Now she, he, or it sat up.
The indecipherable shadow muttered: Thomas, Thomas, don’t be silly.
That’s what it sounded like, he thought, he heard that, but do ghosts or sibyls call you silly? He was hearing things, of course, hearing what he wanted. Thomas believed the ghostlike shape was created by a weave of branches and leaves, the winds causing it to shift its shape. It was a shadow created by nature, the play of elements, and maybe of his desire, with an illusion of physicality, but even when he shut his eyes, then quickly opened them, it was there. He accepted his own explanations or interpretations and waited for more.
Someone will love you, the voice said in a deeper register.
Thomas scoffed, then he snorted, and the birds stopped singing, as if they recognized his sounds as derisive and objected with their silence. He stood up, brushed off his pants, boldly walked toward the form, and stuck his arm through the air above it. The shadow disappeared and his own shape hovered, instead. Selective hearing, selective memory, selective living. Maybe he was going mad, this was it, but he didn’t feel mad. Would he ever be happy? He couldn’t imagine it. A dream is a disguise, his college therapist explained, while his Spanish teacher taught Calderón’s La vida es sueño, and if a dream is a disguise, and life is a dream, then life is a disguise, too. The tautology satisfied him since it demonstrated he was able to think, so he wasn’t crazy yet, but if life were a disguise, what did it disguise. Was there a design? No, not a design, there was too much randomness, but then what does life disguise?
Thomas sat on the log again, thoroughly engaged in the question, listening to his thoughts, to the birds who sang again or argued or cried, until he fell asleep. He must have fallen asleep, because time passed and kept passing, and reality didn’t feel real, he was looking at himself looking at himself. The big striped tent was back, he saw himself go through the opening, he saw her walk down the aisle, everything repeated itself, he saw himself, he saw his twin, Tony, she was a man and a woman, and she didn’t hate him, his parents smiled, then looked sadly upon him. He saw life rushing by, was he dead? Life is a dream, life is a dream. Now everyone was in disguise, everyone, and he fled the tent again, horrified, because if everyone’s in disguise, and a disguise is also disguise, then where does it end. IN DEATH. In death, in death. He was dead. He wasn’t asleep, he was dead. Life disguises death. We only think we’re alive. That was the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and, realizing that, he breathed. He wasn’t dead, he was only reading a book. Nothing made sense. A dream is life, life is death, death is life, and all of it is a disguise. Everything. Lies, lies upon lies, only lies on lies only. He finished running away and again he was where he was, by the pond, and the birds were singing, and a mourning dove flew to him and alighted on his chest, so, startled, he rubbed his eyes to better see the beautiful grey bird.
The mourning dove chirped: The biggest lies are the ones you tell yourself.
OK, that’s good, Thomas said to the talking bird.
It was as if I’d seen a ghost, but I was the ghost, he explained to his friends later. He told his twin, Tony, that he knew she was a man and a woman, and he thought, in his dream, he was also. Tony liked him better then, maybe forever after. Thomas did forget Grace, he forgot Billy Webster, and one day he forgot falling asleep and dreaming at the pond, because that’s what he’d told himself. It was all a dream, life is a dream, a dream is life, life disguises death, and only I can lie to myself.
Lunacies
The first astronaut to reach the Moon proclaimed: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Neil Armstrong, his head entombed in a white bubble, his eyes obliterated by Moon-resilient plastic, gravityless in a bloated space suit, planted the U.S. flag right where he stood.
Later, Armstrong realized his mistake. He was supposed to have said: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
“As you read this, the Moon is moving away from the Earth. Each year the Moon steals some of Earth’s rotational energy and uses it to propel itself about 3.8 centimeters higher in its orbit.”
He had never encountered a parasite he didn’t, in some way, envy for a kind of perverse talent.
“The tidal forces of the Moon—and the Sun—don’t act only on the oceans, they act on the land too. Stand on the equator, and the land beneath you will rise and fall as much as twenty-one inches over the course of twenty-four hours.”
Vertigo restrained her from standing near expansive plate-glass windows on the upper floors of top-heavy skyscrapers. She teetered on high heels, the foundation undulating beneath her feet, or maybe she was moonstruck again.
“The Moon is about the same age as Earth. When the Moon was created, it was much closer to Earth and appeared ten times larger in the sky.”
In Sunday school, he asked his teacher, “Why did God make the Moon without people?” His father told him the moon was too cold for people, it was the dark side of God’s work; then his mother broke in, “Your father’s being funny. Look at the TV. Michael Jackson, honey, he’s moon-walking.”
“The Moon is full when the Earth is between the Sun and Moon, it is a New Moon when the Moon is between the Sun and the Earth.”
Nocturnal creatures, cats nightly play and prance, hunting mice, hearing their faint movements behind plaster walls, while their owners beseech moon gods for love and power.
“The Moon is not a planet, but a satellite of the Earth.”
Being an identical twin was way cooler than being a virtual one—adopted at the same time, same age, but studies showed virtuals were very different people. He and his brother were unique, even if they looked the same, and he didn’t moon about his lost individuality, the way his twin did.
“An afterglow—also called post-luminescence—is a wide arc of glowing light that can sometimes be seen high in the western sky at twilight; it is caused by fine particles of dust scattering light in the upper atmosphere.”
She loved the line, “When a pickpocket meets a saint, he sees only his pockets.” She scratched his right arm and nudged him. “Naked, you don’t have pockets,” he said, “unless you’re a fucking kangaroo.” Moonlight did nothing for this guy.
“Alan Shepard, when he was on the Moon, hit a golf ball and drove it 2400 feet, nearly half a mile.”
The moon is made of green cheese, and that crater on it, it’s really a man in the moon. And I haven’t drunk any moonshine.
“At the full Moon, the times of moonrise and moonset have advanced so that the Moon rises about the same time the Sun sets, and the Moon sets about the same time the sun rises.”
Their honeymoon, after years of living together, still scared up traditional illusions, intimations of ecstasy, a time out from reality, and when the second night of connubial bliss yawned on, she quoted George Meredith, “Where may these lunatics have gone to spend the Moon.”
“Ramadan begins with the sighting of the new crescent Moon in the ninth month of the lunar calendar. But whose sighting counts?”
She read the first sentence of the book: “A white dog bayed at the Moon, a true moon-dog, with moon-blindness, more blind sometimes than others.” The writer must be a lunatic.
“Dr. Eugene Shoemaker, a geological surveyor who educated the Apollo mission astronauts about craters, never made it to the Moon… He was rejected as an astronaut because of medical problems. After he died, his ashes were placed on board the Lunar Prospector spacecraft on January 6, 1999… and fulfilled Dr. Shoemaker’s last wish.”
Once in a blue moon, the tides pull at us. They invoke humans to recall primitive ancestors who shouted at the sky, noise-makers who yowled in the dark, beckoning forces and spirits to aid their survival. Now, domesticated dogs guard their masters’ lives, and house cats daydream about orangutans swinging happily from branch to branch. Human beings cannot stop being afraid of the dark or imagining complete freedom.
The Way We Are
I walked over to the café on a sunny and boring Thursday afternoon in
Amsterdam. I found him sitting at the bar, next to a young blond woman and an older man. Their heads were inclined toward each others’ at an angle that indicated drunkenness.
“Let’s go to a movie.” They all looked up. “Come on,” I said to him, “I’m going nuts in this town. I’ll pay.”
“What do you want to see?” he asked.
“The Way We Were, Streisand and Redford. I want to cry.”
“Shit,” he said and slid off the barstool, leaving the woman and man. He didn’t say goodbye. They watched us go.
We jumped into a taxi at the Rembrandtplein and sped to the cinema as if leaving the scene of a crime. There was some relief just being in a taxi. We arrived at the movie two minutes before showtime. “You see,” I muttered to him, “we were meant to be here.”
Four o’clock in the afternoon and there were only twenty people in the theater—tourists or depressives at this time of day. We took seats in the center of the hall. There was no one in front of us. I slipped my feet out of my shoes, and he went to take a piss. He’d had eight beers by the time I’d commandeered him out of the café. He returned with chocolates.
It was a lowdown, dirty day. I was leading the life of a bat, a fascinated bat, in a dark hole, eating candy and gobbling images. I plugged my naked feet in between the empty seats as tears rolled down my cheeks. I’ve learned to cry silently during movies. The usher, who was probably bored, too, wanting to be outside, not here with us on a sunny day, asked me to remove my feet from the seat in front. I did as I was told, my eyes on the screen, but my friend immediately threw his legs over the seat in front of him. He looked with menace at the usher. The usher took note and left.
Redford’s telling Streisand why she’s not right for him just as the usher returns. My friend says he won’t take his feet down. The usher stands there. My friend pretends he is absorbed in what’s on the screen. A minute or two passes. They’re in a standoff. I’m trying to watch the movie. Streisand and Redford are fighting. Then fists start flying. Streisand is crying. With one eye on the screen, I try to break up the fight between the two incensed men. My friend turns and yells at me, “Why are you on his side?” “I’m not, I’m not,” I protest. His glasses fly off so I drop to the floor, crying, to search for them.
They’re swinging at each other and I’m on the floor wondering what’s happening to Streisand and Redford. The usher pulls away from my friend, who had him in a bear hug. The usher shouts “Politie” and starts up the aisle; my friend storms up the aisle after him. I try to concentrate on the movie. Someone else finds my friend’s glasses—no one is really able to watch the movie—and when he returns he puts them on and says, “I’m demanding our money back.”
We walk to the lobby where he threatens the ticket taker, an overweight elderly woman. He looms over her, all hair and eyes. “Let’s go,” I say sensibly, “the cops will be here any minute.”
Back on the street, on the outside, he throws his arm around me and curses. He murmurs that the world is too hard for us. We walk a block or two and begin to cross a busy street when he pushes me forward, toward an oncoming car, insisting it should stop. The car swerves. We are on the white line, rush-hour traffic running both ways.
“They should stop,” my friend says. He seizes my hand. This time we both jump into the path of an oncoming car. He kicks it because it doesn’t stop. He is wearing sandals. He kicks it a second time; the third time he dents it. The car stops and the driver bounces out. He asks, in Dutch, “What the hell is going on?” My friend responds, in English, “We had the right of way.” My friend blames the driver, who is both furious and incredulous. Then we walk away.
We are trailed by the car driver, a taxi driver who had witnessed everything, and a man on a bicycle, another eyewitness. We arrive at a bridge, leading these three like pied pipers. My friend urges me, a foreigner, to flee, to run away. “Go,” he says, “before the cops get here.”
I march to the corner and stand behind a telephone pole. I watch my friend, the car driver, the taxi driver, the bicyclist, and the cops who arrive in no time. They all talk for a while. Then my friend is escorted into the cop car where he disappears in the backseat.
The cop car drives away, followed by the three indignant Dutch men. I telephone someone and explain that my friend has been taken away. Someone reassures me that he will be released immediately because this is Amsterdam.
I walk home. I avoid the movie house. My friend is not charged. His behavior, he tells me, is considered ludieke, too strange, really, to be a crime.
A Greek Story
A friend announced that what she was going to tell me was the best thing she’d ever done. It was her best story.
She and her friend were about to start traveling in Greece. On the first day they were in Athens, where my friend lives, she stepped on her very nearsighted friend’s glasses. The nearsighted friend insisted anyway on being the driver of the car they rented. The nearsighted one pasted a piece of paper over the shattered lens and off they drove. The nearsighted friend drove everywhere. But they contacted another friend in the States, to send a new pair of glasses as soon as possible.
Everywhere they went the nearsighted friend saw out of one eye only. Maybe this is why, when they arrived at Mesalongi, where Lord Byron witnessed the massive battle against the Turks, she especially found the local population menacing.
Then finally it was time for the nearsighted friend to go home, to the States. By now, at some poste restante in Greece, they discovered that a FedEx package was waiting, with the nearsighted friend’s new glasses. A note told them that the package was being held in the customs building at the international airport, from which the nearsighted one would fly home.
On the day she was to leave, they went to that building. It was very hard to find the door to enter it, it was a very large, impersonal, and opaque-looking building, and for a long time they couldn’t find its entrance. When they did, finally, my friend, who speaks Greek, asked an official the whereabouts of her friend’s package. They were directed to a series of rooms, and, in each room, hundreds of packages, some marked Urgent, were strewn on many tables. Many of the cartons and large envelopes were broken or torn. In about half an hour, though, my friend miraculously spied the Fed Ex envelope, with the glasses. But at the door was a customs official who informed them, in Greek, that there was duty to pay on the contents. A lot of duty.
At first calm, my friend explained that her nearsighted friend was leaving for the States that very day and wouldn’t even be bringing the new glasses into Greece. The customs official said that it didn’t matter and repeated that there was duty to pay and she had to pay it. My friend became agitated and also repeated the same thing: the contents were her friend’s personal property, which she wasn’t even bringing into Greece and she was leaving that day. Nothing had any effect upon the customs official. He continued to say money was owed, and it had to be paid. Then, my friend told me, she launched into Greek anger, that’s how she explained it, which naturally made me think about Greek tragedy.
My friend began cursing and shouting in Greek, a torrent of words. All the while the nearsighted friend listened but didn’t understand. My friend shouted and shouted and then, as she shouted, she surreptitiously opened the FedEx envelope, removed the eyeglass case, and took the glasses from it. Then still shouting vehemently in Greek, she returned the case to the envelope, closed it, threw the envelope on the table in front of the customs official, took her nearsighted friend by the hand, and stormed out. When the two had gone through the door, my friend took the glasses from her pocket, gave them to her friend, explained what she’d done, and said, run.
After my friend told me the story, I reminded her how she began it, by saying it was the best thing she had ever done. Oh, she said, that’s awful if it’s true.
The Recipe
—Sadness, that’s normal, it goes with the territory, but becoming bitter, bitterness is to be avoided, he said.
—Be a saint inste
ad, she said.
Instead, he’d live from the largesse of a common madness, not just his own, not just from his sadness, he’d lament and move on, lament and move on.
My lament, can’t do it, my way.
Clay wouldn’t ever want to relinquish internal rhyme, rhyming was a mnemonic device, too, and venerable for a reason, and, along with that, he relied on the beautiful histories meshed inside the roots of words.
—We don’t determine what words mean, they determine what we mean, Clay said, later. We don’t determine much.
Cornelia was a film editor and also translated documents and titles for a movie company, she also plied her insightful eye as a photo researcher and archivist for a wealthy eccentric, who never left his house and liked to know what was going on, but only in pictures. The eccentric hated to read.
—It would be great if pictures told a story, Cornelia said, but they don’t. They tell too many, or they don’t tell any.
—Words, also, he said.
—Images are easier to misread, she said.
—I don’t know.
Subtitles crowded the image, she explained more than once, they changed the picture, even dominated it, and besides, reading words on a screen disrupted the cinematic flow. He wasn’t sure that was all bad, but then he was suspicious of images, which he didn’t make. He
was wary of words, too, which he used and tried to remake, so he had reason for anxiety. In her business, they talked about “getting a read on” a script, on meaning, sort of instantaneously.
A place for words, orphaned, wayward, no words,
no images, what then.
The lovers argued about the small things, about cleaning up after themselves in their apartment, as responsible adults do, supposedly, and petty problems, at work and with relative strangers, and also the large things, love, politics, history, friendship, art, poetry, which he wrote, when inevitably inconsiderate matter that had earlier settled in words and sentences extruded layers of their pasts, lived together and separately.
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