Miller's crossing
I. FIAT HOMO
"Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels - bring home for Emma."
Mother was in ER again. I called the hospital, was put on hold. Called again, on hold again. I shivered in the cold and wind, pacing the little yard outside the back door, 5 steps to the left and 5 steps back. The flowers bought and rooted in the summer have been long dead in their pots, withered stems drooping like cut wires, like thin strands of cartoon hair. The frisbee-sized ashtray was full, cigarette butts several layers high and frozen solid several times over taking it all in like a sad pyramid tip of ash and nicotine-laced ice. Music played on the phone. It was wordless, innocuous, waiting music, elevator music, bank vault music when the day's transactions were being sorted, department store clearance sales music to accompany potential buyers of plastic lilacs and carnations made of synthetic fibers. Switchboard courtesy, standardized suffering, a computer-generated signature for all addressees. Vanishing without the impact of blood. The hold time extended, indefinitely. If we live long enough we might just see the future solid as an island of mini golf park, hiccup-less, green always, manageable difficulties, hole-in-one. It will be an insomniac's all-you-can-eat buffet in those undernourished nights.
II. FIAT LVX
"It was there, on a July night in 1974, that Annabelle accepted the painful but unequivocal truth that she was an individual. An animal's sense of self emerges through physical pain, but individuality in human society only attains true self-consciousness by the intermediary of mendacity, with which it is sometimes confused. At the age of 16, Annabelle had kept no secrets from her parents, nor had she - and she now realised that this was a rare and precious thing - from Michel. In a few short hours that evening, Annabelle had come to realise that life was an unrelenting succession of lies. It was then, too, that she became aware of her beauty."
I cannot bring you back. I cannot bring you back. I cannot bring you back any more than I can the first frog I had to dissect in biology class. I was 13, and the dead frog seemed it couldn't be bothered in my hour of nausea and shame. She did the dissecting for me, the girl in our two-persons team, and broke no sweat. The frog didn't struggle. It was so heavily drugged and unholy-smelly that I thought it should at least give protest, wiggling a rubbery leg, blinking its glass-bead eye to justify my cowardice. In my whirlwind of horror and mercy, I kept myself steady by watching her small steady hands making the incisions and slices, opening the frog's death-vacuumed belly to release the formaldehyde-bleached viscera intricate as a work of nature's origami, slippery and translucent, a pale remembrance of insects and moonbeams. I stared at her eyelashes, long and pronounced like blackbirds resting on a power line, occasionally trembling. I saw how beautiful she was, the sheen of her nose in the lab lights, the un-lipsticked mouth with which I barely exchanged any words in a year, as if the knowledge of beauty could only be had when its loneliness was tried, embodied, corseted, one thing to be bartered for another, freedom for a willing captivity, the bliss of sameness for the burn of separation.
I cannot bring you back. Winter along the Hudson, white water flowing at the foot of the Cloister's elevated monastery. From room to room I walked within its wall of stones, the sarcophaguses with the statues of their owners sleeping atop, the icons of saints and eminent patrons pockmarked by centuries' wood-chewing worms, the shrines and crosses, the tapestries of speared and captured unicorns, beautified blood afloat in the silk and silver. The herbal garden stripped of its leaves and fragrance. At an unwatched corridor I blew my breath onto the window, and memory returned to lift my hand to write down your name over the fogged glass, your fingertip coming through to touch mine, a drop of time's acid liquefying the hardened paints that, later, slid down like tears.
III. FIAT VOLVNTAS TVA
"One of the last days in the bush we came through a ville that had been wasted - razored and burned off. The bodies were piled to rot in the center of town, rats and stench already there. At the edge of the village clearing the sun was dropping in an elegant fan of muted rose that I might call lovely if I thought my feelings were intact. As though a hook can take you from behind and at the same moment of impact you can't be sure if it's ecstasy or a pain so cold and sure of your body it knows how to imitate ecstasy. And in this country there may be no difference. All my love."
Where was I? I never told you about my birth, the first city I remembered when a toddler began to remember, the river blackened by industrial dumping, its rancid smell in July's blazing heat, the spell of garlic and pork and fruits and unfiltered smokes from immense power plant chimneys. It was like Havana, by the sea, without the palm trees, and the monsoon shelled a month long of rain in each spring to be felt in the bones when under the sheets. Unworn clothes were put away to save space and aired along a clothes line from time to time in the sun to eliminate moisture - when you wore them again for the first time you never failed to inhale the mothball and sunray. For years nothing happened, except the swallows making their nests under the clay eaves, bringing food back and keeping out of sight in the wet winter, their forked tails and homesick chirping showing up again when the plum trees blossomed like airborne flesh-colored kimonos. Once I woke up at the middle of the night to see my father sitting on my bed, his face mellowed overnight by the grief of my grandfather's death. A few of the neighbors also died, of age and sickness, neighbors who had fed and watched over me whenever my parents worked double shifts. Death was always present, in the air made powdery and exhaustible by coal-burning stoves, by the density of people, by the impatience to have a better place. In rain and snow the streets were a vapor-towed sea of drifting umbrellas. There were births too. You had to come from somewhere to be somewhere else. Life was simpler then, that even if it could be unforgiving at the end there was the kaleidoscope of early happiness, of lights and tales and hopes that dazzled within the duration of a book of burning matches. Heartache undivorced from innocence was lyrical, indistinguishable from love. Even if you'd one day dissolve into a mutinous field of drawbridges, wheat-flames and a delirious earth, by the meticulous persuasion of revolting irises, with the bat-winged, machete-carved starry night because you could find your place nowhere else, you are still what you were, waiting for what no one else could see, Heathcliff and Catherine, Wuthering Heights contained in the windless stir of a rooftop pinwheel.
I am yet to tell you about my birth, and I've already said my goodnight.
"Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels - bring home for Emma."
Mother was in ER again. I called the hospital, was put on hold. Called again, on hold again. I shivered in the cold and wind, pacing the little yard outside the back door, 5 steps to the left and 5 steps back. The flowers bought and rooted in the summer have been long dead in their pots, withered stems drooping like cut wires, like thin strands of cartoon hair. The frisbee-sized ashtray was full, cigarette butts several layers high and frozen solid several times over taking it all in like a sad pyramid tip of ash and nicotine-laced ice. Music played on the phone. It was wordless, innocuous, waiting music, elevator music, bank vault music when the day's transactions were being sorted, department store clearance sales music to accompany potential buyers of plastic lilacs and carnations made of synthetic fibers. Switchboard courtesy, standardized suffering, a computer-generated signature for all addressees. Vanishing without the impact of blood. The hold time extended, indefinitely. If we live long enough we might just see the future solid as an island of mini golf park, hiccup-less, green always, manageable difficulties, hole-in-one. It will be an insomniac's all-you-can-eat buffet in those undernourished nights.
II. FIAT LVX
"It was there, on a July night in 1974, that Annabelle accepted the painful but unequivocal truth that she was an individual. An animal's sense of self emerges through physical pain, but individuality in human society only attains true self-consciousness by the intermediary of mendacity, with which it is sometimes confused. At the age of 16, Annabelle had kept no secrets from her parents, nor had she - and she now realised that this was a rare and precious thing - from Michel. In a few short hours that evening, Annabelle had come to realise that life was an unrelenting succession of lies. It was then, too, that she became aware of her beauty."
I cannot bring you back. I cannot bring you back. I cannot bring you back any more than I can the first frog I had to dissect in biology class. I was 13, and the dead frog seemed it couldn't be bothered in my hour of nausea and shame. She did the dissecting for me, the girl in our two-persons team, and broke no sweat. The frog didn't struggle. It was so heavily drugged and unholy-smelly that I thought it should at least give protest, wiggling a rubbery leg, blinking its glass-bead eye to justify my cowardice. In my whirlwind of horror and mercy, I kept myself steady by watching her small steady hands making the incisions and slices, opening the frog's death-vacuumed belly to release the formaldehyde-bleached viscera intricate as a work of nature's origami, slippery and translucent, a pale remembrance of insects and moonbeams. I stared at her eyelashes, long and pronounced like blackbirds resting on a power line, occasionally trembling. I saw how beautiful she was, the sheen of her nose in the lab lights, the un-lipsticked mouth with which I barely exchanged any words in a year, as if the knowledge of beauty could only be had when its loneliness was tried, embodied, corseted, one thing to be bartered for another, freedom for a willing captivity, the bliss of sameness for the burn of separation.
I cannot bring you back. Winter along the Hudson, white water flowing at the foot of the Cloister's elevated monastery. From room to room I walked within its wall of stones, the sarcophaguses with the statues of their owners sleeping atop, the icons of saints and eminent patrons pockmarked by centuries' wood-chewing worms, the shrines and crosses, the tapestries of speared and captured unicorns, beautified blood afloat in the silk and silver. The herbal garden stripped of its leaves and fragrance. At an unwatched corridor I blew my breath onto the window, and memory returned to lift my hand to write down your name over the fogged glass, your fingertip coming through to touch mine, a drop of time's acid liquefying the hardened paints that, later, slid down like tears.
III. FIAT VOLVNTAS TVA
"One of the last days in the bush we came through a ville that had been wasted - razored and burned off. The bodies were piled to rot in the center of town, rats and stench already there. At the edge of the village clearing the sun was dropping in an elegant fan of muted rose that I might call lovely if I thought my feelings were intact. As though a hook can take you from behind and at the same moment of impact you can't be sure if it's ecstasy or a pain so cold and sure of your body it knows how to imitate ecstasy. And in this country there may be no difference. All my love."
Where was I? I never told you about my birth, the first city I remembered when a toddler began to remember, the river blackened by industrial dumping, its rancid smell in July's blazing heat, the spell of garlic and pork and fruits and unfiltered smokes from immense power plant chimneys. It was like Havana, by the sea, without the palm trees, and the monsoon shelled a month long of rain in each spring to be felt in the bones when under the sheets. Unworn clothes were put away to save space and aired along a clothes line from time to time in the sun to eliminate moisture - when you wore them again for the first time you never failed to inhale the mothball and sunray. For years nothing happened, except the swallows making their nests under the clay eaves, bringing food back and keeping out of sight in the wet winter, their forked tails and homesick chirping showing up again when the plum trees blossomed like airborne flesh-colored kimonos. Once I woke up at the middle of the night to see my father sitting on my bed, his face mellowed overnight by the grief of my grandfather's death. A few of the neighbors also died, of age and sickness, neighbors who had fed and watched over me whenever my parents worked double shifts. Death was always present, in the air made powdery and exhaustible by coal-burning stoves, by the density of people, by the impatience to have a better place. In rain and snow the streets were a vapor-towed sea of drifting umbrellas. There were births too. You had to come from somewhere to be somewhere else. Life was simpler then, that even if it could be unforgiving at the end there was the kaleidoscope of early happiness, of lights and tales and hopes that dazzled within the duration of a book of burning matches. Heartache undivorced from innocence was lyrical, indistinguishable from love. Even if you'd one day dissolve into a mutinous field of drawbridges, wheat-flames and a delirious earth, by the meticulous persuasion of revolting irises, with the bat-winged, machete-carved starry night because you could find your place nowhere else, you are still what you were, waiting for what no one else could see, Heathcliff and Catherine, Wuthering Heights contained in the windless stir of a rooftop pinwheel.
I am yet to tell you about my birth, and I've already said my goodnight.