The Alumni Grill, Volume 2

by Tom Franklin

  “Fuck no,” said her husband. “Fuck the sunset.”

  “That reminds me of a James Thurber cartoon,” I said. I tried unsuccessfully to explain what I was talking about.

  “You’re going to miss a beautiful sunset,” said the poet.

  “Seen one you’ve seen them all,” said her husband.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  “Thank you,” said the poet.

  We headed for the pier.

  “Sunsets are for pussies,” her husband called.

  *

  Hodge and I kind of wanted to hit the road after the party, but we went back to the church instead, because the drunken writer was going to read, and he was supposed to be hilarious. His book had a hilarious title.

  The program was delayed while different authorities tried to find the drunken writer and force him on stage. Finally he crawled up of his own free will and read a story very slowly with lots of odd pauses. Many times we could not understand what he was saying. Other times he would yell out, for no apparent reason, “Thank you, George W. Bush!” Even with all that going on, the story was funny and we laughed upon several occasions.

  Hodge and I sneaked out before the next writer started. The church lawn was black and eerie in the dim electric light. On our way to the parking lot we found the poet alone in the dark, on a bench, eyes shut, head drooping. She wore an air of distress!

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  She shook her head.

  “Is everything all right?”

  She shook her head.

  “Can I get you something?”

  She shook her head.

  “Okay,” I said. “Are you sure you don’t need anything?”

  “Thank you, I’m fine,” she said.

  Hodge and I got in the car and drove away.

  “I hope she’s all right,” I said.

  “She’s pretty,” said Hodge.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You sure were on that pier a long time,” Hodge said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “It takes a long time for the sun to go down.”

  “Sure it does.”

  “Well, it does!”

  “I know, I’m agreeing with you.”

  “Well, then, what are you getting at?”

  “I don’t know. I thought she looked sad.”

  “Sad how?”

  “Like she and her husband had had a fight.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “About…? No!”

  “Okay then.”

  “You really think…?”

  “All I’m saying is, you were out on that pier for a long time.”

  “What? So what? That’s his wife! He’s my oldest friend, one of the best friends I’ve ever had! And what about Happy?” (Happy is my wife.)

  “Don’t tell me, tell him.”

  “Oh, he wouldn’t think…. He’s the nicest person in the world.”

  “Fine, then, it’s settled. Settled to the satisfaction of all! She was sitting all alone in the dark for no reason. Case closed.”

  “Maybe she was tired.”

  “A man and a woman at the end of the pier. Watching the sun sink slowly into the ocean. Alone. Makes a real pretty picture. Real pretty.”

  “Would you shut up?”

  “Oh, don’t mind me. Case closed. Nicest person in the world. Oldest friend for many years.”

  “Well, you know, he can get really jealous.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, he’s been known to get jealous. Yeah, like one time I walked through the mall with this girl he liked and he got so mad he snapped his pen in two and got ink all over himself.”

  “Hmm.”

  I was quiet for a long time.

  Hodge started laughing.

  “What?”

  “What do I always tell you?”

  “Oh!”

  I started laughing too. Right! The self-absorbed thing.

  Turns out it’s true!

  I want my name in poems. I want people, all people, to name their babies after me. I imagine myself to cut such a dashing figure on the dusky pier, even as a distant silhouette, that I cause great rifts in the solid marriages of my most beloved friends. Me with my eczema!

  Hodge sure “had my number.” Yes, the joke was “on me.” This I knew at once, even before finding out the next day that the poet had been, after all, just terribly ill with a surfeit of drink (I hasten to add that this incident did not occur during her pregnancy).

  Hodge and I laughed for a while and then we stopped laughing.

  “That’s quite an imagination you have,” I said.

  “You’re highly suggestible,” said Hodge.

  “Yes, between the two of us we’re going to make a good writer.”

  ACKERMAN IN EDEN

  by Donald Hays

  Tomorrow, he knows, they will return with their Thorazine and their rules, but now Ackerman, alone of all his kind, stares into a pool of water and thinks of spearing fish in a twilit eddy of the far Euphrates. For tomorrow, when they come, they will not find him. He will be in the marshlands south and west of Babylon and Babel. The war, he’s sure, will begin tonight. Shock and awe. But he and the dark princess, whom he has lavished with love and poetry, have planned their escape for days. In but hours, the watchman will come to her, accept the bribe, and in exchange give her Ackerman’s confiscated cards of identity and access and a duplicate key to the doomed city’s western gate. Already a car awaits them. They will flee the horror, cross the God-plagued desert until they reach a place of safety, an oasis where, after dining on fish and rice and fruit, they will lie naked together outside a hut of woven reeds, share a pipe of Afghan opium, and make love beneath the flaming skies of Eden.

  “You still puddling around here, Doc?” It is the first watch of the night, and so it is Rasheed, the keeper of the early evening. “You ain’t careful, Bub, you gon’ miss supper. We might even have a poetry reading after.” His head jerks down, up, the emphatic affirmative. “You never know. What you think, Wally? See if we can’t stop the war that way?” Sometimes he calls Ackerman Wally, sometimes Doc, and sometimes Dr. Hip. That’s because on Ackerman’s first night here, Rasheed had asked him what he was a doctor of. Poetry, Ackerman had said, I teach it and I write it. What’s it like, your poetry? Rashed had asked. Wallace Stevens, said Ackerman, except hip. And then, for many minutes, he had declaimed poems and bits of poems from his most recent collection, Parallel Loves.

  Rasheed walks over to the sink. “What a man’s got to do here is just pull the plug and watch it all go down the drain.” Ackerman stares at him. He is a mystery. Rasheed pulls the plug. “See,” he says.

  They watch the water swirl and disappear. Ackerman looks away and sees. He is in a white room. There is a bed, a window, blinds. Slits of dusklight seep through. He looks again at the sink. White and empty. Vanished waters. There is a mirror above the sink. A black man and a white one. Ackerman stares into first the black face and then the white. “‘How can we sing the Lord’s song,’” he asks, “‘in a strange land?’”

  “You just got to keep right on at it, Dr. Hip,” Rasheed says. “A man like you, ain’t no other way.” He takes Ackerman by the elbow and turns him away from the sink.

  “I write letters home,” says Ackerman earnestly. “I read paragraphs on the sublime.”

  They step into a hallway. It is empty now, but it leads toward the western gate and, beyond that, the world.

  “But you gon’ eat your supper now, Wally. Right up here. We having fish tonight.”

  *

  Tonight the television is on. Inside it, bombs burst on Babylon.

  “Baghdad,” the dark princess says. “You got to quit calling it Babylon. All that’s gone.”

  “Ah,” says Ackerman. “Another world.”

/>   She reaches across the table and touches the back of his hand. “Let it go,” she says. “None of it’s going to be any good if you don’t let this go.”

  A third person at the table, an old man, asks, “You want your fish?”

  Ackerman stares deep into the princess’s dark eyes. “I am a poet,” he tells her. “I am in love with loss.”

  “You a special kind of fool,” she says.

  With his fork, the old man spears her fish.

  *

  Deep in the night he comes to her, the young woman, dark and lost. She is sleeping. He stands above her and watches her breathe. Comely, he thinks, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Her face is dark against the white cloth. Ackerman leans down and kisses her lips, her neck. Her smell, he thinks, is like the smell of Lebanon. He wants to undress and lie beside her—the first man and the first woman. But time is short. A terrible army crosses the desert, racing toward them. Already the fires of war have smudged the night. The air itself hums with threat. So they must go. They must hide together in the marshes at the edge of Eden. When the terror passes, they’ll flee to Ur and join the great caravan to Ophir, where songs still map the world.

  He straightens and stares down at her again. She opens her eyes and there’s a moment of wonder. He wants to speak of that wonder. He wants to ask her how she could sleep on such a night. But all he can say is, “The key?”

  She shakes her head. “It’s not done yet. Too early. You go on back and bide your time. It’ll be all right.”

  But he stands and looks.

  “Go on,” she says. “Don’t leave your room. You gon’ mess it all up.”

  So he leaves, returns to his room. He does not see the watchman. He lies in his bed, curled like a frightened child. He waits. He listens. Again and again, he tells himself not to mess it all up. What must be done must be done. A sacrifice for freedom.

  Twice he rises and paces his room, then returns to his bed and curls into himself again. He listens. Nothing. The institutional hum. He fears that the other world is lost, that there is only dread and madness.

  Then the footsteps. Ackerman sits up. He wants to stop the man. Instead, he merely sits there, wide-eyed, staring into the imprisoned night. He begins to rock back and forth. He wants to pray. He has always wanted to pray.

  When at last she comes to him, he does not see her. His eyes are closed. He is still rocking. He is reciting, in a whisper, “Esthetique du Mal.”

  She touches his forehead. He opens his eyes. “Is it…?” She touches his lips with her index finger. “Night men are easy,” she says.

  Ackerman wants to say something, fresh words from the heart. He opens his mouth to speak but finds nothing now save silence and sorrow.

  She is dressed in jeans, sweater, sneakers. “All right,” she says. “It’s running time, rhyming man.”

  As he had promised he would be, the keeper of the night is now watching war in the sun room. They slip past the door and turn down the other hallway. It is white and empty. They creep down it, passing other rooms. Some of the doors are closed, some half-open. All of the rooms are dark. Inside them, patients sleep. Behind the reinforced glass lining the upper half of the nurses’ station, the light is bright and harsh. The head nurse, head bent with concentration, is writing something in a patient’s chart. A life there, Ackerman thinks, symptoms, diagnosis, prescription. He would like to steal his chart, his file. Steal it and take it with him. Deprive them of all they know. But it would be a fool’s risk. And what does it matter? It is a kind of truth, that chart, but it is only their truth, a formula, cribbed and condensed. There is Eden, too.

  The girl pauses, looks back at Ackerman, and makes a downward motion with her right hand. On hands and knees, pressed against the white wall beneath the brightened station glass, they crawl past the nurse. Once they are well beyond her and her light, they stand and, carefully, quickly, walk toward the door at the end of the hall. The princess slips the duplicate key into the lock and turns it. Ackerman follows her into the silent hall, the opening world, beyond.

  *

  At the edge of Nasiriyah, atop the ziggurat of Ur, Ackerman looks east across the broad Euphrates and the flatlands and marshlands beyond. Cornfields, pastureland, cattle and sheep. Carp-filled ponds, mud-walled gardens, landholders’ houses. He turns his face northward and searches the edges of the shadowed world. Beyond all light, in the darkness that covers the curve of the world, are the thirteen city-states where man invented meaning. Extinction, he thinks, the great, gone kingdoms and caliphates. And yet, except for us, the total past felt nothing when destroyed.

  The girl touches his forearm. “You’re talking to yourself again,” she says.

  “Borrowed words.”

  “Sometimes that’s all there is,” she says.

  “And silence. Borrowed words and silence.”

  “You’re going all grim again,” she says. “There’s a road leading west. We keep driving, we be all right.”

  “We have enemies everywhere,” he tells her. “Arrogant armies, moon-ward fedayeen.”

  She pulls at his arm, turns him to face her. “Look at me,” she tells him. “This is Fort Smith, not Nasiriyah or An Najaf. That’s the Arkansas, not the Euphrates. You’re William Ackerman. People say you’re a pretty good poet but you went nuts. I’m Tamika Jones, a runaway nigger girl that’s never known nothing but crackhead projects and hard-dick foster homes.”

  Ackerman nods, then turns his face again toward the water. She turns it back to her. “We got your money. We got your car. We refilled the prescriptions you had before you went in the hospital. You got a chance now and I want you to have it. Ain’t nobody ever been as good to me as you. But you keep this up, I’ll leave your ass. So you got to get this in your head. Neither of us has ever seen Babylon. Not much chance we ever will. You keep pouring pixie dust over everything, we’ll end up someplace worse than what we left.”

  “You were getting gas,” Ackerman says. “I walked up on the bridge. That’s all.”

  “You looked like you were fixing to jump. Up here talking to yourself, moving off into that other world again.”

  He turns and looks across the river again. He nods. “It’s just Oklahoma,” he says.

  “Get back in the car,” she tells him. And he does.

  *

  “Amarillo is not Ophir,” she insists. “Tucumcari ain’t Tikrit. Those are gulleys, or maybe arroyos—they ain’t wadis. And that’s just one more mirage, not Habbiniyah Lake. Nobody out here ever heard of Haroun al Rashid or Jafar the Barmecide or Pale Ramon or any of that other crazy shit you always talking about. I don’t want to hear no more about nobody descending nowhere on extended wings.” She nods toward the windshield and points toward the road ahead. “You keep your mind fixed on what’s right here in front of you. You got to give up all this Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego shit.”

  They cross the width of Oklahoma, the panhandle of Texas, enter New Mexico. She never allows Ackerman to drive the car. He is trying hard to hold onto the world.

  They take a room in Tucumcari. Ackerman pays with cash they have gotten from an ATM in Amarillo. They will eat, sleep, and move on, the princess tells him. Then she looks at him and says it again, “We will eat, sleep, and move on.”

  Ackerman stares at her. She touches the back of his hand. “You gon’ take your pills,” she tells him. “And you gon’ sleep.”

  He nods slowly. “The night has no bedroom,” he says.

  “Yeah, well, we renting it one now.”

  In the night, she eats and then sleeps. Ackerman does neither. He sits in the chair beside his bed and watches the war on the bolted-down TV. The sound is off. He does not want to wake the princess. The English have taken Basra. There are marines in An Najaf, where Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law and cousin, is buried. A rectangular wall surrounds the sanctuary, two stories with a golden dome that holds the tomb. Ali, a gentle man who became Caliph after the murders of Omar and Othman and ruled
until he was murdered at the door of the mosque in Kufa. He was succeeded by his enemy, first of the Ommayed Caliphs, who for the next century ruled from Damascus.

  The Shi’a and the Sunni. Believers and their wars. Infidels are not allowed entry into the sanctuary of Ali’s tomb, and Ackerman is everywhere an infidel—in Bethlehem and Jerusalem as much as in An Najaf. But beyond the cemetery and the thin stretch of palm-lined fields along the far Euphrates, there is but desert, black and endless. Desert.

  As he watches the television, tears come to his eyes. He must let the girl go.

  When she wakes he stares into her soft eyes, watches as they become wary. A new day. What must be done must be done. “Tamika Jones,” he says. He closes his eyes. Tamika Jones. He opens his eyes and sees her again. Tamika Jones. “‘Let be be finale of seem,’” he says.

  She stares at him. “You didn’t take your pills, did you?”

  He shakes his head. “I’ve gone too far.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?” she says, shaking her head. “You listen to me. I’m gon’ get up now. I’m gon’ shower. I’m gon’ put my clothes back on. Then we gon’ go out and get us some breakfast. We get back, we gon’ get in your car and drive to Phoenix.”

  “Yes,” says Ackerman. “Phoenix.”

  Phoenix is what happens when there is no poetry, Ackerman thinks. Then he says it aloud to Tamika Jones. “Well, we fix that,” she says. “You be there tonight.”

  Casually and splendidly naked, she rises from the bed and goes into the shower. The body itself, thinks Ackerman, should be wonder enough.

  While she showers, he watches the silent TV. Retired colonels and ignorant anchormen. An ad for a purple pill. Phoenix, thinks Ackerman. He has been there. There is nothing real in Phoenix. The rainbow lawns, the blue pools, the desert denied. Can no one hear the sucking sound of greed?

  Tamika Jones walks out of the bathroom still drying herself with a white towel. My dark princess, he thinks. But, yes, he must leave her. His desire has become the twin of his despair. Ackerman watches her dress. She doesn’t need the sweater now. Just the jeans, the T-shirt, the shoes. There is much he wants to say to her. She looks at him, her face a question.