Centuries of June

by Keith Donohue

  “That seems an odd story for a father to tell his daughter under the circumstances,” Sam said.

  Sita laughed softly. “For sure, if you read it as an allegory for my situation. But my father wasn’t recommending trial by fire or a return to Mother Earth for me. I was not the goddess, and Matthew was certainly no god, no incarnation of Rama or anything of the sort. My father had the opposite intent in mind, if any moral is to be drawn, though I am not sure if the purpose of poetry and stories is to provide morals. His point may be: no man is worth such a sacrifice, eh?”

  From downstairs came a sudden thud and crash, as if someone had bumped into a sideboard laden with glasses and knocked one to the floor. Judging by the ebb and flow of the conversation below, the guests were busy tidying up the mess. My brother swung his legs and put his feet on the floor. Sita sat beside him.

  I got better in time. My father’s stories may have helped, more for the teller than the tale. Certainly the chance to be home again and under their care. Do you know Bachelard’s concept of the Desire Path? You find them all the time in landscapes, the paths or lines carved into the earth by animals or humans, the path worn by traffic across a park or open space, the most expeditious way from point to point. I loved the sound of it. I followed the desire path home. What I needed. There I found myself again, and by the following term, I went back to school, finished my degree. Took much longer to trust men after that. Lots of first dates, but nobody special. Four years wandering in the desert, and then my desire path led to Jack.

  In the book and gift shop at the American Institute of Architects, a lovely unknown place, right around Christmastime. I was looking for a tie for my father, and this guy is the only other person in the shop. Must have been midafternoon on a cloudy December day in the middle of the week. I can’t help but notice this man just wandering amid the merchandise. It’s not a big shop really, but he passed by me a couple of times, and I can’t really tell if he’s looking for something in particular or if he’s working up the courage to speak to me, so finally I just ask him outright, “Can I help you?” The look of surprise in his eyes is priceless, and then he thinks that I work there. “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” he says. “Something inspirational, thought-provoking, something to help me dream.”

  “Are you an architect?” I asked him.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  He looked just like a small boy caught in a daydream, so I took him by the hand and led him to the bookshelves and pulled out Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. “You’ve heard of this?” He shook his head, so I handed him the book, and you’d have thought he was never going to move from the spot, never going to speak again. Just stunned. I suppose I was too forward.

  She’s right about the book. I never would have found it without her. But I’m not so sure just how shy I was when we met. I mean, I was instantly attracted to her, she’s strikingly beautiful. I seem to recall a certain savoir faire on my part—

  “Who are you kiddin’?” Harpo asked.

  “Ah, what do you know?” Had I a shoe, I would have thrown it at the cat.

  Harpo growled at me like the tiger of his dreams.

  Jack asked me out for a coffee right then and there, and I thought, whew boy, not another architect. Managed to stay away from that sort for the past couple years, but how much harm in a cup of coffee? Jack was different, it turns out. He seemed to be someone I had always known, like we had met before in a previous life and were meant to meet again. His mannerisms and gestures, the light in his eyes. Even the way he talked. You didn’t have an ordinary conversation, chitchat about the weather, but always a little deeper, and I don’t know, like a haiku or something Japanese. Philosophical, poetical, straining toward the profound. An old soul. Nobody else talked that way with me. Nobody else treated me that way.

  And he lived completely in his own head. Which can be an interesting place when he lets you inside. I used to catch him singing to himself when he thought no one could hear, snatches of opera it turns out. Or I’d come over and see him on a whim and he’d be in the middle of some old cowboy movie or anything with flappers or Buster Keaton or the Marx Brothers. But what was most different was that he was forever off on his own desire path. And his dreams were a symptom of an underlying sorrow, I think, a kind of despair.

  “Despair? Jack?” My brother did not recognize me in her description.

  “Jack would tell me his dreams. Everything he wished to design and see built, of course, but beyond that. What he hoped to create out of empty space, how to give people the places they needed for work or to study or just live. How to make a home out of a house. He was always reading the Poetics, trying to find some key to making it all happen, but I think he truly despaired of ever making it so. Too many hurdles. The bureaucracy of the firm. The conspiracy of other people.”

  “You have that anywhere,” said Sam.

  She soothed her grief with a sigh. “I’ve been there before, so I recognize the signs. Always wishing but never doing. Always desiring but never searching. His dreams of making all those houses and buildings and cities that he had drawn as a boy. He put his life on hold as he waited for his life to begin. All of it, even me. The shame is we were so close.”

  I saw her face surrounded by fireflies.

  “The other night we had a few people over from his firm, a cookout to celebrate the beginning of another summer. The couple across the street were sitting on the porch blowing bubbles for their two girls to chase, and then the fireflies came out by magic in pairs and dozens and hundreds. Those girls were full of joy. And then these two jerks from his office were going on about this and that, and at one moment, I caught Jack’s eye and begged him, in my mind, to get me out of here, to take me away from all this. Run off, stare at the ocean together, start a little magic of our own. But I guess he never quite got the signal, and I wonder now if he knew how much he was loved.”

  She began to cry again, and Sam finally got the signal that I was sending and rose to his feet and draped an arm across her shoulders. She folded herself into his embrace. “One thing I am sure of,” he said, “was how much he was loved and how much he loved you.”

  Thank you, old man, I whispered.

  “Perhaps the next time we go around,” Sita said.

  “Here’s to the next life,” Sam said. He guided her to the door. She looked back once over her shoulder, and then they left the room. I longed to stop her at the door, hoping to see her one last time, but she did not turn around, so I let it be.

  A short while later, the noises downstairs abated as the guests left the house. Good-bye, good-bye, they said to one another. Sam helped Sita with her suitcases, for she was off to Chicago for repair of her heart. When the last one out locked the door, the old empty feeling returned. I was sad to hear them go, of course, but such endings are inevitable.

  How much of our lives is spent saying farewell or waiting for someone to say hello? I neither dreaded nor welcomed being alone, but still, one enjoys lively company when it can be found. It had been good to see the girls again. After such a night, I was overwhelmed with sleepiness, and to no great surprise, darkness filled the windows. It would not shock me to learn the clocks read eight minutes until five once more. The cat, perhaps sensing my fatigue, lifted its head from the coil of its body. He appeared curious as to what had transpired during his nap, but no more curious than usual. Unwinding himself, front legs first, then the uncurling tail, and then an invigorating stretch that starts in the claws and ends at the back legs, Harpo woke slowly and meowed once. Inscrutable yet again, he leapt off the bed and swished his tail back and forth. He seemed hesitant to depart, yet anxious to go. I would have preferred he stay but knew better. “Go on,” I said. He quick-stepped through the door and into the dark hallway. “I hope you get to be a tiger next time,” I said, but he may have been too far gone to have heard.

  Where Sita had rested, the comforter lay bunched and ruffled, and her impression remained. I thought I’d lie just
for a moment where she had been, for the bed was warm with her memory. I dozed off for a spell. I loved her, perhaps more than I realized at the time when it would have made a difference. Had I any sense that June night of the fireflies, I would have kissed her under the canopy of the great leafy trees or told her how excited I felt just to be near her, but nothing much happened. Her arm brushed against mine every now and then, and I could almost taste her skin. Her hair shone under the string of Christmas lights hung around the railings of the deck. She smelled of cardamom and honey. It was perfect exhilaration, and yet, and yet, I failed to say any of this. And now it is too late. She was good for me, far better than I for her.

  I loved them all, in my own way, the women who came to me from the past: Dolly, impetuous and loyal to the end; Jane, from whom I beg forgiveness; Alice, who bewitched me; Marie, most delicious; my darling Flo with whom I struck it rich; my biggest fan, Adele; and Bunny, who brought out the beast in me. I see now how I wronged each of them in one fashion or another. Maybe next time I will get it right. I do not claim innocence or push the blame on any of them. Yet at the same time, I wonder why they bothered to put me to the trial. Is it just possible that they loved me, too, that they came because they missed me and wished for one more day? For I see now that I have been a rascal over centuries, but not without some appeal. And my brother has always been a bit of a rogue as well. These thoughts give me comfort and hope.

  Every once in a while, I wake up in the morning in exactly the same position in which I fell asleep. The sheets are barely wrinkled, the pillow holds its shape, and the blanket is merely creased like a flag from where it had been folded before I laid my body down. Following the wake, this is how I slept, as though the bed had been designed to enclose my body and nothing else, and the darkness fell like a lid, reassuring me that I was safe and free to rest. My pounding headache had vanished. Such a peaceful sleep with no thoughts or cares or dreams or anything to wake me.

  Recently, though, the space changed, and that changes everything. The light—if one may call it light; perhaps a better term is the shade of darkness—stimulated a nerve cell or two deep in the mind, and by reflex, I kicked and the box smithereened apart. A kind of Big Bang return to consciousness, to a more fluid state of being, yet still somewhat restrictive, as though living in a bubble. It was not an unpleasant transition, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. The room dark, though not of a smothering sort, but rather an enveloping darkness, and around the edges, a tad cooler. The air itself had become viscous and tasted faintly like the ocean. Life has slowed to a lunar cycle.

  The voices, when they became audible, startled me. Emanating from beyond and above yet within the room, they seemed at first to be the gods in conversation, a woman and a man usually, but sometimes a third or fourth person could be heard over some infernal public address system with periodic announcements that buzzed and shook the walls. The actual words were nearly impossible to make out, though every once in a while, a phrase would filter through. “But I don’t even like milk,” the woman said. And much later, when the man exclaimed, “Hey, look it’s snowing,” I realized that we were not in June anymore, perhaps not even in the same year, or who knows, the same century. Of course, it was far too dark for me to see anything happening outside, even if I could somehow get up and find a window. For I was trapped in place, barely able to find my thumb with my mouth. And when I finally did manage the trick, that’s when I realized what was actually happening in here.

  Soon I will forget again everything I ever knew.

  I won’t remember the night when the seven women from the past came to recount my most grievous sins. Or the old man who led me to think he was the ghost of Beckett. Or the babbling baby boy, the talking cat, the singing windows, the women in the bed. Soon I will forget this very room, my house, and all poetics. I will trade recollections of my brother for some new experience, perhaps with another brother. All that’s left of mother and father will vanish, as will every memory of friend and acquaintance. A lifetime of choices and opinions, the carefully constructed persona, vagabond experience, and the hopes and hurts and everything in between passes. Even now, I lose myself, my name escapes me. Sita, love of my life, will disappear from memory.

  All of it will be erased completely, and even the simplest things will have to be relearned. Those voices outside will be my new guides to language, to talking and walking and eating solid foods. To make sense again of the material world, to read what’s in another’s heart by their signs and deeds. Someone will have to show me right from wrong, right from left, how to draw, what to eat, how to tie my shoes, why it is best to keep a cheerful disposition. I sincerely hope that I get reintroduced to the writings of Bachelard. But who will laugh at the Marx Brothers with me? Who will wait with me for Godot? All of it to be learned over and over and over. Here’s a kick for you, lady, to remind you I am here. I am filling the last available space, dark as it is, and when all is taken and there is no more, I will fall down, out into the world and light to begin.

  Here we go again. Another chance to muck up not only my life but so many others. Another go around, a new desire path to follow with or without the lessons learned. Round and round and round. Soon all this babbling will be just bubble and drool. The stopped watch is now ticking.

  Here we go again. Another chance at life.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to John Glusman and Peter Steinberg. To Bill Pugh and Lee Owens. Rose, for the French, and Melanie, for the red pen and support.

  Although some of the characters in this novel actually existed historically, they are fictional representations.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KEITH DONOHUE is the author of the bestselling novels The Stolen Child and Angels of Destruction. For many years a ghostwriter, he has worked at the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Donohue holds a Ph.D. in English literature, has published literary criticism, and has lectured on literature and writing at several colleges and universities.