My companion soon fell asleep and snored loudly. I sat watching the evil houses and the evil trees.
The next morning we continued into the high country, where everything had a grayish tinge—grayish-green bushes, grayish-red rocks—and everything was hot and prickly: thorns, prickly pears, nettles, and thistles. Sitting up among the pyrites, you could listen to the creek talking to itself, the faint hiss of the grass-pennants in the wind, the hums of flies and the discussions of birds where the shale spires and saddles were fractured into vertical planes seamed with quartz granite. Some of the rocks were embedded with minerals that glittered like stars. Others had been traced with concentric rings, as if they were trees. They were all hot to the touch an hour after sunup. Outside of houses, we're easily influenced, it seems. I have often seen patches of lichen on Arctic stones, forming a schematic of planetary orbits around the sun. Here, even the lichen—bright orange, bright yellow—hid from the sun in rocky fissures. I wanted to hide, too, but not from the sun. Of course it would be useless. Those houses would see me as soon as I'd clambered down to the creek to drink. Their windows saw a long way.
My companion said: I hope my house is all right. I didn't lock the back door.
All at once I, who had no home, understood why the cabins at Roberts Camp had not assaulted his brain. His own house was evil and had already eaten him . . .
Herculaneum, Near Napoli, Campania, Italia (1993)
The Angel of Forgetting wanted to be the kindest angel. She went down to the roofless open places, the lacunae walled with diamond-angled brick. She came into the old house and began to unbuild it. The little boy said: I lived here in the old centuries. I lived in this house.
Around the edges of that squarish pit of ruins, graying apartments whose balconies fluttered with trapped white laundry rose from beards of ivy, and the sounds of auto horns floated down. A living child cried, and his anguish sifted down.
Did you hear that? said the Angel of Forgetting. — Ah, that pretty little bird!
Letting down her hair with a windrushing sound, the Angel of Forgetting overflew continents of surviving plaster. She strode the pillared yard of palms, click-heeled corridors roofed only with marbled sky. The little boy walked behind her, whimpering. Grass and weeds grew atop the jagged wall-ends.
In the room of gravel and moss, the Angel of Forgetting knocked down walls to let wind and birds in. She was being kind.
The little boy said: Don't you know me?
The Angel of Forgetting smelled a memory somewhere, like a pattern of a few dozen tiles. Sniffing, she raised her arms, swam the sea of graffiti-waved grayness, marched down narrow streets sunken like dry cobblestoned canals. Some rooms were hollowed out to store water or oil or grain, each opening being an upturned bowl with a ring around its hole, so that the darkness inside widened like a woman's breast. The little boy didn't follow. He stayed in his house.
Ah, ah, she said. Here it is. Here's the heart that needs to bleed!
She'd found the House of the Deer, in whose ultramarine violet sky of tiles golden-brown greyhounds leaped up at fleeing deer. Wreaths of leaves writhed like banners across heaven, and twin peacocks lived above.
She swept her hair across the tiles, and they faded. Slamming her heel down, she made thunder and the walls fell down.
Then she returned to the little boy's house.
The little boy sat looking at her in the pale-tiled rib-roofed chamber of echoes, sitting on his dolphin-tiled floor.
The little boy said: Don't you know me?
The Angel of Forgetting said: I'm not your mother.
The little boy said: I'm the Angel of Death. I lived in this house.
She shrieked, flew up, and ran along the many low ridges of various curvatures which hunched gray and yellow against time. Her wings fell off. She ran under the wall's narrowing archy darkness, that smell of sand in her face; she was sand in the little boy's hourglass.
The little boy, whose cheeks were burned purple by the Angel of Forgetting's death, kept twisting around to look at the woman who was getting off the train. He said: Don't you know me?
She replied: I lived in your house.
He said: I'm the Angel of Death. I lived in all the houses.
She said: You can't kill me, because I know you. Besides, I don't believe in angels.
The little boy started crying, but she said: You always do that. That's why I left. I got tired of your crying. Why don't you go kill someone?
Why don't you know me? he sobbed.
I do know you, she said. I died in all the houses. You never killed anybody but me. I'm your mother, and you were born dead.
The little boy stopped crying. He grasped the woman's sleeve. He said: Who built the houses, Mommy?
Your father did. He wants you to come upstairs. He has a new house for you now.
Then she shoved the little boy down, knelt upon his chest and strangled him. He squirmed and choked for a long time before he died.
Did you hear that? said the Angel of Forgetting from upstairs. — Ah, that pretty little bird!
San Diego, California, U.S.A. (1988, 1992)
Down in the golden grass near San Diego where houses and new houses terrified me, families lived the California life, saying to one another: If you can't feel it, never mind it. — A black lizard crawled and stopped. He heard what they said, and wanted everything to be true. Like ants on rocks, bees among thorns, flies and then rocks, grass-shadowed rocks, the houses went on forever.
If only I could blow up the aqueduct, I said. Maybe that would stop them.
The lizard crawled and stopped. He heard me before I heard myself.
In the desert I hear the clink of climbing gear or the clink of rock before I hear the sloosh of water in my canteen. I never hear my own voice.
The lizard heard and didn't hear. He heard desert birds talking to each other in long bright monosyllables.
Tomorrow I must die a little for your joy, the lizard said. He didn't hear his own voice.
Every time's a little drier than I remembered, I said. I didn't hear my own voice.
We both heard the slow double-beat of eagle wings.
The eagle saw cacti dead one day, green and blossoming the next. The eagle followed clouds like the branch-widening shadows of trees on narrowing rocks.
The gray dirt is covered with golden flowers, said the eagle. He didn't hear his own voice.
My, voice was a bitter salad of Joshua tree flowers. The lizard's voice was a man's legs warmed by the sun through dark trousers. The eagle's voice was a long day.
Others were building new cities in the east, where life is blue space, where so many beaches and low dry mountains are overhovered by vultures. I heard the cities growing loudly. They grew like the voices on their radios, and cars made noise between them. Forests of houses mingled with palms in the canyons, orange-roofed condos and hotels, everything owned, but green ran through it like revenge. Ivory-nippled mission phalli became erect on palm-starred hillsides, the palms bushy, grainy like phosphor from shooting stars. Houses built themselves with hammering rackets. Garage doors hummed shut. Lawn mowers ate my scream. The lizard crawled under a house and said: You can study something for years and have no conclusions, but that's not to say you've gotten nowhere. — He didn't hear his own voice.
The eagle said: This desert might look green if I fly high enough. — He didn't hear his own voice.
I saw a girl naked outside a house and said: You're too glowing to find meaning in, but I can find meaning around you. — I heard my own voice.
She said: I can't hear you until you kill the lizard under my house.
I caught the lizard and said: I'm going to kill you. — He was screaming but I couldn't hear him. I killed him, and the girl and I poisoned his body together. We threw him on the road and watched. The eagle came to eat him and I said: You're going to die. — The eagle couldn't hear me, and 1 knew that and laughed. The eagle rose with the lizard in his beak. Then he screamed and t
he whole world heard. He fell out of the sky.
The feeling that I had to become something left me then, in that house where she and I always lived naked together. I knew that I was something, and did not feel trapped. Yes, I became something more evil and more good. Now that it is over, I can say that I was happy.
Once we went outside to look for lizards, but found none. We comforted each other, saying: Here we'll always hear flies. We'll always hear wind blowing until our ears ache.
Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.A. (1990, 1991)
Snow geese ascended from pond and field like leaves returning to the trees. I could hear them crying like Indians. I could see their flickering shadows by the hundreds on the ground. That was in Iowa. The difference between Iowa and Nebraska was more arcane than the shading between silver and rust on a corncrib, but crossing back into Nebraska I saw ever fewer snow geese. Omaha was not the chalice. Outside the city, among the grasses, tawny, red and brown, fields of barley watched the bluffs on the Iowa side, those steep bluffs which commemorated themselves with trees. Pale light, chilly and dusty over the plains, weakened as it crossed the river. Maybe that was why there were no snow geese anymore. Naturally I discovered birdbaths in the backyards (starlings by the dozen), houses window-eyed and door-mouthed like Chalcolithic ossuaries. One house even owned a picture of a snow goose on the wall. That house would have denied that it was jealous or that it worshipped icons. I never saw anyone stop to gaze at the picture, which does not mean that it was without influence. While its situation was not lethal, however, that same pale light declined even further en route to the living room, where there were power tool ads on the TV and blonde cheerleaders yelled prettily.
Like a chicken on a June bug, said the TV. Six-thirty to go in the third. Looks like a pass! Got that little laceration over the eye. Don't wanna put a Band-Aid on it. Facing third. This Ace speed drill looks right to me. Not a cloud in the sky here in Oklahoma.
A cheerleader shot her arm up and did a miniskirted somersault, momentarily displaying something like the underside of a mushroom. She was from Nebraska.
That pass went right through Nebraska, said the TV. Nebraska's gettin' blown away thirty-five to ten. They've beaten the stuffing out of Nebraska. And the fullback today—a hundred seventy-seven yards. Let those guys go back to Lincoln. Let's not rub it in.
In Omaha there were little houses in rows, spreading trees all the way to the malls, the place dusty tan with the blue-green blotches of trees. But in the empty old town, the railroad depot still offered its chessboard floor and waiting benches as finely finished as pianos. You could take a train to New York, although that wasn't as easy as it used to be. At the Bohemian Café, where they sold ceramic bottles of Jim Beam shaped and painted like Czech girls, and the waitresses in traditional dress were themselves shaped like bottles, bearing magnificent quantities of platters on their brawny arms, food travelled to and fro according to the same laws, in a union of love and shame, leaving the restaurant inside people's bellies, rolling past the neon beer-lights of bars in the Czech section, entering the little houses in rows, becoming flesh, then dirt at last, dusty tan dirt under the blue-green blotches of trees. It changed into plants and animals. The blonde cheerleader who'd shot her arm up on TV was made out of Nebraska, but when she came home from the game she'd have atoms of Oklahoma inside her. This I have learned by following the contours of universal law. Those atoms would not receive their due, either from her or from anyone she'd ever meet, but for all of that, they wouldn't go away since doing so would have left them even more emptied of their Oklahoma selfhood than remaining a part of somebody who had once at least paid lip service to the sovereignty of Oklahoma. And so the blonde cheerleader would marry, move to Iowa and die, becoming dirt, then barley, but at that point the suppressed principle of Oklahoma would bust out in an angry taint; she'd be barley that the snow geese wouldn't eat. The end would be autumn, as they say, but the middle was midsummer lying heavy on Omaha on the day that the blonde cheerleader came home to tall light-globes, signs on poles, lines of concrete splitting the grass. Summer besieged Omaha's chilly warehouse-wide supermarkets whose white aisles (mopped and polished continually) could fit six shopping carts abreast; there was a whole lane of nothing but potato chips. Outside, the summer said: I am Omaha. Without my formative activities, humidity could not quarrel with the absolute. You sweating people know it, and that's why you hide from me. That's why you go inside your cold supermarkets to buy red-white-and-blue cheeses with tinsel stars on them for the Fourth of July. Behind the supermarket was the house where the cheerleader lived. I never met her, but I believe that she too had a picture of a snow goose on the wall. From this house the cheerleader's father drove her past all the other houses to the bus station. She was going to Iowa to visit the boy whom she'd marry. Her father thought that she was going to stay with a girl from school. The ticket window was just opening. She stood her guitar on end like a longnecked pear as she finished her root beer. Then she lifted it and made it keep her company to the trash can. She came back to her place in line and played an inaudible melody. Something nickered against the window, and she heard a bird crying like an Indian. It was only a starling. For a minute she wanted to go home; she didn't know why. If she didn't say a word her boyfriend would hardly notice. What he wanted was to see her in her underwear. Maybe this time she'd let him. He and his friends had watched her on TV for the Oklahoma game. They'd said: looky here, and they'd said: a nice batch. She thought she heard the bird crying again. She didn't want to live in Iowa even though she knew that she would. Tonight for him she'd take off her underwear. Tonight she'd take his penis in her mouth. She didn't know that he had a bet about that riding with his friends. His friends said: Just pull her head down. Worst she'll do is slap you. — When she saw him she was scared for a second; she didn't know why. She didn't like his house. He grinned. The pale light was very intense as it came in through his windows. He was cleaning his shotgun. He promised that come Christmastime he'd bag her a goose.
La Loma, Near Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico (1992)
The cardboard house smelled of urine. The door was part of a packing crate curtained with flower-print cloth. Inside, an old sofa and a chair squatted on the rubble. The dresser was the shell of a dead television. The rear wall was the long brick-edge of the factory that all the other cardboard houses embraced. There was sunlight on the bricks.
Next to this house was a mile of others.
Every month or two, the army came to burn these homes. The people watched. Then they came back, because they did not know where else to live. One old man asked the army what they should do, but the army did not know.
Whenever it rained hard enough that the train policemen could not see, the people leaped onto the factory trains to steal cardboard bales. Some of it they used to make houses, and the rest they sold.
(The toilets were also cardboard boxes. When they became filled, the people built others.)
In a sense the people had a desperate kind of freedom. Nothing was theirs, and so they could never lose it. Their houses could not eat them. Roofed with corrugated metal, those improvised dwellings an arm's length from the hot and sunny tracks swelled full of puppies, chickens and bright laundry. The railroad was like a street walled with cardboard and planks, curving as the tracks curved.
A dirty little boy in galoshes that came up to his knees was laughing. A man approached slowly, carrying baskets of water for his family. Children peered from the rusty stalls between houses. They played on the tracks. Little girls walked brown-legged in skirts. Their clothes were very clean. A beautiful woman with a blouse that shone like metal came running down the tracks. She ran past a house whose walls were made of tires. She ran past the wall of rusty iron where someone had scratched a round and happy face with big breasts. Laundry blew in the wind. The black slits of darkness between trousers and dresses expanded and contracted with the wind. The woman ran from tie to tie with easy grace, not needing to look down anymore. Sh
e was coming home. She ran to a house of cardboard where her mother sat in the doorway, smiling to see her come.
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