Message #28: Jonas, please. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I just said all that to make you angry. I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry, darling. Please forgive me. Please.
Message #29: Jonas, I’m still giving you a break. I haven’t called the police on you yet, but if you push me I will. It’s now 2:00 a.m. (Inaudible.) I am going to give you fifteen more minutes to bring my child and my car back.
Message #30: Jonas, can you hear the phone ring? Are you looking at my number and not picking up? Did you fall asleep? Is Jimmy asleep?
Message #31: Jonas, I’m calling the police now and I’m going to take a taxi all the way out there. I’m going to come and get my baby from you. Even if it costs a hundred dollars I don’t have.
Message #32: Jonas, you’re proving yourself to be a very low-class individual. If you think you’re going to fuck with me, I’ll show you. You’re messing with me for the last time. You jealous piece of shit.
Message #33: (Inaudible.)
Message #34: (Inaudible.)
Message #35: (Sirens blaring, mostly inaudible. Sobs.)
Message #36: Jonas, how can you do this to our baby? (Man’s voice follows.) YOU WORTHLESS MOTHERFUCKER, YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!
Message #37: (Loud background voices. Sobs.) Jonas, you should not have run and left Jimmy behind like that. Jonas, you should have killed yourself too.
Message #38: Jonas. (Woman screaming.) I WILL FIND YOU. WHEREVER YOU ARE, I WILL FIND YOU.
Message #39: Jonas, I will spend the rest of my life looking for you. (Screaming. Sobs.) Oh my God, Marcus. I can’t believe he did this to our baby.
Message #40: Jonas, you stupid asshole. I can’t believe you did this to our child. I knew this phone would lead them to you. It’s like having a GPS on you, you imbecile. You can barricade yourself in there all you want, but they’re going to get you. And if you try to run, they’re going to blow you right out of this world. No court sentence will be enough for you, though. Even if you make it out alive and go to jail. One day I will kill you with my bare hands. I’m going to kill you, just like you killed our child. I will put your face in water and drown you the same way, just like I have now a thousand times in my mind. I’m going to show you, Jonas. I’m going to—
RECORDED MESSAGE: THIS CUSTOMER’S MAILBOX IS FULL.
END OF TRANSLATION.
Four Poems
Elizabeth Robinson
ON EDITING
Editing was the perfect recursive process—
to return to the thing and make it more itself.
As a child, she enjoyed the idea that she could think a thought
while thinking of herself thinking it, a predisposition
toward editing which understands it as
a kind of magical oversight on
immediacy
to thought. But never
was she able to be certain that she had actually
thought the thought while thinking of herself
thinking it.
To do this again and again, to strive for mastery
over the iteration that makes it pure.
Editing was never perfect, but it strove for purity:
recursiveness by excision. She edited and
she edited until it was possible
not that she thought, or thought herself into a thought
but that a thought existed, claimed
its site so that the mind could recur to it.
ON PAGES
Their purpose is to turn.
Literally,
against the clock.
The future, as read, is counterclockwise.
*
At last, alone or
singular,
the page measures its margin.
Creates the field, Janus-faced,
of the verso.
Time turns within its spine,
within its own signature, on itself.
*
Verso is to the clock as
signature is to time.
The page renounces itself in the turning.
Turning on its own rhythm.
Within its own leaf:
(Seasonal. Deciduous. Falling.)
If time accretes as pages—
If it sheds itself—
*
A field on which to fall, fall backwards, forwards, fall
into the spine.
*
Time, two-faced on the page, doubles back
to the imaginary, sans body, field, or time. What part means to whole,
spinning in the pivot of its own progress.
ON THE RED-LETTER EDITION
The Holy Ghost is garbed in white in honor of its invisibility.
For this invisibility
conveys immutable truth. Authority.
That the holy writ is literal. Is the white page imprinted with its
own transparency.
Except for the words printed in red.
The Holy Ghost, being, of course, male, has sex-linked red/green-related color blindness.
And so its truth
is mediated.
White, remember, is the presence of all color. Except
when one
can’t see the color.
The Holy Ghost—
it fails to recognize that someone else
said the red words. Said.
What is literal is incomplete because it cannot conceive the spectrum
from which it becomes itself.
Perhaps not the presence of all color. But a voice
that selects its own hue, and color recurring.
Partial
to the same truth. Glossy Holy Land maps.
Sheen of gilt enfleshing the edge
of its visual impairment, its vaguely white onionskin transparency.
ON TYPOS
Homer was a blind poet who resighted poetry.
In the woodland you were
dear and deer.
I might almost have said it simultaneously.
Where your
who are
you’re
would land. Uncorrectable and
I might have said there
all at once
where
they’re grazing
among wares, air and err.
It’s these,
a thesis:
where made
to wear its self, it’s
tangled in samenesses—a little
grove of the subtlest confusions and
a tune
I might have sung. A site wrung of
these is
a rung of sight
cited
synchronous. At once attunement
dear and recited unseeing. Whose words
might be there and theirs.
Some Episodes in the History of My Reading
Frederic Tuten
THE BED
My mother comes home from work tired. We sit in the kitchen with my grandmother, who has prepared a frugal meal, and by nine my mother is off to bed. We do not have a TV, it is 1945, few do in my Bronx neighborhood, so I read a library book, a Jules Verne, maybe, or an abridged version of The Three Musketeers. The living room, with my wheezing grandmother sleeping fitfully behind the screen that separates us, my squeaky cot and the old, thin blankets, the winter coldness, suddenly vanishes. I’m carried into the richest worlds of life and remain there as long as I’m reading my book. And I’m protected from harm after I turn off the light as long as the book remains in my hand.
THE RAFT
My mother gave me The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for my tenth birthday. She had heard that they were what American boys read. I devoured the Twain books ove
r and over again, finding myself in them—that is, my desired, adventurous free self. Finding in Tom and Huck the friends I needed and wanted, models to keep me in the hope of escape from my cramped world in the Bronx. I was raised by Sicilians and I may as well have been living in Palermo, where there was no vast Mississippi and no wide raft to ride it, no open sky and no territory ahead, no America.
I lived not far from the mighty ripple of the Bronx River and one afternoon I tied a small raft of planks I had plucked from a construction site close to the botanical garden—where the river ran through—then still on the wild side with a deer or two hiding in the brush. I left my shoes and socks on the bank and pushed off and sank. I got stuck in the river’s soft muddy bottom and barely worked my way out of the muck. I was coated in watery mud and crying with fear on the grassy bank. I wonder what story I told my mother when she saw me mud caked and trembling. That was the early end of my exotic adventures. I consigned them to the safe regions of movies and books and, later, to putting them into my own fiction, in novels and stories located far from the Mississippi, far from America, and about artists, revolutionaries, and romantics, who, unlike me, burn and dare.
THE SEDUCTION
When I was young, I sought the more difficult books, the more difficult the better: I did not ever want to be led to where and what I had already known, to be guided in a language with words that seldom required a dictionary. At fifteen, I saw a beautiful older woman whom I had a giant crush on sitting on a park bench and reading as if nothing else in the world mattered. I was ashamed of my lustful thoughts and expected her to have read them in my stare. She finally noticed me and called me over and asked if I liked to read.
“Of course,” I said and nervously began to name a few books I loved.
“Those are good books. You’re my son’s friend, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am,” I said, not mentioning that we disliked each other, that he called me four eyes and a fruity bookworm.
“I have other books you may like,” she said, “so come by for coffee.” Her apartment jumped with books, shelves of them even in the kitchen, where we sat and drank coffee and where I burned for her. She lent me the novel she had been reading on the park bench, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. “Let me know what you think,” she said. I wanted to like it because she had. But I couldn’t follow the story, I did not understand if there was a story, but there were passages of intense, mysterious beauty that made me tremble as I had on my first Holy Communion.
A year later, I broke my head trying to make sense of Joyce’s Ulysses, another book she gave me, one she had a special passion for. Something extraordinary was going on there in that Irishman’s ocean of words and I felt elevated, special, just trying to fathom it. But what remained in me was not only the novels she had led me to but the association of fiction with sexual longing, and with beauty and mystery.
My beautiful friend loved Ulysses so much that she left her husband and children to live in Paris with a French scholar who had devoted his life to that one book. His passion to what she also loved was the magnet. Because of her, I’m drawn to every woman I see reading a book and curious to know what she is reading, snobbishly gauging her beauty to her taste.
Once, in a café in Paris, I saw an elegant woman, as Henry James would say, of a certain age, fixed on a book. She was at the same table over the following five days. Once, our eyes met and we smiled. I took the courage from that smile to approach her and ask in my most polite way, and in my crippled French, what she was reading.
“Nightwood,” she said, showing me the cover. “And you?”
I held back my surprise and my wanting to tell her how I had first come across the book, but instead I answered: “The Third Policeman, by an Irish writer. I’m not sure it’s translated.”
“I have read it in English,” she said, adding, “I have wondered what you were reading all these days and wondered if you were a simpleton.”
She did not appear the next day or the days after, which I ascribed to my intruding on her privacy. But the headwaiter, a man I had known for years and who was a friend of Lawrence Durrell’s, said, “She comes here every spring and early fall for seven days and sits with a book, speaks to no one, and waits for no one. She is not French and she is not English or American. She leaves extravagant tips above the service compris so we don’t care how long she sits, even when we are busy. She drinks kir royale. Anyway, she is beautiful.” I imagined her world and wrote a novel about her called The Green Hour.
THE POISONOUS BOOK
A novel may just leave you where you were when you started it, and in that case it was not worth your time, the dear hours of your life never returned. Sometimes, and in the best case, a novel leaves you with a shudder of recognition—about what you do not know: It has altered you and you do not understand how or why, but it has. That does not mean it has changed you to be kinder or not to cheat on your lover or on your income taxes. But it has changed you: However alone, you are not alone.
W. H. Auden said that poetry changes nothing but the nature of its saying. That may be true for poetry, but fiction’s power moves in mysterious ways. Some novels may elevate you, some may degrade. At eighteen, I encountered such a “poisonous book,” as the Huysmans novel given to Dorian Gray by the worldly Lord Henry was called. I was in my freshman year at City College and doing poorly—because I arrogantly, rebelliously read everything else but the required texts—and the final exams would determine if I was going to be expelled, which, for me, meant the street. I started to study four days before the exams. I liked the danger of it, the immersion of life at the brink’s edge. Of course, I slept little and drank black coffee and smoked until my eyes popped; that was part of the ritual but one that deranged me. The day before the exam I lit on The Fountainhead, sitting on a pile I had taken from the library. I had been warned against it by my fellow bohemian students: It was a fascist book, an apologia for social Darwinism, an all-around rotten business with cardboard characters to boot.
It didn’t matter. I started reading it in the afternoon and through the night and morning of my first exam. I slept for two hours and went off to the subway and down to the college, took the exams, and failed both algebra and biology. I had a semester of academic suspension to mull over my fantasy-driven crimes.
What had happened? Midway in my reading of The Fountainhead the idea grew that I was above exams and above study, towering above the college and above every demand made on me other than my own. And soon I was sure that I would not only pass the exams but that by my powers of concentration I would do brilliantly and win great praise. I was in the clouds of the grand Self. I was like the genius architect, Howard Roark, the superman of Ayn Rand’s novel, one of the exceptions for whom rules were meant to be ignored or, better, to be shattered. My fellow students and my professors were the gears that made the System work, that giant academic factory that turned out standard bolts, screws, and solid citizens. I had a higher mission: I was an artist. I was the Howard Roark of the Bronx. I consoled myself with that idea for a few months after my suspension and while I was distributing mail from desk to desk in a large downtown catalog company.
ANOTHER BOOK, ANOTHER FOLLY
I suppose I descend from the line of those characters deluded by literature. Don Quixote rides off to save chivalry and the world, modeling himself on an antiquated literature of knights and their codes and adventures; the married Emma Bovary ruins her life in the pursuit of the kind of love she swoons over in the sentimental romances of her day.
My model for ruin was Hemingway. Nothing he could do was wrong. Not a sentence was off. His style was contagious and many in my generation caught the infection. I wrote shopping lists that read like his: “Buy a true bread. Be sure the leche is cold and its container true.” His stories were perfect. His life was perfect. Everything Hemingway wrote and did I wanted to write and do. But not exactly: I did not want to fish
or hunt. At eighteen, I went out on a day boat that sailed from Sheepshead Bay and moored some miles into the ocean. Within an hour I turned green and spent the excursion turning even greener below deck and pretending to show to the ship’s crew—as Hemingway would have me—grace under pressure. As for hunting, at nine, I shot my Red Ryder BB gun at a squirrel squatting in my uncle Umberto’s little Bronx garden and missed. I hit my uncle. My uncle was not hurt but the shot unsettled him, wounded his trust in me. I never again wanted to shoot at any living or inanimate thing.
At nineteen, I went to the corrida in Mexico City because of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon; he had written about the drama of the run of the bulls and I was sure I would find, as he had, metaphysical courage acted out in the sand. But when the matador’s sword plunged in and the bull fell and shuddered and died I felt ill. I was still sure, however, that the feeling would pass because I would come to see the truth and beauty in the bull’s death and in the matador’s union with the animal he had just killed. Back in my little hotel, I saw only the felled bull in the blood-soaked sand and I had to drink a lot of tequila before I could finally go to sleep.
From among all of Hemingway’s stories, I was especially called to action by “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” moved by its cadences and glamorous darkness. I liked the idea of a café/bar as a place of sanctuary and that to drink there was a mode of communion with the nothing, the nada of the story and of life.
I had learned from Hemingway that it is the writer’s duty to drink. This was much easier than fishing or hunting or even sitting alone and, in total focus and purity of spirit, writing. Hemingway was not all to blame for this but he had given me a noble mission, an obligation to the profession, which I, as an earnest young man, was eager to fulfill.
I was fresh from meeting Hemingway—crashing his home outside Havana—in the early September of 1958. He talked about writing and its need for discipline but he never mentioned the drinking part of the craft, which I assumed was part of the unspoken code that needed no mentioning.
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