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.

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 peace. 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 demand, 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 rapidity. Their 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. Walking away, back the way he came, across the living room, through the doorway set alight with the morning sun. There, a comfort of the elements, the warmth of unforgiving things. 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, in 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’? But 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 tensions in your limbs when you pull, the muscles across your back, the arrangement of bones. If love is to be something eternal, something to lay my hands on, to lay claim as my own, then I would only know it if we still loved even after death. To proclaim to you any sort of love from beyond the grave as if it was possible. Perhaps. So its come to graves then, and how useless to imagine, to hope for the one day at the other’s grave. But even then, at what use? When does one stop saying what can’t be said? In the end, I think I feel as I do because 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 ‘othering’, to arming myself, practice, for the day that I slip out of who I am, with mere words, to the other. 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, not exactly knowing who you were speaking to, “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, just as ourselves with each life lost, unable to bear into 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, or subsides into the noise of everything else, of all the other registers. Like a pebble when it first hits the surface of the water: that violence, the 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, one after another. You had been surprised with the scalding temperatures with which I took my showers, the water angry, thick, steaming from the spout. Under the very same spout for hours, feeling the beads hit my skin and nothing else, not even the heat, 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 her father sitting on the nearby bench. Holding one perfect pale arm out to him, 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 ironically 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. For a moment, he wanted to hand the clipboard back over to them but they looked at him again as if they were considering his mental state. 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, there were stars in his eyes. 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 folds from within the walls of this desolate little room. 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. He closed the door with little effort, thankfully, today, it did not stick. He noticed briefly its frame, the thick coatings of white paint over the wood, the moldings and their chipping away, plying into time. Flat matte white, so hard to keep clean, she had been at first annoyed with the walls of the apartment, the ceilings and corners yellowed with one cigarette after another. “Ghastly” she had said, a towel in one hand, a bucket of water with foam over its lip, scrubbing, laughing. They had thrown more water at each other than they cleaned with. He longed for a cigarette now, after so long, turning away from the door, 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?”
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. They had lived here in such a way that the cupboard was always empty by week’s end, that each evening was spent walking in parks and to nearby theaters. Their meals were meager, neither had taken to cooking, dinners were sometimes even sandwiches. 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.” He closed the book and 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 followed the length of the bookcase, “You know better than I do”, walking away, her back was so even, so delicate, towards the kitchen, “there can never be enough words.”
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.
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.
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? I look at you, for some measure of comfort, a measure of understanding. A begging for an intrusion into a world that I have so markedly inscribed. It is neither cold nor scalding here, neither void, nor cacophony. Only a torrent that inundates me, makes useless fodder out of me, my loins. Particularly when we go walking, in the quiet moments between us. Past the park, before the theater, a whisper of words, sentences, ghosts of meaning arise behind the eyes. I am battered with the sure knowing that each and every is lost, and hence priceless, never to be recovered. I hear you suddenly take a deep breath, and the world fits in the center of your lungs. It stays there, becomes silent, not a sound or a care. 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. I can still taste the salt of my father’s tears as he beat me into submission, particularly during the cold months. 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. Between snow and the slick blue haze of ice I could sleep, staring often into Christmas lights wrapped around and around, blinking and dazzling all through the night. How do I set this restlessness at peace, when each time I close my eyes I myself am left for dead, among tombstones? I turn away from you. I turn and touch tentatively the keyboard, bring it closer to bear. I write. Montaingne had said, “The thing of it is we must live with the living.” And in all this writing, there is a desperate need indeed to learn how to live, to live with the living, amongst the living, while easing ghosts safely back into language.
The phone rang, close to midnight. He paused, he had wrenched over only a page or two. The problem he always had with computers was their intangibility, the lack in belief that the page on the screen was ever really there. There was nothing to hold in his hands, no sheaf or opened reams to mark the work’s progress, just an infinite regress in a set of 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, stop and wonder who was calling, why there was no one home three floors up.
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 he has been told. 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 second 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 as if deciding what to do, 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.
Perhaps there is nothing indeed to remember, nothing to record, nothing to translate. Half remembered bits, and it is said that in order to act, that any act in itself, requires forgetting. Forgetting the violence we commit in remembering a past that we can not capitulate in words, in deeds, nor in words posed as deeds. It runs afoul, it is better to forget and never forgive, us of our ills, the past of its inarticulate quality. Maybe this is why the task is so difficult, the memory, the writing, the whole major task that this has become. The dawn arrives through the highlights of a sky that we cannot see. It rises on the other side of the apartment, on the other side of a world that I no longer comprehend. Did I tell you that I was mugged the other day? You had asked where the bruises were from and I think I had said that I had taken up a scuffle with Steven. It was lie. I had been coming home, just around the corner, near the park and a young woman asked me for a light. I didn’t think anything of it, how would she have known that I had just quit smoking that week? I didn’t recognize her but had thought that she might have seen me from one of the cafes. There wasn’t much thought involved, I had reached into my pocket and then the blow fell, and I fell. It must have been a man, or a boy, I wasn’t really looking, or listening. It was all quite effortless, old memory, I noted the sun, noted how bright the grass was as I fell into it. I think she had riffled my pockets too, there were two pairs of hands. I had thought of my father, of you. I had thought how I did not ever kiss you goodbye. I then laughed at the thought of having been robbed of a kiss, of stolen kisses in the bright light of day.
He had said much of this, and in saying it became lost to it. What else to lose, what else had been lost, what can be lost? He had always been prone to losing things. Phone numbers, address, paychecks. Anything that was crucial to remembering, even names. They had been at a party and he had 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 reception’s DJ took the microphone off it’s stand. He boisterously announced the names of each usher and bridesmaid. The applause grew steadily stronger and stronger, especially for the ring-bearer and flower girl, a boy and girl of seven and eight. Everyone was at their feet, some were even whistling when the newlyweds approached the dance hall.
The bride was young and strident and blazing white. ‘Angelic,’ she had said to him during the service at the church. And the groom far too old and pinched and embarrassingly balding in his tuxedo.
“You can tell it’s a rental,” she whispered, or was that during the service as well? The bride and groom were smiling, the guests a raucous of whistles and applause and the clatter of spoons on glasses. “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 light sifts over the apartment, inches as I imagine from the living room towards the bedroom. You had been tired, it was night, or sleeping, I was driving. 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, so many miles between. 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, he had been dying for a long time, long before this, 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 mile from home. How much history could we have withstood, how much history could we have held together through that night as it snowed heavier and heavier, through the empty void of silence and bitter words that had left our mouths or that were about to be spoken? 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 believe that we were finally driving home after hours on end only to never return from the point from which we came. I was lost. We had left it somewhere behind us, somewhere ‘before’, to return home and find it suddenly ‘after.’

We tell stories, I do not know why. The sun drifts in through a haze that threatens rain. We look for cues, when can we begin, when is it allowed, we look for hidden registers. Through time we want to believe that this story, any story, means something, anything. To be allowed to mean, to be allowed to be spoken, to be allowed to be told. To give ourselves meaning, to give the lives we live worth, reason, purpose. Precisely, it has to move, we have to be moved, we need to move, away from the point of impact. It is like prying fingers off the edge of a cliff and falling. I had called you over to the computer, I had in mind some sort of empty collaborative idea. I had wanted to write with you, to you, in one space, this space, this ephemeral space that leaves no mark in living, to coax you into writing. “I am not a story teller,” you said to me, easy laughter for the last time, “I cannot tell a lie.” I had called you over again, insisted, and with each gentle refusal I had grown more adamant, anxious, almost angry. Why wouldn’t you want to be a part of this, a part of me? How could you hold yourself away from me, what did you have to hide? As if the truth of the matter were ultimately in the writing, like the pulling of teeth, like a child smiling bloody with a bit of porcelain between her fingertips.