I'm beside Thomas, up high in a giant metal cage. With our elbows resting on a steel railing, we're catching a breath after the steep climb to this point where the Williamsburg Bridge walkway peaks and mellows. Comfortable to lean here, the view superb, opening like a storybook where the river broadens and divides, its banks so overwhelmed by gray piles of skyscrapers you wonder why the land doesn't sink. Helping to frame the view, other bridges arc gracefully over the water and planes inch slowly, slowly across the screen, some gliding high above the skyline, others vanishing into the emptiness between the tallest towers. We can't see passengers inside the planes and the passengers can't distinguish us from the bridge upon which we've stopped. Like millions of our fellow citizens we stare up anyway. The passengers believe in us, stare down at our invisible shapes immaculate within muddles of concrete, glass, and steel or racing along highways in strings of cars or lying in green parks along the riverside. Everyone certain someone, somewhere is staring back. A city, after all, isn't it. Fabricated of eye exchanges. Living and dead. Open and shut. The feathery wake of a long, slow barge plows the glittery water, an arrow pointed at the bulk of Oz silhouetted against hazy distance.
Thomas has learned that Fanon and Malcolm X, aka Malcolm Little (coincidentally, a surname he shares with Chicken Little), share, by coincidence, the same year of birth, 1925, and that Patrice Lumumba dies, by coincidence, in 1961, the year Fanon dies. Fanon, Malcolm, Lumumba, three men of color born separated by oceans, two of whom spoke French, the other English, men who invent a new language, unheard till they begin conversing with each other.
Was Fanon a third, silent other on the Williamsburg Bridge gazing at the river, the island, with us. Was Fanon grieving, recalling the murder of his birthmate, Malcolm, the murder of his deathmate, Lumumba, Fanon's words visible on invisible pages the silence turns...Europe now lives at such a mad reckless pace.. .let us try to create the whole man whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth. Fanon on the bridge that morning admonishing us, Fanon addressing us as comrades, saying, Don't jump.
PITTSBURGH—A HOSPITAL
My mother studies her Bible after her coffee and morning paper. She's sure these are the Last Days. No doubt in her mind signs of the Last Days all around and about us. Uncanny correspondences daily between what the Bible foretold about the end and what she watches on TV, she says. A shudder of pain deep in the Earth's bowels sending a skyscraper-tall, mile-wide glacier of deadly water moving fast as the speed of light to drown islands in the South Seas. Three-headed turtles, civil wars, a giant asteroid on a collision course with the Earth, boys killing boys in Homewood's streets, fires, floods, plagues, cops handcuffing and arresting an unruly seven-year-old colored girl misbehaving in her elementary school. Topsy-turvy, pell-mell, no center holds, things falling apart—the Last Days sure enough and she nods gravely as I recite lines from a somber Yeats poem written on the eve of World War II. Meanwhile, in these last days, I'm trying to imagine with her help, her witness, Fanon's last days. Numbing waves of pain blurring his nights and days. Do I ever fall asleep, Fanon might have asked himself during a lucid instant, or am I always sleeping. Consciousness, identity experienced as degrees of pain, as drifting, the boat, the sea, the passenger merging, the island of his destination no longer separated by time or distance from the island that he departed from. Fanon a name like a beacon blinking on then off, found, lost again in a fog of pain. An endless tossing and turning passes for sleep or could be sleep roiled by constant, nagging dreams, his body, what's left of his body, a banner flapping in the wind, ripped and shredded, fragments of meat and bone, bloody waves, the body eating itself, screaming from a mouth that may be his or a mouth he dreams screaming silently, choked, gagging on the tail end of himself he swallows. His last days, ours, these, my mother's wheelchair parked beside Fanon's high-railed, high-tech hospital bed, my mother's hand on Fanon's chilly shoulder that also somehow sweats. She's squeezing it, the rhythm of her stroking fingers calming shudders and heaving of his flesh. In her other hand a remote controlling the TV suspended from the ceiling at the foot of the bed. She clicks from scene to scene, Bedouins on camels crossing a desert, masked skiers, snow that looks like sand, sand dunes drifted like snow, talking heads speaking foreign languages, a man in a chef's hat chopping a red lump of something into tiny bits with a huge cleaver, a woman who sings and dances as she scrubs an oven, a naked man and woman in bed, tonguing each other's fashion-model faces, a helicopter's-eye view of roofs burning, a posse of galloping cowboys, a plump baby circled by a tire, etc., and on and on and so forth as if the flow of pictures might soothe like Muzak soothes, as if the eyes of the man in bed, shut now, might pop open and be seized by an image flashing on the screen, distracted from pain for a split second by a lucky coincidence of worlds bumping and overlapping so he can beam from one spaceship into another, escape his flaming berth, his anguish, long enough to catch a breath, gear up for another breath, saved by an image he takes as real. She clicks, instantly weaving and dissolving worlds with her nimble touch, hoping to seduce his eyes, to fool him or awaken him or relax him to sleep. Who knows which is better or which is which. Awake or asleep. Does it matter in these last days. Either one, either way, any way, just so the pain quiets. She asks this peace in her god's name before she dozes off, clicking, watching with him.
Never forget this simple fact, he warned her one day: always some person or persons at the controls monitoring what you read, hear, see. Never underestimate the power or ruthlessness of those at the controls, Fanon had taught himself and instructed his patients, as he's instructing her. He sees a split-screen submarine view. Submarine-split screen. Two underwater scenes, one on each half of the screen—one day, one night. One side the other side's nightmare. Screen half in color, half the colorless black, white, and gray of scorched earth. Brightly painted plants and fish busy on half the screen, the other half a wasteland of wiggly gray fingers, their bones crushed to jelly, tens of thousands of wiggly gray fingers all you can see, soft rippling fingers the current animates so they seem to be waving slow, sad goodbyes. After the counts of drownings and deaths, cameras pan the ocean floor in Southeast Asia to reveal long-term ecological damage. A telling submarine view of a coral reef before and after tsunami devastation, Fanon understands, in spite of the babble he doesn't understand coming from the TV. Then later, another submarine story on TV, not connected, not displayed split screen with the tsunami story. Unrelated it seems because numerous stories in between and more ads than stories in between the stories in between ads. Submarine, nuclear, the woman in the wheelchair tells him, a submarine belonging to the USA, operating in Pacific waters when it runs aground. On a sandbar not there pre-tsunami. An accident. Not nuclear, thank god. Everyone's relieved. Hasn't god been flogging us enough lately. Yes, Fanon replies, though he doesn't speak her language and she doesn't speak his. Time out. Take a day off, old murderous god. Have mercy, Mr. Percy, she amens. Submarine/split screen. It rhymes, she says, like rap and nap and gap. And therefore the words go together. And therefore related. Therefore, how, why. Who's in charge of this juxtaposition, this submarine mission. The bright versus dark side. Peace and war. The split screen. Fanon sees a nuclear device implanted. Sees it detonated. The floor of the ocean rising like a rocket ship. Like lava from Mount Pelée. Overnight the seabed's fourteen fathoms below the surface instead of a thousand. Something wants out. Who opened the door. Who exploded something deep, deep within the deep.
After the tsunami story, the second submarine story. Comes too late. The sub not guilty. No. No. Heavens, no. No split screen mourning our mutilation of our world. Nobody asks questions. We've already swallowed the old natural-disaster story and forgotten we've swallowed it—so many stories so many ads ago. We blame the tsunami, nature's bloody tooth and claw, god's will. The new story admits there was nearly a manmade disaster after the natural disaster, but thank goodness for those heroes in charge of the nuclear submarine and its nuclear weapons, thanks to them a
tragedy of epic proportions averted at the last instant. Split-screen submarine. The sub's radar, the story goes—a story she translates into her language and he understands in his—the sub's radar picked up at the last split second the unexpected, uncharted, post-tsunami mountain of heaved-up sea floor so rather than ramming it full speed, the craft full-throttled its engines in full reverse, as close to slamming on brakes as you can manage underwater, plowing a deep furrow with its steel beak into the mushy heap of erupted seabed, a rough landing that flipped the sub on its side but didn't split its steel skin, the accident an embarrassment with a full nonpartisan inquiry to follow but thankfully no fatalities reported so far, just a long, sleek submarine drydocked beneath the ocean, radioing S-O-S-O-S-O-S, while gray wiggly fingers comb the sea, zombie fingers, blades of gray grass rippling where acres of coral of many colors once bloomed, the seascape an evil twin of the lost world we saw just yesterday on the split screen, a scene so Edenesque, Disneyesque you half expected cute talking fish to swim by any second, a pair of them, identifiably female by their miniskirts and painted cupid's-bow lips emitting bubble-pipe bubbles of gossip. If these fishies survived and crossed the split-screen divide, what would they say about the big steel shark stuck in the mud. Would they recall its shadow gliding above them the day of the tsunami.
Was the submarine accident accidental or part of a plan or cover story for a failed plan. Who knows. Who would tell us if they knew. Gentle stroking soothes Fanon's sweaty splitting brow. How many seconds required for an image to burn into the TV screen. How long after the tsunami's shockwave does news of the submarine wait its turn, submerged no one knows where before it begins its ascent to the surface, toward the news, toward the accident waiting to happen as reported on a sandbar, nature intervening again to rain on man's parade. SOS—Same Ole Shit. Nature flexing its muscles, indulging its mysterious ways. In this corner Man. In the other corner Nature. A mismatch some promoter has dreamed up and hyped and sold to the gullible public. Clever and simple as three-card monte. A simple matter of distracting the player's eye while you work. Pity the poor sub. Pity injured sailors trapped in a metal prison. A hero will emerge to save the day. A good story to seize the public's attention as the tsunami story recedes. Who remembers the tsunami. The disconnect rolls on, the fog rolls in. Fanon's mind skips off to other pastures, different sleeps, different islands. Mom mopping his brow like she used to mop mine when I had a fever.
THOMAS TEACHES HIS LAST CLASS
Good morning, boys and girls, sisters and brothers, my likenesses, good morning. Thomas smiles. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question this morning—are your stories more than words.
Since stories, whatever else they may or may not be, are composed of words, let's ratchet back and begin with a more fundamental question—are words more than words. If we're able to answer this question, then perhaps we can go forward, or back if you will, and examine stories as a particular case of words governed by the logic or illogic we uncover after we determine whether or not words are more than words.
Words. There's one. Thomas mimes grabbing it. Gotcha, he says. This specimen, words, will serve as well as any other word to establish (a) the inherent nature of words (b) the emergent capacities of words that might enable them to transcend the qualities defining them as words, in other words, their potential to become more than words. Words. Employing words or any other word to determine what words are and also what they might become limits from the outset the seriousness of this endeavor. Like cronies of the president appointed to investigate the president's conduct. The circularity, the slippery slope of our enterprise this morning girls and boys becomes even more apparent if we pose a parallel question—what is a human being. Who decides who's qualified to serve on that board of inquiry. The dog-chasing-its-own-tail aspect of our investigation can be mitigated, if not entirely overcome, as long as we decide beforehand we won't bite down on our tails if we capture them. We should always be as gentle with ourselves as circumstances allow, especially since no one else in this world, except perhaps good ole Mom, will be gentle and forgiving toward us when we fail, and if we consider those ever-present, nonhuman dimensions of our environment—fire, flood, plague, etc.—in these Last Days, gentleness is obviously a nonexistent concept in whatever wordless language those forces of nature speak. So let's be easy on ourselves.
Gentleness. Remember Mom, remember the tear in the corner of her eye when you do wrong, Thomas. Her gentleness the good news. The bad news, boys and girls, it don't get no better. Huh-uh. So don't make things any harder on yourself than necessary. Words. If you choose to write, words are a necessary evil. And if necessary means no way round it, then we have the answer to our original question: yes. Your stories are more than words. They are evil.
NYC-PARIS-NYC
Two or three times a week for the past three or four years, usually in the early morning, I've walked or jogged along the East River from the Williamsburg Bridge to Battery Park and back. The apartment-for-rent sign I noticed on one of my first trips along the river still sits in a second-story window above the Paris Café. Given the Paris Café's location (since 1873) on a street corner about two hundred yards from the river's edge, just beyond the overarching shadows of the FDR parkway and Brooklyn Bridge, near the eye of a foul storm of loading and unloading tons of fish that used to occur in the Fulton Fish Market every morning except Sunday, it's no wonder no one wanted to live over the Paris Café. Either the noise or stink alone enough to dissuade any sane person from renting the vacant apartment, so why some mornings do I imagine myself its tenant, hope the sign will greet me when I pass. Would I enjoy being awakened by the clamor of trucks, vans, forklifts, the odor of rotting fish clawing at my window. Perhaps the perfect awfulness outside would sink me deeper into the nest of comfort and safety pitched inside a tiny room above the Paris. Or maybe I'm attracted by the idea of disciplining myself to be unaware, if I choose, of whatever mayhem the city produces. Proud of my acquired immunity, my eccentricity. Undisturbed by crashing pallets overloaded with boxes of iced fish, the beep-beep-beep-beep warning of trucks backing up, vendors hollering, doors slammed, tailgates banged, the braying, honking, and wailing of way too many vehicles crowding a limited space, tires crunching mounds of spilled ice, hoses spraying, hissing streams of slimy runoff from the tarmac into South Street. Ignoring this chaos even if it's rife in my hair, my clothes, inside me. Body and mind impervious as the Paris apartment, welcoming more stink, wallowing in it. Pleased to have discovered a hiding place where none exists.
When I imagine living over the Paris Café, I guess I'm actually daydreaming about living under it. A mile deep where the East River licks and sucks the fill that long-dead workmen once dumped in to tame its flow, the river engaged in a continuous, nibbling assault, hollowing out more space, reclaiming its ancient precincts. Corrosive grains of sea salt pushed inland by tidal swells, then swept back downstream by the current are efficient as sandpaper, deepening the wound beneath the Paris where black water laps in mile-deep darkness and my little yellow submarine swims, its fuzzy, disintegrating finger of light checking out what's down there, groping live fish, suicides, dead kittens and babies, all the unexpected creations of drifting cast-off debris and muck that wind up in a scooped-out pocket of water a mile deep below the edge of Manhattan. A soundless, etherized realm exerting unimaginable pressure as I bob there alone, hidden from view, or if I get lucky, with a lover beside me in my bed each morning, fellow sailor, mermaid, fellow ship-wrecked isolato sealed like me in our bungalow, denizens of an immortal city beneath the mortal one, marveling at the quiet, the air of our two breaths, our two fleshes quietly mingling, nuzzling, sour and sweet as measureless tons of water at bay just beyond the porthole.
NEW YORK-PARIS-PITTSBURGH
Thomas watches the curtain pretending spring. One of four matching, semitransparent goldish curtains with a darker gold floral pattern veining them. The panel lifts, no, dances in the draft from a window he'd cracked, not because it w
as spring but because the apartment had overheated during the night, its thermostat predictably unresponsive to changes in temperature outside or inside his old building. Inadequate boilers, clogged radiators, broken traps. Heat on warm days, then AWOL when the city's arctic. A frigid wind agitates the curtain, gropes its folds, and pleats with icy fingers, but the poor pale thing, a colorless rag in the harsh winter light streaming through it, quivers, shudders, would girlishly sigh if it could speak.
Was he concentrating on the problem of representation. Shouldn't he admit to himself at least—who the fuck else is paying any attention—that his mind's as idle as the diddled curtain he watches when he isn't watching for the newly resident mouse to dart from under the stove and skitter across the tiles. Was Thomas contemplating distinctions between literary and cinematic representations of reality or was he speculating on the mouse's next move, stalking the beast, formulating a strategy for killing it. Who knew the French director he'd chosen to rescue Fanon's story from the sorry-assed inadequacy of words would turn out to be fed up with images, falling in love with literature. Did the filmmaker quote writers more and more in his films because he believed images had lost their tongues. Or spoke too much. Working out to the same thing. A global commerce in images usurping, colonizing, lobotomizing, digitizing, roboticizing thought. Instead of being alive, instead of, you know, possessing agency and unscripted, unpredictable possibilities, images are slaves, prisoners. Images kidnapped, copyrighted, archived, cloned. Property. Images serving power, speaking the master's language, saying and doing what the master orders.
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