Washington Square Park-
-to feed the pigeons…
* * *
in a nearby mcdonald’s, packed with starving business suits waiting for mcmuffins, he sat-
then slumped against the fiberglass seating.
the photo of the abandoned girl-
…pulling out the homeless woman’s past, riding it until she left the baby in the rundown apartment…then leaving the homeless woman, latching onto the baby as she was found by the superintendent…carefully, speeding up the past…baby becoming foster child becoming adopted becoming teenager…slow it down…STOP, there…the abandoned girl taking a picture in one of those passport places…snatching that moment, blending it with the homeless mother’s sorrow and a bit of his soul; he brought it across to Reality, into the mother’s trembling hands, and made it real…
-he took a deep breath that turned into a yawn and caught himself. less than six hours back and he needed sleep. puzzled, he lit a cigarette and stretched out his legs underneath the small square table, crossing them. there’s so much to do, where to start…where to start..
then, so slowly, so unnoticeably, like a tide rising… ebbing, wave after wave, across hot white sand…making a rich, dark thought…that replayed the train ride and the park in his head and he wondered-
(…how…?)
-but the tide starts to recede…
the sand becoming hot and white again, losing it’s color… he tried to grasp the idea-
(…how…?)
-but the sand became pale again…
and his mind became a total blank.
for some reason, his cigarette caught his attention. it was like any other cigarette except for the brown little camel near the filter. camel lights, his brand for as long he could remember. what bothered him about the cigarette was the fact that he was sure that he lit up a good five minutes ago and it had barely burned.
troubled
(…how…?)
and yet anxious to see and feel the
city again, he got up and walked out onto third street. people crowded subway staircases and rushed past speeding cars, crossing
sixth avenue. faintly, he could hear below, the squealing of
arriving trains and the soft hiss of others leaving. the sounds and sights, the bustling and fast paces, the smoke of cars and foggy breaths of those on the sidewalks, Everything: made a rhythm. a rhythm that was easily missed and yet so overwhelming. once pulled, one would never know it even existed. he felt it however, crashing against walls of concrete and steel, full of glory and sadness, washing out petty minutes, ushering another day.
he smiled, leaving the front of mcdonald’s, all thoughts of sleep gone. they were replaced by the excitement of walking through the city again with the living…
welcome home.
* * *
One of the mopers had first noticed it and immediately notified one of the busy cashiers…
-“Yo, mamasita, check it out…”
“What? I’m busy…”
“Look, the gringo by the window, there. Holy shit.”-
Who then rushed to the manager and pointed out what the
moper had brought to her attention…
-“Al, we got a problem-”
“You CRAZY?! LOOK at that LINE, get back there, you crazy-”
“AL, we GOT a PROBLEM, okay? LOOK.”-
The manager, seeing the sincerity in the cashier’s eyes, went to the counter and looked over to the seats by the window.
He wasn’t the only one staring.
Everyone, later on, would dismiss what they saw. They will go on to their jobs and back to their homes, slipping back into the routines they made their lives out to be. Even if asked, they will not admit that they saw a young man in an MC and torn jeans with black John Lennon sunglasses and black hair. Nor will they admit how the young man’s black t-shirt and skin faded and disappeared, leaving floating hair and sunglasses, black jacket and jeans. Within this cutout, they will not say how they saw bone white sand and rushing dark blue water; or how, a few minutes later, the young man just reappeared, snapping back, filling the jeans, wearing the circular sunglasses and biker jacket, staring at his cigarette…
Then getting up and leaving.
No, they will never admit to seeing this. But…
While sleeping tonight, throughout their dreams, they will distantly hear the crashing of waves but, never see the shore. They will taste the saltiness of dry sand but, never feel it sift through their fingers…
They’ll never admit it-
But they’ll know.
* * *
You’re sleepy and probably a little horny too. That’s what runs through Terri Hughes’ mind as she tosses in her bed. Her jeans feel heavy and tight, and her white sweater is getting real annoying. Terri Hughes repeats it again, this time out loud, in a whisper.
“You’re sleepy and probably horny too.” It’s not convincing. Terri Hughes’ green eyes aren’t suddenly heavy and her mind isn’t emptying out, so she can think about not thinking. No, her eyes are jumping around her bedroom, from the see-through phone, to her feet in white fuzzy socks sticking out from under the covers, to the unfinished sketches cluttered on the floor.
Giving up, Terri Hughes throws the covers off her, sitting up and stares at the drawings. She hasn’t been able to get the image out of her head, since this morning but each time she started, she stopped. To her, each one looked wrong, missing some vital detail. Terri Hughes couldn’t put her finger on it and she couldn’t ignore it and it bothered her, she had other things planned for today: Calling Mom, upstate, to tell her that New York City was still being gentle; and calling Dad and his bimbo Sheryl, in Florida, to tell them about how she did on her finals; and leaving a message on Todd’s answering machine, reminding him to go screw himself; oh, and killing herself too.
This isn’t a whim in Terri Hughes’ mind. No, she’s been thinking about this for a long time, since Thanksgiving actually. Christmas was now two weeks away and she said, ‘Why not?’. Terri Hughes had heard that the suicide rate goes up around this time of year, so she checked it out. Wouldn’t want to be just another statistic. It doesn’t, sometimes, it even slightly drops off.
Couldn’t let that happen, thinks Terri Hughes and laughs. It’s a sad laugh, one of a broken heart and bleak future. Why not? Terri Hughes nervously laughs again. Look at her: She wants to love and be loved, but could she put a child of her own through the Hell her parents’ two year divorce left upon her? So Terri shies away from men that seem sincere and falls for those that she knew weren’t. What, her amazing talent of art? Maybe if things were different Terri Hughes could’ve lived for that, but her professor had said she lacks focus and failed her. The unfinished sketches on the floor prove that. But what about her stunning dark red hair and slim, trim body? Looks that make most men stuck on the idea of what’s between her legs and not in her head and that created a strange love hate thing about her looks. She could go back to living with Mom, up in New Paltz, maybe even finish college there. But if she feels strangled here, imagine there, under constant watch and paranoia. How would she look with a leash around her neck? Florida is out of the question, where Daddy’s getting not only his dick sucked, but his wallet too by Sheryl, and that was fine for him because that was how he viewed women. How could she could go there? But where could Terri go? What was for her in a world where people watched others kill each other and sometimes even paid money to see it? Terri wouldn’t watch TV because it left her sleepless and aching for something more. I’m no altruist, she thinks, I want somewhere to belong. I want to feel a part of this world and find something real, something beyond what I see. I want something to feel me, not feel me up. I don’t want to be raped anymore. There’s nothing left to abuse. There’s nothing left but this empty space that I don’t remember if it ever held anything. Empty in a hungry world.
Nothing to live for.
Terri Hughes silently cries…
And looks again at the sketches. One that’s almost finished, she stares at. For some reason, she can’t the image out of her head. The razor that she got this morning, is right there, on the lamp table. The setting sun is throwing beams on its steel edge. It’s like a tug of war:
The nearly finished face…
and the razor, clean and sharp.
The dangling cigarette between thin lips…
and the razor, almost saying, it’s not that hard.
The sunglasses, the black hair, the silver ankh around his neck…
Terri Hughes picks up the razor. She laughs at how badly she’s shaking. You’re not scared, Terri Hughes tells herself and knows she’s lying again, but she doesn’t give up.
Terri Hughes promised herself.
So, ever so cautious, like she’s being careful not to hurt herself, she presses it to the soft of her left wrist and goes across.
Not down, like your supposed to, says a tiny voice in her. And Terri Hughes sees the blood, bright, start pouring out.
It feels like warm milk…
The voice inside her grows louder and she’s beginning to feel calm: Now down like you know you should. Down and maybe a little deeper…
And Terri Hughes does that and it stings just like a needle and cuts just like butter…
It’s so warm down her wrist…
And seeing how easy it is and the voice booming in her head, wanting so much to die, to show them all how far Life pushed around this twenty-two year old girl, she switches the blade to her left hand…
Draw pictures this time.
* * *
he had started from 3rd avenue, taking in the sights. somewhere between there and 57th street, he realized what he really missed: the thousands of little scenes, like short plays happening all around the city, between people. the way they interacted on the corners and the small delis, in the posh restaurants of midtown and the tin hot dog stands on the streets.
it was what Life was all about.
he also noticed how people scurried from the bitter wind that blew up the avenues and how there was a sheen of ice along the curbs. for a few scant seconds, he wondered why he wasn’t freezing, wearing only a tee-shirt and mc.
in the business section of midtown manhattan, people crowded around store fronts, where there were lavish Nativity scenes and each block had a santa claus ringing bells. a light tingle rose in his chest: it was christmas time, or near to it at least.
memories of decorated trees and colorful, flashing lights, of silver tinsel and well sung carols, went through his mind.
he paused, then walked on.
there were also the smells, that he breathed in, full offresh happiness and the smell of wine: Hope. a couple of times, he caught whiffs of oil, Despair, and a bit of rotting greed but,
the bouquet of newly opened wine rose throughout the streets, from every building and shop. by the time he started crossing the 59th street Bridge, he felt giddy.
while in queens, he trekked on queens boulevard as it snaked through Long Island city, with its crowd of cars and dirty buildings. the overpasses and potholes turned into long blocks with stretches of auto dealerships, banks, restaurants, shopping centers and movie theaters. he passed the entrances to the queens-midtown tunnel, the Long Island expressway, the brooklyn queens expressway, and the interboro parkway. a buzz hung around where people shopped, a humming of thoughts all revolving on what to get for who, that he picked up along the boulevard. it came from all kinds of people: rich, poor, black, white, beautiful, and ugly.
and he walked on.
somewhere in kew gardens (he was pretty sure it was kew gardens), he turned up a block on his right. he then found himself in the middle of apartment buildings and lavish private homes with wide, snow covered lawns. he realized then, as the sun drooped towards the horizon, what New York City was: a jigsaw puzzle, with pieces of gray, black, green, red, and a few clear ones. a puzzle that a child, who didn’t really care, just forced together, the finished picture not making any real sense.
but he loved it all.
making another turn, as he lit another cigarette, he reveled in what he saw today and thought of what he would see tonight. the City was totally dif-
no…
the smell of burning paper.
No…
the kind that comes from a million lit up books.
NO.
he knew it and feared it because he had been there. spinning to his left…looking…the apartment window two floors up…
there.
he started running to the entrance and wanted to scream because the smell was so strong and filling his chest to the point where he couldn’t breathe.
Death smells like that.
he couldn’t help himself from feeling cold.
* * *
Terri Hughes thinks the pictures were nice but can’t tell with all the blood in the way. Her head’s real fuzzy and she remembers something about being a little horny and everything is so red.
And she wants to cry herself to sleep.
Suddenly, there’s a slam at her door and she tries to get up and see but Terri Hughes is so tired. She looks at the doorway and sees some guy, a model and thinks: oh great, I’m facing oblivion here and somebody’s decided to do a photo shoot…
The stranger rushes to her bedside and takes her hands and his hands are shaking as badly as hers were before. Terri Hughes stares at the stranger’s face and rolls her head to the drawings and back.
Now wait a minute here…
And the voice that was booming before, that went away, is back and it hurts and Terri Hughes doesn’t feel anymore blood on her wrists and the stranger’s eyes are closed, like he’s praying, and he’s crying.
The voice is screaming: GO AWAY I WANNA DIE!
And there’s tingling shocks, like static electricity,
jumping all around Terri Hughes’ wrists.
“stop…stop..”, she tries to push him away but the voice inside is getting weaker.
No, leave me alone…!
And Terri Hughes looks at the stranger again and the sketches and back and forth, like a tug of war-
…there’s so much pain here. He’s trying to sew up the inner and outer wounds all at the same time. The damage to the soul, the girl was too precious not to be careful with…
And he’s rushing this…
-A thought hits Terri Hughes, as the little voice inside her fades, Hey, this is the same face, isn’t it? And her head’s starting to clear and she feels like she’s waking up-
…replace Death. negate it, flip it. nothing that he has done will mean anything if she still wants to. take the black, fill it with light. where’s the light going to come from?
again, he cuts from…
-And Terri Hughes feels this slow blooming within her of children and promises and it’s an old memory of one that she once had and never did. The stranger let’s go of her hands. Terri is rising and she has been changed. She blinks, breathing as if for the first time. There’s his odd nag saying within her ‘look at your wrists. look’. There are no scars. Terri knows this before looking and is still confused when she checks. She looks up. The stranger is standing. He sighs and then takes one last look at her and turns-
But Terri Hughes can’t get something out of her mind, so she whispers, “..who are you…?”
The stranger stops dead in his tracks and for a split second, the time it takes for Terri Hughes to blink, his form ripples. slowly he turns, he doesn’t see what change he has made on this girl’s life, like with the old man and the homeless woman. he doesn’t disappear, like before, to move on…
The silence crowds the room…
for the first time since he’s been back, he tries to speak. Terri expects a deep voice like a winter’s night and soft like a baby’s breath but hears nothing. mouth open on the verge but caught between expectation and her eyes, on the verge of, what can he say, he didn’t-he really didn’t know.
* * *
Earlier on today, around two in the afternoon, a high school teacher walked into a classroom. The students inside were all talking amongst themselves when they heard the door close and took notice. The students started talking again, like nothing happened. A few guys, in the back of the classroom, smiled.
The teacher was a substitute.
The guys in the back started tearing sheets from their tattered notebooks, making sure the sub noticed.
The teacher had been through this before. He knew the routine. Sooner or later the guys in the back, when he would start to take attendance, would throw paper balls and planes at him. Then they would get loud and witty, saying that their names
were Suck, My, and Dick or maybe Get, A., and Life. Something
clever. Eventually, they would make threats and walk out laughing. If they were real men, they would probably hit the teacher if he went after them. He knew the routine and had the scars to prove it but, today would be different.
The guys from the back started moving up toward the desk. The saw the substitute lay his briefcase flat on the desk and open it. The teacher then pulled out an Uzi and the guys froze. Before anyone could have said anything witty, like “DON’T”, the sub pulled the trigger.
When the police finally arrived, they found the teacher seated at his desk, in front of a classroom splattered with blood and torn flesh. Giving no resistance, the teacher closed his
briefcase and smiled.
“We were just discussing the works of Gandhi”, he had said.
It turns out he lived in an apartment in Queens. His record with the Board of Education was spotless and his psychiatrist couldn’t even believe it. According to his wife of twenty years, the man loved teaching, it was his life.
He lives three floors above Terri Hughes.
* * *
“Why did you… You know,” Terri Hughes asks the stranger, as she sits across from him in the kitchen. She’s scared and
oddly fascinated.
he takes the beer Terri gave him and takes a gulp. it’s
bitter and refreshing as it slides down his throat. he’s never been thirstier. looking into Terri’s eyes, he wonders why he’s still here, why he doesn’t have a name and, Why did you?
And Terri picks up on this. Right after asking she could see the flip side to it and his eyes seem to ask it. Terri takes a sip from her glass of whiskey and coke. Every time she glances at the glass, she stares at her wrists, unable to believe that just a half hour ago, blood poured from them. There’s a million things buzzing through her head and she really can’t believe that she’s still alive. She looks back up at the stranger and tries to find the words for what she tried to do, but as they come out, she knows there just excuses. “I don’t know, life was shitty. There’s this guy, Todd, who I’ve been steady with…Well-“, normally tears would swell up now, but Terri doesn’t feel the need anymore, “-he disappeared on me about a month ago and see, I’m an art major-“, and she feels her cheeks flush: Obviously, he seen the sketches, “-oils basically…I dream of exhibiting at the Met…Anyway, there’s this professor who finally knows what he’s talking about so, I had tried everything to pass his course…”, Terri makes a face and scowls, “And you know what he does? The prick fails me, you believe that?”
he’s been quiet, listening, taking sips from the beer. he raises his eyebrows, questioning.
There’s a beat.
“So?!” Terri can’t believe it, she’s almost out her seat. He takes her hands and rests his elbows on the counter top. her fingernails are thin delicate, yet strong. short nails polished a deep red. he thinks, Life’s too precious to throw away for any reason. he’s waiting for her to pull her hands away, but she doesn’t. In fact, she slightly squeezes his.
“Let me guess..Life’s too precious to throw away for any reason..” and she pauses. Her fingers grow cold, ” ..I..shouldn’t expect it…to be easy…or…it wouldn’t..be worth..it?”
he stares and there’s something about that look that makes Terri nervous, old and glad to be back, glad to be…
…alive again…
Now that threw her. She pulls her hands away and leans back, “ooohkay.” Terri takes a stiff one from her glass.
he pulls at the collar of his tee-shirt, revealing a five inch scar, like a line of lightening, twisted, thin, pink flesh, right over where his heart would be.
Terri’s eyes are popping out and she feels goose bumps squirm under her skin. “What happened?”
he shrugs and finishes the beer. he sees that Terri’s got the chills. he takes out his pack of cigarettes, holds them out, pauses, can I?
Getting up, she finds a heavy glass ashtray and places it in front of him. Walking back around the counter, she sits back in her seat. Terri quit last year and itched for one now, but she ignores the urge.
he nods once, lights up. he takes a drag, letting the smoke leave through his mouth slowly. sitting back, he shakes his head slowly.
“What?”, thin eyebrows raised, full lips slightly apart, green eyes questioning.
he keeps shaking his head.
“What?!”, both hands firmly on the counter top, demanding.
he stops, points the cigarette at her.
“What about me? Am I funny?”
he gets up, walks into the bedroom, comes back. Slowly, one by one, he puts each sketch on the counter, carefully, planned. he pauses, looks at her, then places the last one on top of the rest, centering it in front of her, the one that was almost finished but definitely him. he drops a single finger on it, hard.
“I…I can’t explain the sketches…You just popped into my head when I woke up. Before I….And no, I don’t know you and I can’t explain any of it and..,” Terri stops. She then tilts her head, softly, “Do you even remember your name?”
he doesn’t move.
“What can I call you?”
His eyes seemed to say, Whatever you want, and whether that was true or not Terri didn’t care. “Let’s make one up…ok? Just go with it,” Terri thinks and squints her eyes, looking to the side. “Hmmm…Something mysterious, but not cliche..” Her eyes light up, “Stefan?”
he doesn’t move.
Terri rolls her eyes. “Evan?”
he doesn’t need to say a word.
“I don’t know…Eric?”
come on, he stubs out his cigarette.
Terri starts by looking him over. His face has high cheeks and a thin nose to divide them. Underneath, a small mouth. But his eyes, they made her think of smoke, the way light and colors danced in them. Then came his body, thin and Terri imagined by the way he carried himself, well toned, like a Greco-Roman sculpture. Wide shoulders to thin waist, almost like a triangle. All under a black, worn MC jacket, t-shirt, and torn jeans. Then she thinks of how he saved her, how she feels that he came back and the scar and the image of Greek sculpture…
“Myth…?”, she says, biting her bottom lip.
he sits back, lighting another cigarette. Myth struck a bell in his head…
And Terri doesn’t know why she’s anxious or why she’s even bothering, or caring at all but, she does.
he smiles.
“Cool deal.” she says and they both smile and he thinks he’s falling in love…
* * *
It’s dark and freezing, a sharp wind is cutting through the dirty windows but, Tommy D’Angelis is thinking only one thing:
The blood won’t come off my hands.
Tommy D’Angelis tried everything since last night, to wash out the stain from his fingers. From soap to liquid dishwasher to Ajax cleaner to paint thinner…
Nothing and the blood is even still wet, Tommy D’Angelis can feel it.
So, Tommy D’Angelis now takes off the gloves he wore to the supermarket and tries not to stare at his hands. He takes out from the white plastic bag, a small box. Tommy D’Angelis notices that he doesn’t leave a smear on either, or on anything else for that matter.
He stumbles through his apartment, anxious, nearly knocks over the sculpture his girlfriend, ex-girlfriend really, gave him
three months ago. Passing right through the living room, Tommy
D’Angelis doesn’t notice that his answering machine light is blinking. Before the small kitchen sink, Tommy D’Angelis turns on both faucets. He’s thinking:
I shouldn’t have stabbed him there-
Tommy D’Angelis rips open the cardboard box. Since two in the morning, this blood’s been driving him crazy…
-this better fucking work..Fuck, I shouldn’t have stabbed his fucking-
And he pours Ajax all over the brillo pad he bought. The greenish powder itches his nose and his forehead is sweaty…
-heart! So much fucking blood! Why won’t it come off, why shitshitshit why?!?-
Tommy D’Angelis bites his lip to keep from screaming. The brillo pad hurts so much but, he keeps scraping, even a little harder.
-fuck….fuck…-
And the sink fills with thin blood and water, almost reaching the rim.
-FUCKING JESUS!-
It takes about an hour of scrapping his palms, an hour of seeing his skin peel away with the wire pad, that Tommy D’Angelis realizes that the blood in the sink is his own.
The other blood still hasn’t come off his hands.
Between tears and lack of breath, between screaming pain and
sweat, Tommy D’Angelis slumps to his knees…
And starts giggling.
* * *
Out on Long Island, in Mattituck, a mother stares at her three month old baby in her pink cradle. New windows shutter because of the wind outside. The mother’s heart shudders as she sighs.
The baby gurgles in her sleep, the mother stares.
She can’t cry anymore for her son.
He’s gone to a better place.
Gently, her newlywed husband hugs her. His eyes are red and
cracked and his breath is heavy. Her son wasn’t his but…
The baby gurgles in her sleep, the parents stare.
Both hold each other tightly, as the mother finally lets the emptiness settle in and he cries.
The funeral was set for Saturday.
The day after tomorrow.
Her son loved Saturdays.
* * *
he can’t believe it.
Terri had left about ten minutes ago, grocery shopping and picking up some chinese food. Myth liked the name and he opened a beer and settled on the couch, remote in hand, tv across from him.
on and flicker. and Myth felt pulled and raked and buzzed and torn and flooded and shot and entered and licked and seduced, punched torn and pushed raped and burning in his head that didn’t connect with lights and sounds but sterile nothing taste great less filling bombs tearing and (so much powder of your faces) pristine teeth too white and shiny and nails a deeper gloss of and I’m not just a get rid off those get out of New but made for a woman tonight on the where your children I’ve decided to keep it jake step out of the old muffler sound like this such sights to show (so much powder of your faces) its raining oh jeez edith uhheh-uh or something it’s not a good day to be top stories tonight. focus focus screen OUT focus there. he didn’t know how long he was gone. an anchorman, with straight line parted brown hair and serious eyes, was saying:
“Once again, our top stories tonight: Three teenagers were found killed on a south bound D train early this warning. Police approximate time of death between midnight and four a.m. No witnesses have come forward and police have yet to establish any motives…”
he feels odd, regret. he remembers Terri, ‘..Life’s too precious..’, but they were killing for fun. they were going to kill. he wonders if he’s justified.
listen some more. bzzz. focus.
“…Also, today, a substitute teacher working at LaGuardia High School, with an Uzi submachine gun, gunned down an entire class of thirty students.
“The police commissioner denied any connection to the two killings and said the that they were coincidence-”
he heard the sliding of elevator doors in the hallway. Terri.
the tv went off and he raised the nearly empty can to his lips. a feeling like a cat’s tongue, no sandpaper, caressed the back of his neck, raw.
the sliding of cylinders in a deadbolt lock and a turn of a knob and Terri was home. “Hey, I’m home.”
She sees Myth sitting in the dark, “Yoo-hoo..You okay?”
coincidence…
the word bothered him and the feeling of a cat licking his neck, raw, sending chills down his spine, wouldn’t leave. Myth turned to Terri.
Terri stood there for a moment caught in just looking at Myth.
There’s a beat.
he gets up, as she closes the door and throws away the beer can, walking into the kitchen.
Plastic bag tossed on the counter with milk, juice and stuff, Terri brings the big brown bag, red-white menu stapled on one side, to the table. She notices that Myth had already set it, knives, forks, spoons and napkins. Myth tried to see what was circled off on the menu. Placing it in front of him, she said, “Don’t try. I got, Everything…”
he helps Terri unload the white cartons onto the table.
Standing next to him, Terri felt a sense of security and dream, of being home in very big place. God, you don’t even know him and you bought him dinner yeah, but she couldn’t explain it. “Before, when I came in, what were you thinking? I mean, you seemed like you were far, far away.”
the tickling of cats’ tongues and coincidence…
Myth shook his head as if, Nothing, nothing at all.
* * *
The moon, wide and scarred and pale, rises.
It’s midnight and the streets are cold.
A part of the city is getting ready for a Thursday night on the town.
Another is sleeping. There are people in beds, warm under heavy blankets or quilts. Others are lying on cement or in train cars, curled in rags. Layers of rags. Some are alone, some have just finished making love. Some snore and some talk.
They’re all dreaming.
Dreaming about things that don’t make sense, but seem so real: about lost friends, childhood pasts or the first million; about rotted food, off the wall sex, or trips through Hollywood. The dreamers either see their hidden, deep hopes or larger than life fears.
Dreams are a reflection of the mind and soul, basically.
And every child, thumb stuck in mouth, and every woman, scent of a lover’s cologne on her chest, and every man, gripping the sheets, is a drop…
A drop in the Dreaming.
A sea that stretches from Reality, a rocky sandless shore, to a shapeless horizon called Eternity. It’s something one can never see or feel physically. It doesn’t really exist in the conscience world of concrete and flesh. It isn’t tangible, but the Dreaming is more real than Hell or anything else. Everyone is a part of it, unified and at peace here more than they can ever be when awake. A third of their lives is spent here, creating and keeping the Dreaming. It touches them all, as much as they take part in it. Ever notice how on edge are the people who get no sleep? The ‘edge’ is the calling of the Dreaming…
Of the womb of warm wet semi-dark, before birth…
Of a sea, forever at sunset, without tides…
The calm of Life.
Normally, it’s quite boring here-
-but not tonight.
* * *
There is a man by the name of Joe Gallahger, treading in the Womb Before Birth, in the Dreaming. He’s dozing off in the back of a company cab, in the Queens Midtown Tunnel. Joe Gallahger had the scariest and happiest thing happen to him yesterday, on the train. Three muggers died in front of him, three muggers who were going to take the watch his father had given to him.
In other words, Joe Gallahger was saved.
Joe Gallahger had thought of the stranger all day. He couldn’t get over how the young man did it and how he disappeared, without a thank you from Joe. In the forty plus years he’s been in New York, Joe Gallahger never saw such a thing: An act of salvation and damnation without reward. An act of pure justice and horror. An act of a stranger with black smoke for eyes…
And then he had spoken to his wife, this morning, about adopting a child. Joe Gallahger, nervous for a reaction, watched as Gloria’s plum face, wrinkled eyes and puffed cheeks, gray strands of hair behind her ears, lips still as full as when she was twenty, stretch slowly into a smile. For Joe Gallahger, it was like a door opening in the dark: light shining on a small man, back bent and thin legs, with hairy arms like trees and a potato sack for a stomach, hair thin and graying away to nothing, with dull, small eyes that saw clearly and a stubby, large nose that smelled practically nothing. Hugging Gloria in his arms, Joe Gallahger saw that light in his mind and it gave him strength. It was Hope.
This is what Joe Gallahger is dreaming about.
Hope.
He really shouldn’t be dreaming though. Joe Gallahger shouldn’t be in the Dreaming at all. He’s supposed to be dead on the D train, killed by a gunshot blew off his face. The three muggers are supposed to be pawning the watch Joe wouldn’t give up.
But Joe Gallahger is alive and well…
* * *
Ever slightly, the Dreaming shifts…
* * *
Right there, between 59th and 125th street on the D train, on a cold, sticky floor in the last car, Thelma Wilkins is sleeping against the far corner. The few people that sit around her glance with contempt and turn their noses away from the smell of piss and sweat from the homeless crowded in the car.
But Thelma Wilkins doesn’t mind. She’s asleep in the Calm of Life, the Dreaming. Besides, it’ll be the last time she sleeps on a train. In one day, Thelma Wilkins has managed about forty dollars.
One more day of shuffling through subways, crying and holding her cup, jingling it and asking for change. One more day of stone-faced business people, giggling teens and awed babies, of sympathetic stares, shaking heads and newspapers thrown up like shields. One more day of people not believing.
Thelma Wilkins sleeps, resting for what she knows will be a hard day. She sleeps and her hands, hands dark and somehow still young still tickle. The photograph is in her hands and it’s still warm and maybe for different reasons now. She sleeps knowing how she looks and how she smells and even that is something she hasn’t done since… but today it’s not as bad as it was before, today she took care and was careful of where sat and what she ate. She sleeps and the photograph is still in her hands, not clutched, resting in her palms, it cannot be taken away from her. Thelma sleeps and dreams of what tomorrow will bring: The welfare hotel on 14th and six, a job, an apartment, an abandoned daughter tracked down and a bittersweet reunion, of the young pale man that ‘woke’ her up.
A new life, a future, is the theme of Thelma Wilkins’ dreams.
But this is wrong.
Thelma Wilkins should be dreaming of Missouri, of how a young black girl was swept off her feet and dumped in New York City, of how she abandoned her baby and roamed the streets and start all over in her poppa’s garden with the birds. Dream over and over that year, to relive the loop, to never accept how she was growing old and crackling in a city that was old and crushing.
In other words, Thelma Wilkins is supposed to be still insane.
She’s not anymore.
* * *
There is movement in the Dreaming
* * *
Scattered throughout the Sea Without Tides, the Dreaming, are a little over twenty people tossing and turning in their sleep. Twenty people, each mind filled with a mosaic of lives, years, hopes, ideals, values, sorrows, beliefs and fears. Twenty something normal people, a cross section of race, color, age, gender, all shaking in their sleep, disturbed.
They’re all dreaming of being blind, hearing the thunder of waves and the taste of hot, dry, sand.
* * *
There
A ripple
A ripple in the Dreaming
* * *
Outside (Next to) the Sea Without Tides, in Reality:
Myth does not sleep.
he has not moved a single inch since midnight. when Terri had fallen asleep, he picked her up from the couch and tucked her in bed.
-without thinking of her body, without thinking of her smooth neck, without thinking of the feel of her breath on his neck as he cradled her from the living room, or the brush of her hair against his cheek as he laid her down, without-
he does not sleep and instead sits on the floor beside the bed. he is carving the outline of her into the wide empty stone canvas of his mind. over and over. over and over. every sigh, every scent, every turn and lash and line. over and over, carving into the empty stone canvas, never to be erased, to also be a focus. Myth doesn’t understand why Terri is important to him, why he has the urge to stay with her, to protect her. to protect..over and over, carving. something was not quite right. everything looked Real, felt Real and happened the Way Things Should, not really though, not since-
he continues watching Terri, taking in every scent, sigh, turn, lash and line, carving it all on the stone canvas on his mind. he does not sleep for he might not wake up again or he might really wake up from this.
again he feels the uneasiness of wet sandpaper on his neck, the news flash briefly across the stone canvas, coincidence is beginning to sound like suspicion and there’s this pull, a rubberband stretched and tugging at him from someplace Else but someplace Else is something Myth doesn’t know where. he finds things a little strange but can’t put his finger on the imperfection, so he lights another cigarette in the dark and stares at Terri.
There’s a pile of canvas shavings beside him and the only pack of cigarettes he’s had is still full.
Myth doesn’t notice.
It’s been 24 hours.
* * *
He will not cry…
It’s black but the snow kind of glows blue and the silence from the crickets chill Michael Tsakis. His bed is empty and cold. The red numbers on the bedside cloak tell him it’s three a.m. and his wife is not with him. Michael Tsakis gets up, weary because of years of labor, wearier since his stepson’s death and checks the pink cradle. Seeing it empty, he scratches his thinning scalp to keep from tearing his eyes out and walks into the hallway. Midway between the bedroom and the livingroom, Michael Tsakis finds the basement door open. He knew she was down there and so was the baby. Michael Tsakis knows because he can hear the sighs of exhausted sleep from his wife. Down there, down stairs, down the steps to the basement apartment where his stepson lived. There in that basement that the stepson always wanted and turned into a studio. There, down there, downstairs where one wall was painted black with a collage of sketches, photos, and quotes while the other three were a spotless white. There where he wrote for hours, ate when he wanted to be alone, drank when he was angry with the world. There where Michael Tsakis’ stepson was most alive.
Michael Tsakis will not cry.
Down there, downstairs, down the steps, staying close to home, hardly home but trying his best to help, to share dreams and hopes, to joke and to be sarcastic with a grin, to be who he was meant to be, to stand by his mother’s side. Not anymore, not anymore, the grin and strange laughter was stripped when the phone rang here twenty-four hours ago and they told Michael Tsakis that his stepson was-
He will not cry down there, down the steps, downstairs.
My son, thinks Michael Tsakis and feels a pin rip through his heart. When he hits bottom (and inside he’s wanting to hit bottom, to stop falling through memory after memory, to hit bottom of this pain and somehow start to climb again), Michael Tsakis sees the shape of his wife and their newborn daughter on the bed, both whimpering. Michael Tsakis doesn’t have to see his wife’s tears, doesn’t have to see her dark brown hair wet and matted around her cheeks, he knows that she is crying. Just when he thought she had hit bottom, she must have lost her footing and went spiraling again. The thought drags at his heart as the pin goes through it, in and out, and the sorrow floods his chest and eyes.
Michael Tsakis wishes he could hit bottom so he can climb but he just stands there and begins to cry, dropping.
* * *
There is a detective, a big man, trying to see the words on a report. A pint of ouzo whispers its location into his ears. There is a photograph of a dead body within his inside jacket pocket. It isn’t his case but he wants to solve it. The sergeant detective, a private man, 32, knows the deceased. There is anger in the way he tries to read the autopsy report. Words like ‘incision’ and ‘lacerations splitting cardio tissue’ mingle with the location of the ouzo.
There is a man, who is a detective of sergeant rank and authority over five other detectives, growling, “…that bastard..”, as he reaches for the hidden liquor.
There is a police station off the Major Deegan, on University Ave, called the four-four. Inside that station house, is a detective with a .44 clipped to his belt, downing a pint of heavy liquor. His shift ended at midnight but he’s still here and it’s a quarter to four in the morning.
There is a precinct house called the four-four and inside it is an alcoholic sargeant detective with the homicide file of a young friend on his desk that he knows that he shouldn’t even have, let alone investigate.
The man feels helpless.
* * *
The Dreaming:
Terri Hughes is floating in the Calm of Life. For her, the same dream runs over and over again. It starts out really sad with a crying little in torn clothes. The little girl is on a cliff. A bitter wind, not cold but uncaring swirls about her. The little girl doesn’t look behind her but knows that no one is there to stop her.
She jumps.
As soon as she sees the ground below, as soon as she realizes that the wind has stopped but her hair whips about her, there’s a slam at the door and Terri Hughes knows it’s Myth and the little girl can see him rising up to her, catch her and the little girl becomes Terri and up, up, and away.
She hugs Myth tighter as they rise past the cliff into the sky so blue. She can see he’s crying but he smiles softly, please don’t do that again…,not outloud, in her head.
Terri nods and buries her head in his chest and the breeze whispers good things. As they fly up, Terri sees the unfinished sketches trail and drift below them, unfinished, white, lines, spiraling. Just as she focuses on one sketch, the little girl is on the cliff again and the wind is bitter, not cold but uncaring…
But this isn’t How Things Should Be.
Terri Hughes should be dreaming about the nothing, the not being of Death. She should be in St John’s Hospital, in critical condition. As a matter of fact, her boyfriend Todd should have discovered her after she had sliced open her wrists when he had
come over her apartment to explain. All in all Terri Hughes should be dreaming of a way to get a hold of a needle and having her veins get a breath of fresh air.
But she’s dreaming of Life.
* * *
A ripple as if aware
* * *
And right on that, surfing and disturbing the slumber of those beneath his feet, Tommy D’Angelis sleeps with eyes open, dreams without blinking.
Even though he knows the TV’s on, the bzzz of moving static lighting his eyes, he only sees drops of blood lightly fall on his lashes. It’s memory and dream and the beginning, drops of blood on the eyelash. It’s never been, Tommy D’Angelis thinks, eyes never fluttering now, not even then, so REAL. He dreams of nothing but memory and need and chewing and dusting off corners of those who struggled, begged or bargained and those that simply knew.
Like Cynthia. A child’s voice whispered, far in the background, right next to his ears, an echo in the Dreaming that will linger and ache in everyone’s dreams until awakening. The drop of blood pauses as it descends from the eyelash, freezeframe. Tommy D’Angelis remembers:
Junior High School, scent of autumn, whether it was spring or winter, school smelled of autumn. Black ponytail and nicknames like Butch Cassidy, teasing her, other boys. Tommy was Sundance, the two a pair. Partners in crime. Mr Frankel stuck to his seat, Marigold Wethers finding a snake in her bookbag, tandem explosions in the bathrooms, dissected cat on Principal Bickoff’s desk with labels.
‘That was…too far’, she had said later, not giggling like all those other times. She’d say that and giggle but not then. Only he was. Suddenly it was a private joke and Tommy couldn’t understand why Cynthia didn’t get it.
‘But’, he had said, still smiling, still willing, maybe she was teasing, maybe a delayed reaction could be brought.
‘Don’t Touch Me!’, ponytail whipping away.
‘You said it’d be funny if-‘
And she had look up then down hands wringing (like he was doing before before before) a stutter in and out of her head, ‘no nono NoNOOO’ then screamed, hands near her face, fingers outstretched like she was holding a fishbowl over her head. Tommy D’Angelis then felt the swell in his pants and suddenly things changed, a distance that made her a part of what she didn’t understand that had her screaming now came over him and fifteen, just fifteen picked up a rock that can only be found at night in a school yard, never during the day. Rock, smack against her head and she wouldn’t stop, again and he brought her to the floor. Third time but he used his hands and his hands came away dyed. He struggled with her pants. Fourth and fifth she stopped
II: Unprovoked Entanglement
“And honey, how’s your breathing?
If it stops, fuck it, we’ll be leaving.
And honey, how’s your daughter?
Did you teach her what is torture?
Well if you didn’t, well you oughta-
Do it now…”
-Happy Mondays, “Dennis and Lois”
“The descent to Hell is easy”
(Facilius descendus averno)
-Virgil, Aeneid
Tommy D’Angelis felt the sunrise. It was close to eight a.m. He felt calm, his face felt sticky, his hands no longer trembled. the blood was calm. He got up, turned off the t.v., tossed the remote and went to the bathroom. Standing in front of the sink, he washed his face, felt the stubble on his cheeks and chin, and paused.
The blood was gone.
Tommy D’Angelis blinked. Once, twice.
It was still there. The blood on his hands.
He blinked again.
It was gone.
Tommy closes his eyes and breathes slowly.
-Let it be there Let it still be there-
One eye, squinted.
Red haze, glow, warm.
….more…, the blood said.
* * *
“I wish I knew more..”
Another phone, another introduction, just another homicide.
“Sorry, no speeky de eenglesh”
Routine. Phone calls. Down the list. Down the phone numbers.
“How do I know you’re a cop?”
Just another homicide.
“Do you know what time it is?!”
No forms. Pen. Notebook. Empty.
“Maybe night security can help ya.”
Empty. Routine. Just a homicide. Black phone.
“Let me have the number of your precinct house, the
forty fourth, was it?”
Hang up. No forms. Bottle in drawer. Morning shift
coming in.
…When’d You come in O’Keefe?…Yo sarge…
…Top of the morning’, huh sarge?..Morning’..
…Heard about it, um, sorry…………….
Routine. Phone calls. Part of investigation.
Sunlight. Dust.
Dialing.
“Hello, this is Sergeant Detective O’Keefe…with the Four-four…yes..Well I’m calling about a homicide..”
* * *
empty.
this is what he felt. this what he felt looking
out Terri’s apartment window. he felt this sorrow engulf
him and it was different than the homeless woman’s. this
was in a different language. it felt like home and empty.
a huge terrifying hole that nothing could ever change, this settling of sunlight and dust and cold winter.
empty.
it reminded him of Terri, of losing something that Life could never replace, that this was it, this feeling of memory, of what was, of everything only being in the past tense.
something within Myth was holding onto it, not letting go, and he felt like going There. how could he sit here while this was going on, while someone was feeling this with Life all around them, feeling empty? but he doesn’t move, taking all of this, trying to place
it’ why was it so familiar, why did he want to drown himself in this, in the smell of empty rooms unopened for years, in rooms that once held someone.
empty.
Terri shifted, rustling of the sheets.
he turned his head.
dreaming and calm and hair tousled, this deep, dark red across her pillow. arms open, waiting for someone to be in them. skin pale but not ghostly, smooth. arms long and thin, neck a place to be lost in, breathing deeply. the curve of her underneath the sheets, sheets twirling about her legs and waist, caught up in her as he was. dark red across her pillow, on her back, calm, thin, here and smooth and fine and sleeping, breathing. she was almost a place for him to go to. almost a place where all that would matter was her and it would be safe to get lost there. in her skin, in the warmth of her beside him, of her cheek on his, on him to taste her hair and fingers, nails delicate, yet strong. the feeling faded from him, he slowly felt the sensation of being filled. Myth watched Terri and he knew could do this forever without touching her, Even though he already did.
Terri.
* * *
“Hello..? Yes, that’s me…thank you…yes..No, no I don’t think you could ever possibly understan- oh, I’m so..I’m sorry..I..would you like to speak to Mike?”, and Penny Tsakis hands over the phone to her husband, who is standing near, in the kitchen?
It is morning. The baby is still sleeping.
Penny Tsakis doesn’t know what to do and isn’t sure of anything, so she checks on the baby, on Maria. The bedroom is off white with blue walls and the cradle is pink and not too far from the kitchen, just down the hallway, just the John’s ro–.
Gently, gently, the baby is still so small, Penny Tsakis picks her up and lets this calm her. The baby is sleeping. It is morning. She sits on the bed, Penny Tsakis is wearing a blue and purple robe, the one John. Johnny. Johnny…the one her son got her for her birthday.
Penny Tsakis just turned forty, last week, on the seventh. She is an old woman to be having a two month old baby, her middle and legs are still heavy and puffy from little Maria’s birth. She is a young woman to have had a twenty-three year old son. She is too young to have to bury him. Gently, gently, Penny Tsakis with tired hands strokes the baby’s forehead.
“He..he..would’ve been a…wonder…a wonderful brother…he..,” Penny Tsakis sniffles, her face crushing in on itself, holding, and she can’t hear Mike anymore with the funeral director anymore. Suddenly she shouts, “Mike? Michael!”
She pitches forward, off the bed and Michael Tsakis catches her in the doorway, “It’s okay…s’okay”, he says and guides her back to the bed. He hasn’t slept well and it is beginning to show, the slack on his face, thirty-nine years catching up with his eyes. “..s’okay..”, sitting with her, holding.
“do..Do you know..what,” Penny Tsakis starts, struggling, her face crushing in on itself, so many wrinkles dark across the edges of mouth and temples, struggling with words, lips pressed together, holding. Her husband is sitting near. “…imagine Maria..,imagine her calling you Baba.. imagine her growing up…seeing her walk, catching her, helping her to walk…seeing her run and how beautiful she’s going to be…and seeing it before your eyes…seeing her calling for you..”, and Penny is fighting every word of this, it’s hitting her, every choice of word is a memory, holding, tired hands stroking Maria’s head, struggling, “…and after she drives you crazy with…staying out late…with boyfriends…driving you crazy because she’s yours and she knows how to walk without you there…worrying…,” tired hands caressing and seeing memories? holding, not looking at her husband, “…after..after years of presents and cards ..just when you think…just when you think she’s old enough…to live…”, Penny turns away from her husband and she can’t hold anymore, the tears force their out from eyes tightly shut, running down the smooth plain of her cheeks. Dark wrinkles around her temples and lips, struggling. She breathes, holds once more, “I’m burying my son and I’m.. still alive…I’m burying him…”
“shhh..No.” Michael Tsakis quickly tries to hug his wife, shaking his head, “..Don’t, don’t think about-”
Penny jerks away from him, angry, “What do you..What do you mean ‘Don’t think about it’?!… My son is “””dead..My Son Is Dead!..my..” she is shaking and the baby is beginning to cry, eyes closed. Michael doesn’t know what to do, she won’t let him touch her.
“Honey..I..I didn’t mean-”
“”‘Because he wasn’t yours? HE WAS MINE! He was MINE and he’s DEAD! ” Penny stares at Michael, her lips are trembling, holding, how can she hold so much, “..a piece of
me is dead..” she looks at Maria, stroking her forehead, the baby calming down. She rocks the baby in her arms, gently, gently, she so small. Penny whispers, “..If…if it wasn’t for Maria…I’d join…I’d join him…”
Mike gets up, but he can’t leave the room. He touches her shoulder. She doesn’t smack his hand away, she doesn’t relax, tired hands stroke the baby’s forehead, soothing, almost resigned, still holding.
“I love you.” Mike says, feeling small and dizzy.
“I know..” Penny replies, “..but the world’s empty.”
* * *
Strangest thing last night…
This is her first thought as she stretches, yawns, closes her hands into fist and rubs her eyes open.
The strangest dream-
How much of it was it…
She turns and sees Myth sitting on the window sill, the sketches in his hands. Could anything ever take this feeling away? Myth was here. Myth was real. Myth was here. Myth was-
Then Terri Hughes was a bit startled.
Myth was in the bedroom was she damn well knew that she fell asleep on the couch and she didn’t want to end up in the bedroom with Myth, not yet and how nice to put a hold on that because she knew that when it would happen, it’d have meaning and worth.
he turned to her, as if he was ready to answer her, sunlight behind his head. he was wearing dark round sunglasses and he smiled.
Terri was tingling, “hey..”
he sat unmoving, soft smile now, a deep breath.
Terri titled her head, “Are you okay?”
he got up, walked over to her, stopped before her, held up one of the sketches.
“What?”
he placed a finger onto her lips, pointed to the sketch.
There was small hand printed writing on it.
She pointed to the words, “You?”
he didn’t move.
“I’m sorry, do you want me to read this?”
he nodded once.
Terri hesitantly took the sheet and looked at it. It was the final sketch Myth had brought out yesterday, the one that was almost finished. Her eyes sneak at her wrists and the movement seems foreign to her and she catches herself. The lines were smooth, a front angle view, as if the face was turning towards the viewer, perfect with the ankh hanging on an unseen chest. It was beautiful, natural, like Myth.
a fiction of you
You sleep, and I write the world at bay. What can come of this? I have asked this of myself, I have asked myself often, watching you sleep. Writing into the night watching you breathe. Deep into the hours, into the sentences, a pause. To take off the glasses, to rub the eyes. To look at you, so close. How could I breathe like you? Something robs me, I stare. Your skin, something like a ghost, it’s paleness draws me. Amongst the limbs. The image of porcelain, a delicacy of the features. I try, I take a deep breath, but another like it doesn’t come. Not as it comes to you, not with the same guile. No, guile is the wrong word. It is always the wrong word, it is always a looking for the wrong word. And in looking for the wrong word I hope to find the right one. I hope to fit something on the page, or something in my mouth that I can say with some measure of accomplishment. Or sanity, or rest. Lost in another thought brought about by the breathing, I turn away from you. I write. I wonder. How can I touch the night as you do, so open, so bare? There the difficulty. Did you ever know it? The difficulty in watching you, or watching anyone for long periods of time. You wonder: Where do the folds end? Where does the grasp of attention finally clasp its object, its fascination? Fascination, always a dangerous thing between us. You fear my penchant for it, my ease. What troubles me more is that I can’t respond to it, I can’t reply. I have nothing to say to you for it, your fear. All this writing is a fascination, and I am a part of it, if not it, itself. And if I am not it fully, I am its gaze, its direction. I look at you, another hour. Another set of pains somewhere between the bridge of my nose and behind the centers of my eyes. I grow tired of writing, I grow tired of these jaunts into the night. I grow tired of your distance from me, of me. All this writing for one thing to stand between us, to wrap us, to entangle us safely into the world. I write for some closure between us. To keep us from the world. And you sleep. You sleep as if I could do that too, that I too should also be sleeping. With you, with the world, in the midst of a world that doesn’t promise anything, not even the words in which we make it with. Only dreams and flesh. I rub my eyes, I remember the title of a work by Kelly: Flesh-Dream-Book.
And when he finally did climb into bed, his eyes burned as if forever, as if charred. Finding that he couldn’t close his eyes, he stared instead at the morning sun. At some point he found himself waking, and when he did, he found that he was still wearing last night’s clothes, last night’s scent of dull cigarettes and last night’s aches still in his eyes. It had only been a matter of minutes. He got up, walked around the apartment to find his bearings. It was sparse. It was empty, the walls yellow, the floor cool to the touch. He believed it to be fall, or the beginning of summer. The air crisp, sharp, he was able to breathe. It reassured him, the floor being there, being there as he remembered it. He remembered a recurring nightmare he had when he was a child. A fear of drowning, but he wasn’t too sure if it had ever been a memory or a dream, something of each, or even if he had dreamt it again last night. But the feeling of asphyxiation, of being incredibly young and not breathing, engulfed, took him from one room to the bare next, one stretch of wood over the next.
Inside of me there is a profound sense of the future, its inevitability, of failure. Its demanding pressure on us, on our bodies. I fear to see you grow old. I fear my mortality, the presence of children, their age and growth. They grow, they change, they die as children before us. We learn to die the minute they are born, we teach them all that we can know. To pass on a knowledge that outwits us, that betters them through us, through our words. We’ve learnt nothing, and we somehow want to convey that to them, to protect them. From our own mortality, or try. “Or die trying.” A friend of mine, the one at the university, has just finished writing a book to his daughter where in which the sum of all he has written amounts to, as he says, “I have not said one thing that you have heard.” She too writes, and I wonder if she fully captures this. She’s still young, barely into her twenties and already her father is writing goodbye books to her. All to impart the impossibility of knowledge, the impossibility of writing. This then, in the end, fills me with sadness for everything that will be; for everything that soon will be, will be what was. I look over to my right in the dark, away from you, to the bookcase. Stacks of books, on each one, a thin film of dust. Time goes, we forget more then we can remember, have even less time to recapture our steps than to move forward. I touch the spine of the first book that we read together, I tilt it out. The pages are turning yellow. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, time moves on, against us.
In the living room there were two large prints that adorned either side of the vanity fireplace, both Van Goghs. The first one on his right, he didn’t like and often wondered why he had let her put it there, facing the door into the apartment of all places. He still didn’t know its name. The other however, past the fireplace, by the table and window looking over the street, was “Café, Paris,” he thinks. They might have even been there when they had first met. At least that was what was depicted, in the yellows and reds and blues, in uneven strokes of his hand, so what better name other than, “Café, Paris”? For a moment, he can be there again, can see her again for the first time, feel the interest in his skin, that knowing, the shade across his eyes. It had been hot and muggy, but she was in white, in a white chair, under a white canopy, here of all places, the city of lights. He remembered saying something stupid to her, to start a conversation, whether or not today was her wedding day. She had introduced herself, but not a minute later he asked for her name again. Or had that been the next day, when he hoped to see her at the same café? “But you remember that I do not take well to sugar?” She had asked after he had placed their order. “One remembers the strangest things,” he had said, then confessed. Always a trouble with names, with their use. From secondary school, everyone he had known called each other by their surnames, yelling across fields, campuses, cafeterias; as if they were more interested in making brands of themselves. He found himself telling her. “It was vulgar,” it made him cringe, no one ever had gotten anyone’s name right, just barked it, shrill to the ears, as if throwing stones. “I’m not very good with names.”
“Well neither am I,” she had said, and smiled, leaning forward, perching her chin, elbow at right angles to the table. It was glass, and he could see the scar reflected through it, pale like lightening that shot up from the bending of the bone and ran halfway up the inside of her forearm. She fingered it lightly, tracing his gaze, leaning over and looking at it herself. “Shrapnel,” she said and they had left it at that.
There is something I need to tell you, there is something that needs to be written of me. Here, now, between dusks and dawns and the bed sheets of your sleep. I need to write myself, write something out of myself, out of this. I know what you will, I know what you have said every morning. “Come on. Get up. The sun and I will leave you soon. Give us a kiss before we go then.” Unmaking the bed, the edge of your sheets in your hands. “Should stop wasting your nights like this.” How many mornings, opening my eyes, looking at you, your arms, the sheets in the balls of your hands, had I wanted to say ‘I love you’? We both know that I can’t, not in writing at least, or perhaps only I know. I wish I could tell it to you, with some feeling, or emotion. With some belief that didn’t make it quaint, or cliche, or trite. Something like the tension in your limbs when you pull, the muscles across your back, the arrangement of bones. But even then, at what use? When does one stop saying what can’t be said? In the end, it’s come to mean too many things. Restless motion of emotion, it roams. “And in its roaming, in its relentless losing of place, it’s come to mean nothing.” Do you remember? It was the first thing you had said to me, the morning after. But you know as well as I do, it does not end simply with love. Not just one word, but all words. Even you and I, at times, when we forget ourselves in the midst of parties, or we suddenly confront new guests, new faces and there is the briefest hesitation in introducing ourselves. There, the chance to begin again, to be someone other than ourselves. As simple as that, one careful slip, one slight deviation from our own personal history. No, from History herself. That’s all it would take, a turn of a phrase, a skipped syllable, and we would not be treated as we are, we would be other than ourselves. And this is what writing amounts to, to arming myself, practice, for the day that I slip out of who I am, with mere words. Sacrificial lambs for the covenant, small price to pay for starting anew.
He looked out the bedroom window, shielding his eyes, the sun still early and low. The leaves on the tree were lush, green, shifting, a breeze outside, he felt it grace his mid-section through the screen. There must have been people outside, somewhere past the thick and rustling branches, there was noise. Chatter and silly laughter, cackling. It was still early enough for stragglers from the nearby tavern, a few who had a few too many, stumbling home, happy, merry, drunk and smelly. Cracking the pavement. He smiled at that, wishing that his arm could reach out, beyond the pane and brush aside the leaves and twigs so that he could spy down on them and take part. It sounded like two couples. He could, at the very least, remember from here, safer from here than in the streets, no matter how empty. Reminisce of duller and ironically harder to remember days, blurry like rain across a windshield, like a stain of piss along a curb, or the teeth of a sewer grate.
That, perhaps, has always been the question, the first question, the question that comes before all others, that everything else falls after asking, after the mouth has had its fill of it and lets it loose in the world. Where to begin? How many times have I asked this, of myself, of you, of the world? I look out the window across the room, over you, past you. It is the hesitation before every move, of every breath, before doing or saying. Where to begin is always the first question. And for those who do not realize the demand that the question makes upon the body, upon the very history of oneself, are in fact without history, without hope but also without despair. Indeed, where to begin is the first question, and every gesture, every expectation of reaction or reply demands anew. Over and over, without possibility of exhaustion, within exhaustion, in the endless infinity at the teeth of exhaustion, without hope of respite. Yards and yards of thread flung outward without ends, with the distinct possibility of never following them, never knowing their bearing of fruit. I listen to you breathe, listening to you again. In this torrent of recurring beginnings all I want is an end, a clear and decisive end. To truly begin again. For everything to collapse in on itself, and to sift somehow through the rubble and walk away. To begin again, to measure up the strength to angle the shoulders in just the right way and breathe outward, forward, “where to begin?”
When he found that he could finally leave the house, tear himself away from the work, the work that was far from finished or even arriving, he realized that he was running late, again. He felt clumsy making his way to the subway, the wind whipped him along the way, made a kite of his hat. Uncomfortable in his jacket, flattening his hair, feeling unkempt and sloppy waiting for her in the lobby, sharp suits and eyes and legs passed him by from the elevator banks. It was clean and tall and all things that one imagines a law office could be, should. A law firm that took up big buildings with famous names attached to them, bequeathed to them for their eloquence and design, and filled skyscrapers with business to the point of bursting. His parents had wanted him to be a lawyer, for the prestige more than the money, he could have been a prosecutor for all they cared, and because of this he has always had a nostalgia for the profession. As well as an inexplicable but palpable deep seated abhorrence. She came up behind him, and although nothing more or less startled him anymore, she kissed him lightly on the cheek, took his elbow. “You must try..” she trailed off, tugging him along through the glass doors. Even though he tried to tell her that he wasn’t even hungry, she hurried him out onto the Manhattan streets where there was such a dazzling array of sunlight that it was as if the deaf were leading the blind.
After the waiter set their coffees down, she nodded, prompting him to talk about his work. He faltered in the beginning, found it difficult to start, to start talking particularly about oneself. “But it isn’t you, my dear,” she said, almost condescendingly, no, no, she had that way about her, the way she would look at him over the rim of her glasses, “it is only a book.” He stuttered, broke sentences in half, chewed on the remains, fits of beginning, of telling, of saying anything. Still, or rather eventually, as the ball got rolling, the gristle from the bone so to speak, so did he, forgot himself in the story that he was telling, in its details. He discussed the manuscript with her, almost for her. She nodded, she listened, chewing slowly, contemplative, as if each word mattered.
He paused, nervous, perhaps he said too much, revealed that very little of it was written. She said that his correspondence had been spotty, that the work had a good start, but where had he been? Not too far he explained to her, but that she was right, he had been aloof, the work was not easy coming. “Nothing good is,” she told him, “but still,” she touched her chin, the work was too compact, it’s space too narrow, too quick, that, “you really need to let yourself go.”
It had been in rubble that we had found each other, hadn’t it? In the midst of personal disclosure, devastation as well as cement buildings blown to bits in spite of all the treaties. There at least had been dust to excuse our appearances, the soot of it all, on our backs, the napes of our neck. I remember you saying that I had a peculiar way of speaking, of hearing, and I had said that they were one and the same. I was telling a boy something, something about his mother being alright, while he sifted through the stone. “You’re a naive one, aren’t you?” you had said. Without looking at you, my hands still in the girding of where we had been staying separately, “But you like that, don’t you?” We didn’t know what to make of each other, the circumstances had ascribed unto to us a demand for recourse and recovery, of rubble and beads of sweat. We might have even bumped into each other at the hotel’s café, before these remains. The boy’s mother was never found. Not even a body, not even at nightfall. In the nearby tavern, full of overgrown men, dirty with regret, unable to bear in their minds that their burly arms were unable to pull this child out, or hold the ceiling off of that grandmother. It always comes to children and old women, as if the well of sympathy for humanity rested only in the beginning and the end: everything between is time lapsing, time moving, unnoticeable, unforgiving, unremarkable. Only a week was left to us, a week to sort out the rest of our lives, the rest of our belongings. “Together…,” who had said this, you or I, or was it the drinking, the moment, the emotional upheaval that comes in as aftermath? “…we have enough for the one of us, and the other to grow out from.” From there it had been then, from there did all this writing begin, began, become lost in the translation.
On the ride home a beggar touched his knee on the subway, propelling his wheelchair and himself down the narrow aisle. There was no apology, it was the early beginnings of rush hour, mid afternoon. His legs were cut off at the knees, but there was no cup, only dirty sleeves and thick pale fingernails, growth upon growth. The beggar smelled of stale garbage, like the piles of plastic bags heaped in the corner of the incinerator on his floor, rank half eaten food. The subway car floor was sticky, faintly smelled of chlorine, the dull roar at both ends, in the corners. And under the seats, grime, above, lights and the occasional jitter, public service posters along vocational advertisements, etched plastic windows with graffiti. Reflexively he looked away, but, again, there was no cup, no plea, no open palm, so he stared, almost admired. Face pudgy, wet and red with effort, full of splotches, tinges of blue beneath. Grey, angry and wild, three days growth around his neck, eyes a dull yellow around the irises. The train hit a sharp turn and the wheelchair spun, the beggar’s other hand shot out and landed this time on his thigh, his leg, to steady himself, half careening, gripping for space. Shocked and breathing on his chest, the beggar looked at his face, suddenly screamed, “HOW LONG HAS SHE BEEN DEAD?”
Another hour passes, you have moved, your arm now across your face, the bridge of your nose, as if you were warding off claws. A hot mug, the third, of dark bitter coffee is in my hands, and the scorching heat briefly registers on my tongue. Then loses itself, gets lost, as all painful things: we get used to it. A burning behind the eyes, an ache in the skull, the splaying of feet as if on rails. Abruptly, it shakes, brings one to their knees, takes hold of all the attention. As if there is no other pain such as this in the world, to the point of tears. However it too fades, it all goes, subsides into the noise of everything else, of all the other registers. Like a pebble when it first hits the surface of the water: the violent disruption of space, of one’s place broken into spirals, movement, rushing outward, racing away from itself. But the outer rings lose momentum, lose sight, disperse into the vast body that become it, become anonymous. You had been surprised with the scalding temperatures with which I took my showers, the water angry, thick, steaming from the spout, almost wishing to be able to feel the heat again. “Why do this to yourself?” And even though the question you asked was with a smile, joking, teasing, there was a bewilderment in your eyes, as if you were taken aback and thrown in to your own thoughts, adjusting the faucets. I had replied, half smiling, stupidly, “We get used to it.” And truth to tell, it had been years getting used to.
Instead of going to the apartment, he cut through the park, took his time with the byways and pathways. The city could forget itself here. By the pond, a little girl, all curls reaching for its surface, abruptly stood, turned to someone sitting on the nearby bench. Holding one perfect pale arm out, she twisted her chubby wrist in a wave, cherry tongue peeking in wonder, then went back to reaching for whatever it was. She wasn’t more than two. “Dada,” and a burst of delight, giggling. “Will there be the issue of children..?” she had said to him, after the first time, was it years ago? He felt almost as if he wasn’t himself, that something was left behind, something he had forgotten about himself, of his life, of what he had known about life, what he thought life would be. There in the dark he could see her smile, shyly, as if embarrassed, he fingered her nipple. “Children are of the utmost issue,” he had said with a kind of giddiness, a nervousness. She withdrew a thousand miles, a gulf opened. Stumbling in, he tried to look at her, almost as if he was looking for her. Somehow, she told him then, “They can’t be,” then looked him in the eyes with a seriousness that betrayed the laughter they shared for weeks, “I can’t.”
“Do you have a light?” A young woman then asked him. She was tall, as tall as he was, with long black hair, twisting and wild down her shoulders, thin and tan. He withdrew his lighter, she leaned over the flame, pulled on the cigarette. She was wearing a tank top and shorts, no more than twenty. It was summer, or still summer, the seasons grew later and later each year. Still in front of him, arms crossed now, she titled her head. She pulled on the cigarette, squinted an eye, “Don’t I know you?” He didn’t understand why this attractive woman was suddenly talking to him, he didn’t know how to talk to strangers anymore. He felt the weight on his body, his heaviness, all the wrong things that made up his face. “Yeah, I do, I know you, you’re that writer.” No, no, he didn’t think so, she’s confused him with some else, but he blushed and fought off a smile. She sat next to him, he found it flattering. “It’s you isn’t it? I’ve read your work and my god…”
When he looked at her, at her face, he should have known, he should have seen something in her eyes, something suddenly clear and sure. She had touched his knee when the blow hit him from behind and knocked him off the bench, another as he hit the pavement. It’s daylight, he thought to himself, it’s sunrise in the park. He never saw the boy’s face, only his legs, the dirty jeans and the boots and something in his hands. As the boy kicked him, he looked for her, wondered if she was alright, he had always been left wondering. She was kneeling beside him, rifling him, her hands rummaging through his pockets. He looked toward the pond hearing the thump of himself being kicked, felt the tip of the boot crack one of his ribs somewhere, and the boy yelling hysterically, “YEAH BITCH YEAH!”
Do you remember the one about the writer and his writing, in the room that lead out in all directions? The one where I thought it too would lead me into all directions but left me. Literally, staring at it and not knowing what to make of its ending, right there before my eyes. Not one finger left to lift, not one word to add to it. There might have still been some fuss left in it, a play of words, a honing, but it was there. Even you were not surprised, you who had said, “It had no where else to go.” Well, recently, as a joke more than anything else, a finger to the wind, I let our friend who teaches at the university read it. He had liked it, said it was “a love poem of sorts without, say, that sickness inherent in Blanchot.” I told him I wasn’t one for backhanded compliments over lunch, and he laughed. “No, no,” he said, “it’s quite good, a little hard at first, awkward. Until it figures itself out.” He had said that, “until it figures itself out.” I didn’t want to press him, I instead asked of his daughter, his grandson. He became younger in the talking, his limbs became more limber, animated. The work, or, I think, any work, brings wrinkles to the eyes, adds skin, folds to the corners, weights you. Your bones come into focus, their brittle, lifeless quality. Like an increase in gravity, or a lack of breath, or a vein being slowly, ever so slowly thickened, pushed aside. Yes, the work pushes us aside, makes way with our bodies, plods us on. The work makes meat out of us.
At the hospital, they asked him if he had insurance and he told them that he’d just been mugged, but yes, he thought he did, he was pretty sure of it. Then they pushed a clipboard with a pen chained to it. “You can have a seat while filling out the form.” Chipped and molding at the edges, he winced as he took it on the outside of bullet proof glass. He explained to them that he found it difficult to move his arm, he thought his wrist might be broken, he couldn’t use his right hand. They told him to use his left then, or wait until a nurse eventually came for him. He moved away from the desk, the light in the emergency room stale, overwhelming, nauseous. It made the skin appear sick, the blue linoleum for a floor, green. Oddly, the emergency room was quiet with colorful empty seats, the windows facing the street dull, dirty with last nights hands. He limped to a seat, he felt the chloride of the janitor mopping nearby. When he sat down, he first faced the chair, reached for its back and then steadied himself. Already, his rib reminded him of its place, of its displacement. Slowly, slowly, he turned himself into the chair, as if he was coming down an imaginary twist in a slide unwillingly, as if he was ninety years old. It was not so much the pain that bothered him, but the sure damage that he had done to himself, doing to himself, having walked here and now this. When he was finally at rest, he saw stars. Blinking once, twice, he took the pen from the clipboard with his left hand.
I have stared out into the night for too long, only a handful of hours are left to us. In the distance I see lightening but I am not sure, the vision hardens. A minute passes, then thunder, a low growl under the belly of a thick sky. There had been the storm that rattled the windows, the night you shot up from the bed, shouting my name. I came in from the living room where I had been reading to find you twisted in the sheets, trembling. The thunder had been so violent and the lightening so quick that you wouldn’t lay back down with the storm so near. “It’s the wrath of God,” you had said, the sheets still wrapped about you, the patter of the rain. “And what would God want with us?” I had asked. Things are as they are, what they are, but past that, past the gesture of the flesh, the immediacy of skin, I do not know what to believe, the roots having been cut and set to dry. “To punish our sins,” you had said, your head on my lap, the ends of your hair behind your ear. Thin delicate bones that made your face, as pale then as it is now. “And what could those be?” I asked, amused at the little child you had become. Lightening again, this time, I could see the bright white shattering of the sky, the blue vein of the night brilliantly set afire. It soothes the eyes, this neon scorching of the night, I almost hunger for it. I anxiously look into a sky that holds secrets in velvet. The thunder thrills me with delight, these hours having been filled with incredible gulfs of silence, of hands without clapping, of voices without tongues. For now, there is only the storm, the sky that holds it over our heads, and the rain that it denies upon our skins. It can wash us away, it can wash this away, like ink off a page, ruined and smeared but untraced. Words lost to their own constitution, dissolved and taken away by them selves, by their very bodies of all things, washed clean of place. As a child I would write fairy tales only to hold the sheets of paper under the kitchen sink and watch them disappear. I move away from the desk and cross to the other side of the room. You have not stirred, I touch the pane of glass between us and the world. Its surface cool to the touch, a sudden flash photographs the room. Thunder rips the sky open, it begins to pour.
He found the cast cumbersome, the strap looped over his neck, a noose. The bandages that hugged his torso were tight and snug as if to hold the insides together, like an old friend. With little effort, he closed the door, thankfully, today, it did not stick. Briefly, he noticed its frame, the thick coatings of white paint over the wood, the moldings and their chipping away, plying into time. The rent was atrocious, the view bare, but the space was even and wide, the ceilings high with ornate moldings. It was all that he needed, a little room to walk in, near enough to the city to never be too far away from anonymity, someplace to keep his books. There was always a book to be found, to store, to place amongst the others.
When they had both lived here, the cupboard was always empty by week’s end, each evening was spent walking in parks and to nearby theaters. Their meals were meager, neither had taken to cooking. They scrounged quarters for laundry, nickels for cigarettes. But she never had complained of the stacks and stacks of books that he would place one next to another, even from the floor up, one atop the other. He touched a shelf, there was dust, it had been some time since he had cleaned it. She shook her head one day and had laughed: there he was, crouched over yet another book. “You’ll own more than you’ll ever read.”
He looked away from the book he was examining to the bookcase facing them. Made up of three different ones placed side by side, they stretched from one end of the living room to the other. He felt foolish, even now, he hadn’t been reading much, the text too hard on the eyes. “Yes. Yes… you’re right I suppose.”
Closing the book he was about to put it away, she knelt beside him, turned him to her by the chin, “That’s not what I meant,” and opened the book again for him. Standing then, she tousled his hair, took a deep breath as she walked the length of the bookcase, “You know better than I do”, her back was so even, so delicate, “there can never be enough words.”
He longed for a cigarette now, after so long, to burn his mouth and the rest of the day away. There were children outside, the sound of an ice cream truck in the distance, the day had already begun to cool. Trying to stretch his neck, he felt the ugly tension of loose things down his side. Behind the apartment buildings in front of his own and he could see the brilliant hues, the red and orange hue of a dying sun rise above the flattened heavy rooftops. He could barely see out his right eye, puffy, spoiled with blues and greens setting on the fringes of the skin, but he moved across the living room. Passing the two prints, he took a deep breath, the pain sharp and nasty, but quick, a flash of lightening and gone, just like that. Leaving against the wooden shutters, he looked out into the street, at the children skipping rope in front of his building, at the corner, dogs at play.
In the midst of the storm and I can not help but feel that we live our lives in utter fragmentation. No two events imply each other, nothing has an inherent connection to the world, to its time and place, even to itself. Making meaning has become a reading of flash card experiences strung together by a hasty narrative whose structure belies its very integrity to recoup some sense of myself, of the things I have felt and seen. I don’t know the order to make of them, I’ve lost the proper sequence. There is only a scratching for meaning, a confusion of meaning for meaning, here, in the writing. In the end I am left to fabricate literally a coherence, to construct a record of a life in this amassing of notes no better than fiction. Nothing is clear, even the rain blurs the world outside such that it has become indescribable, transient, awash in its distortion. Never have I felt your absence more profoundly. I close my eyes and rub them. I feel the ache behind them, the tension of the skin that holds them in place, the tired qualities that have come with abuse and age. In the window’s reflection, past the bed, the monitor glares into the dark with the words that I have left. I had nothing to promise you and yet, here you were, are. “Why?” I had asked when the nights were becoming longer, again. I had turned wild from the lack of sleep, the intensity of the work I had been on. A deadline was drawing ridiculously near. “Why suffer these nights, these mornings where I am no better than dead?” Sitting on the floor with my head in my hands, as if grieving. “You need to ask,” you kneeled before me, started to unbutton your blouse, “when I’ve come all this way?”
He stared at the monitor, bezier curves dance on the screen, gradients of colors shift from red to green to orange. Standing, he was afraid to touch the keyboard with any sudden movement, its plastic the color of bone. So much has been undone since he had left. How to begin? He wondered briefly what she would have said, to see him like this, paralyzed, numb. Standing before returning to all the words, wasted and bruised, one good hand working itself in and out the shape of a fist. Beginning again was always the hardest for him, the picking of pieces, the stringing along of where he left off, the loosening of the day already lived. Like the breaking of shards against the fingertips, of something new. He adjusted the keyboard, moved it out from underneath the cast, slid it along the wood. As if only fractures mattered.
Bracing himself, he sat, bumped the cast off the edges of the desk, it was almost a lead weight against him, the screen saver disappears. He felt an anxiety swell up in his chest, remembered the drowning dream, the hold on his breath. Again, he tried to stretch his neck, the cords were like wood swathed in warm tar. Outside the window, across the room, the night emptied itself endlessly out into darkness. He imagined stars. But the work is right where he had left, pages of it. The computer hummed, the strap bit into the space between his neck and collarbone. Finger by finger, letter by letter, he found himself, writing as it came, as he had told her, in trickles.
Sitting down, I look at you. A breath for the senses, the way the sheets tangle about your knees, your shins. The storm has moved away, has lost its vigor, its self. A breeze comes through the room, rustles the pages. Have I ever told you of leaving this? Have I ever told you of leaving writing for the writers? The earnest and diligent ones, to the ones where it comes like water? Like Michael, who writes novels on the weekends and throws them away out of sheer disinterest. He lives not too far from here, an oath to write to each day, everyday. Even when he has children about, somehow he finds the time. Makes it out of thin air. Fresh like an open wound between us, the words jumbled in my mouth like marbles, where would I begin, what did you know of me? Perhaps cause for infection, or worry, or worthy of medical attention, to tell you of this notion, this idea of leaving writing, of leaving all these words behind us, somewhere, back there, in the past. Like childhood, a bittersweet nostalgia that has lost its place. In those first few weeks I had quite taken up the idea even though I had never shared it with you. But there was more writing, more writing than I had ever imagined, more tearing away into the night, tearing away of each other, away from our bones. Between the unfulfilled intentions of tired lovers and the unceasing demand of fiction, I chose to write stories as meaningless as the hopes I had of abandoning them. More pounding on the eyes then, on the fingers, on the life we had hoped to live, from where on I have no idea. Looking on you now I think it would have been better between folds of supple flesh than in the sterility of this imagined grammar.
The phone rang, close to midnight. He paused, he had only a page or two. The problem he had with computers was their ephemeralness, that the page on the screen was never really there. There was nothing to hold, no sheaf or opened reams to mark the work’s progress, just an infinite regress in pixels. It rang again, cutting through the apartment, as if in a cavern. He sighed, looked at the night table, he would have to get up. The cast itched, but he had been able to ignore it, the heat, the staleness of the apartment. The windows were open and he briefly wondered if a passerby on the street could hear the phone. After the third ring, he heard the mechanical click of the answering machine from the living room, sharp and plastic. He imagined the whir of the tape, the sound of his voice on the recording, barely audible. Never had he gotten used to the shrill beep, its hysterical tone. He heard her voice, he stopped.
“Are you there? Do pick up the phone. Speaking into this silence is unbearable.”
His side felt sore, standing he was awash in dizziness, pain. The chair creaked as he rested his hand on its back, he could smell the air, sharp, chilly. In the distance, the church bell began to ring. Strong and hollow and old. He walked out of the bedroom.
“Are you still writing? Are you writing now?”
The weight of the cast pulled on his shoulder, he made his way to the living room. In the dark he could still see the paleness of the walls, the dust in the shadows of the moldings along the ceiling, the black handset of the phone not far from the shutters, old. He turned on the lamp, sat slowly on the futon he never liked but had a fondness for.
Gently, he could hear a slight stammer in her breathing, closing his eyes.
She whispered, “Hello?”
Then abruptly there was a fumbling click, a jump in static, loud dial tone. The machine stopped, paused, then a high speed whir of the miniature tape. Shakily, he stood, a red little light on the machine began to blink. Walking back toward the bedroom, before the kitchen he stopped at the first print, the one of flowers. He touched it softly as if it were a painting, as if the oils were still wet.
How does one go about the writing, the breathing, the moving of keys that become as erratic as the impulses that wring out each word, any word? A torrent that inundates me, makes useless fodder out of me, my loins. I hear you suddenly take a deep breath, and the world fits in the center of your lungs. Your elbow pins a corner of the sheet, sharps creases shoot from the folds. You breathe, and the world resumes, almost rushes back upon itself, catches up with the rest of us. The winter terrifies me with tortuous prolonged nights, bitter and incredibly still, hardened soil. In the cold months the imagination grows out of bounds, trespasses fiction, interrupts the gestures of living. Did I tell you that I was mugged the other day? You had asked where the bruises were from, I had said a scuffle with Steven. It was lie. I had been coming home, just around the corner, and a young woman asked me for a light. I didn’t think anything of it, I had reached into my pocket and then the blow fell. It must have been a man, or a boy, I wasn’t really looking, or listening. It was all quite effortless, old memory, falling, I noted the distant sun, the thick cement. I think she had riffled my pockets too, there were two pairs of hands. I had thought then I never did kiss you goodbye. Sprawled on the sidewalk, laughing at the thought of having been robbed of a kiss, of stolen kisses in the bright light of day. I turn away from you and touch tentatively the keyboard, bring it closer to bear. Montaingne had said, “The thing of it is we must live with the living.” And in all this writing, there is a desperate need to learn how to live, to live with the living, amongst the living, while easing ghosts safely back into language.
They had been at a reception. He darted from one corner of the room to the next.
“I’m looking for food,” he had said.
She laughed, bright, bright teeth, pausing, sipping her wine, “I feel so clumsy here.” Stem and fingers so thin, it was all so clear, unblemished, giddy, nervous.
“That’s alright,” he had said, “we’re two birds of a feather,” and spilled some of his drink onto the floor, shellacked but well meaning, well tread, hundreds of feet having shuffled across for hundreds of occasions.
“You’re awful,” she had said, eyes wide, darting glances for witnesses, the chatter of voices, of cocktail laughter in the distance.
“No,” he shook his head, grimaced, crow’s feet and wrinkles around his eyes, “this salsa is. Here, take a bite.” With her mouth gently, gently opened, jaw softly dropped, expecting, trusting, to the tips of his fingers he blurted out, “Would you…?”
“Would I what?” she asked, chewing, swallowing, a napkin to her lips. “This is horrible,” she frowned. He drank more wine. “Mmm,” She reached for his, “Let me have some of that to drown this.”
She swallowed, the music was abruptly turned down. The rest of the party had paused and turned to welcome the newlyweds, the MC took the microphone off it’s stand. He announced each bridesmaid and groomsman with fanfare as they entered the hall. The applause grew steadily stronger and stronger, laughter for the ring-bearer and flower girl, a boy and girl of seven and eight. By the time the newlyweds entered, the guests were at their feet, ecstatic, whistling. The bride was young and strident and blazing in white. ‘Simply angelic,’ she had said. And the groom far too old and pinched and balding embarrassed in a tuxedo. “You can tell it’s a rental,” she whispered, or was that during the service as well? They were smiling, the guests a raucous of whistles and applause, the mad clatter of spoons on crystal.
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten,” she said to him now as the applause died down and the newlyweds finally kissed, ‟Yes. Yes, I would.”
“How much history can anyone stand?” you had said to me. I remember it as clearly as the gnawing sensation of having forgotten the most trivial of things: a wake, a funeral, or was it a wedding? It comes to me as morning sifts over the apartment, inches as I imagine from the living room towards the bedroom. We were leaving or arriving, it isn’t clear but the time and the loss of place between exits is. Your fingers lingered on the side window, your head was turned, but I do not know if you had been looking or thinking or if your eyes had been closed. I told you something and you said again, “just simply, how much?” I did not know what to say to you, I felt uncomfortable, I think I might have even been annoyed. My grip on the steering wheel was tight, I was worried of falling asleep, we had an hour’s distance yet to go. The night might have gone badly, I had not wanted to go wherever we were going, or had been. Our coats draped the back seats, it was hot in the car, the windows were fogged. Your fingers left wet streaks, there was ice on the outer side mirror. I knew that it wasn’t you, I had no cause for blame, but the irritation had been there, I remember, and I thought that it was the worst thing to say considering. Considering what? I write this and write to find an answer, to the question of that night, to the question that left your fingers lingering against the pane hundreds of miles from home. How much history could we have withstood, could we have held together through that night? How much history pressures the walls between you and I and keeps this room empty of meaning? “Too much,” I had muttered, spat, an anger flaring up in me that kept me awake and alive through the rest of the ride home. Home? Yes, we were driving home, we had left home. I believe that. That much comes clear to me, that the night was dark, I feared a patch of ice in the road might loom out before us, it had been so dark, so cold. I was lost. I believe that we were finally driving home after hours on end only to never return from the point from which we came.