American Histories
Page 11
* * *
I will have to check my journals. Google. Too young for Korea, too old for Iraq, student deferments during Vietnam. Emmett Till’s exact age in 1955, not old enough to enlist nor be on my own in New York City, slogging daily like it’s a job back and forth across the Williamsburg Bridge those years of Sonny’s first sabbatical. When I hurried back to Rue Duranton next morning to apologize or leave a larger tip, it was raining—il pleut dans la ville. No Ana works here I believe the half-sleep women on the sofa said.
* * *
I wish these dumb undershorts had pockets. Many deep, oversize pockets like camouflage pants young people wear. I could have loaded them with stones.
* * *
Before I go, let me confide a final regret: I’m sorry I’ll miss my agent’s birthday party. To be more exact it’s my agent’s house in Montauk I regret missing. Love my agent’s house. Hundreds of rooms, marvelous ocean views, miles and miles of wooded grounds. One edge of the property borders a freshwater pond where wild animals come to drink, including timid, quivering deer. Stayed once for a week alone, way back when, before my agent had kids. Quick love affair with Montauk, a couple of whose inhabitants had sighted the Amistad with its cargo of starving, thirsty slaves in transit between two of Spain’s New World colonies, slaves who had revolted and killed most of the ship’s crew, the Amistad stranded off Montauk Point with a few surviving sailors at the helm, alive only because they promised to steer the ship to Africa, though the terrified Spaniards doing their best to keep the Amistad as far away from the dark continent as Christopher Columbus had strayed from the East Indies when he landed by mistake on a Caribbean island.
I know more than enough, more than I want to know about the Amistad revolt. Admire Melville’s remake of the incident in Benito Cereno, but not tempted to write about it myself. One major disincentive, the irony of African captives who after years of tribulations and trials in New England courts were granted freedom, repatriated to Africa, and became slave merchants. Princely, eloquent Cinquez, mastermind of the shipboard rebellion, one of the bad guys. Cinquez, nom de guerre of Patty Hearst’s kidnapper and lover. Not a pretty ending to the Amistad story. Is that why I avoided writing it. Is Williamsburg Bridge a pretty ending. Yes or no, it’s another story I won’t write.
* * *
Under other circumstances, revisiting my agent’s fabulous house, the ocean, memories of an idyll on Montauk might be worth renting a car, inching along in bumper-to-bumper weekend traffic through the gilded Hamptons. My agent’s birthday after all. More friend than agent for years now. We came up in the publishing industry together. Muy simpatico. Rich white kid, poor black kid, a contrasting pair of foundlings, misfits, mavericks, babies together at the beginning of careers. Muy simpatico. Nearly the same age, fans of Joyce, Beckett, Dostoevsky, Hart Crane (if this were a time and place for footnotes, I’d quote Crane’s most celebrated poem, The Bridge—“Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft/A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets/Tilting there momently”—and add the fact Crane disappeared after he said “goodbye-goodbye-goodbye, everybody”—and jumped off a boat into the Gulf of Mexico). We also shared a fondness for Stoli martinis in which three olives replaced dry vermouth and both of us loved silly binges of over-the-top self-importance, daydreaming, pretending to be high rollers, blowing money neither had earned on meals in fancy restaurants, until I began to suspect the agency’s charge card either bottomless or fictitious, maybe both.
Muy simpatico even after his star has steadily risen, highest roller among his peers, while my star dimmed precipitously, surviving on welfare, barely aglow. How long since my agent had sold a major piece of my writing, how long since I submitted a major new piece to sell. In spite of all the above, still buddies. Regret missing his party, Montauk, the house. House partly mine, after all. My labor responsible for earning a minuscule percentage of the down payment, n’est-ce pas. For nine months of the year no one inhabits the Montauk mansion. In France vacant dwellings are whitespace poor people occupy and claim, my mother had once informed me. Won’t my agent’s family be surprised next June to find my ghost curled up in his portion of the castle.
* * *
Last time in Montauk was when. Harder and harder to match memories with dates. One event or incident seems to follow another, but often I misremember. Dates out of sync, whitespace conflates and erases everything. Except rapture. Rapture unforgettable, consumes whitespace. Sonny Rollins’s sax squats on the Williamsburg Bridge, changes the sky’s color, claims ownership of a bright day. Was I in fact walking the bridge those years Sonny Rollins woodshedding up here. I’ll have to check my journals. But the oldest journals temporarily unavailable, part of the sample loaned to my agent to shop around.
* * *
I’m sure I can find a university happy to pay to archive your papers, he said.
Being archived a kind of morbid thought, but go right ahead, my friend. Fuckers don’t want to pay for my writing while I’m alive, maybe if I’m dead they’ll pay.
Stoppit. Nobody’s asking you to jump off a bridge. Nothing morbid about selling your papers. Same principle involved as selling backlist.
So do it, okay. Still sounds like desperation to me, like a last resort.
Just the opposite. I tempt publishers with posterity, remind them the best writing, best music never ages. Don’t think in terms of buying, I lecture the pricks. Think investment. Your great-great-grandkids will dine sumptuously off the profits.
Whoa. Truth is I’ve got nothing to sell except whitespace. What about that. How much can you get for whitespace.
What in hell are you talking about.
Come on. You know what I mean: whitespace. Where print lives. What eats print. White space. That Pakistani guy. Ana . . . Ana . . . la-di-la-di-da-da . . . something or other who wrote the bestseller about black holes. Prize client of yours, isn’t he. Don’t try and tell me you or all the people buying the book understand black holes. Black holes. White space. White holes. Black space. What’s the difference.
Whitespace could be a bigger blockbuster than black holes. No words . . . just whitespace. Keep my identity a secret. No photos, no interviews, no distracting particulars of color, gender, age, class, national origin. Anonymity will create mystery, complicity—whitespace everybody’s space, everybody welcome, everybody will want a copy. Whitespace an old friend, someone you bump into in the Houston airport lounge. Wow—look who’s here. Great to see you again. Big hug, big kiss. Till death do us part.
* * *
The Amistad packed with corpses and ghosts drifts offshore behind me. Ahoy—ahoy, I holler and wave at two figures way up the beach. No clue where we’ve landed. I’m thinking water, food, rescue, maybe we won’t starve or die of thirst after all. The thought dizzying like too much to drink too fast after debilitating days of drought. Water, death roil around in the same empty pit inside me. Faraway figures like two tiny scarecrows silhouetted against a gray horizon. They must be on the crest of a rise and I’m in a black hole staring up. Like me they’ve halted. I stop breathing, no water sloshing inside me, no waves slap my bare ankles, roar of ocean subsided to a dull flat silence. My companions stop fussing, stop clambering out of the flimsy rowboat behind me. Everybody, everything in the universe frozen. Some fragile yet deeply abiding protocol of ironclad rules, obscure and compelling, oblige me to wait, not to speak nor stir until those alien others, whose land this must be, wave or run away or beckon or draw swords, fire muskets.
The pair of men steps in our direction, then more steps across the grayish whitespace. They are in booths making calls. Counting, calculating with each approaching step, each wobble, what it might be worth, how much bounty in shiny pieces of silver and gold they could collect in exchange for bodies, a rowboat, a sailing ship that spilled us hostage on this shore.
My Friends, calls out the taller one in a frock coat, gold watch on a chain. His first words same words Horatio Seymour, governor of New York, addressed in 1863 to a mob of h
ungover, mostly Irish immigrants, their hands still red from three or four days of wasting colored children, women, and men in draft riots.
* * *
I’m going to go now. What took you so long, I bet you’re thinking and maybe wonderingly why—why this moment, and since you’ve stuck with me this long, I owe you more than, why not—so I’ll end with what I said to my false-hearted lover in one of our last civil conversations when she asked, What’s your worst nightmare.
Worst nightmare. Good question.
So answer me already.
Never seeing you again.
Come on. Seriously.
Seeing you again.
Stoppit. Stop playing and be serious.
Okay. Serious. Very super serious. My worst nightmare is being cured.
Cured of what.
What I am. Of myself.
Cured of yourself.
Right. Cured of who I am. Cured of what doesn’t fit, of what’s inappropriate and maybe dangerous inside me. Cured absolutely of me, myself, I. You know. Cured like people they put away—way, way far away behind bars, stone walls, people they chain, beat on, shock with electric prods, drug, exile to desert-island camps in Madagascar or camps in snowiest Siberia or shoot, starve, hang, gas, burn, or stuff with everything everybody believes desirable and then display in store windows, billboard ads, on TV, in movies, perfectly stuffed, lifelike, animated cartoon animals.
Lying naked in bed next to naked her I said that my worst nightmare is not the terrible cures nor fear I fit in society’s category of people needing cures. Worst nightmare is not damage I might perpetrate upon others or myself. Worst nightmare, my Love, the thought I might live a moment too long. Wake up one morning cured and not know I’m cured.
* * *
P.S.—the other day, my friends, believe it or not, I saw a woman scaling the bridge’s outermost restraining screen. Good taste or not I ran towards her shouting my intention to write a story about a person jumping off the Williamsburg Bridge, imploring her as I got closer for a quote. “Fuck off, buddy,” she said over her naked shoulder. Then she said—Splash.
EXAMINATION
* * *
Democracy is a form of government that permits anyone/everyone, man, woman, child to play loud music you don’t wish to hear. Or play quiet music you don’t wish to hear in places you don’t want to be.
* * *
Democracy permits unprotected sex, and I enjoy it so I let it happen and here I am, I said to the medical person—not a doctor obviously—who seems to be listening. A technician, not a doctor, since the person in a white lab coat with the facility’s name in neat blue stitching above the breast pocket appeared genuinely interested in what I was saying. Doctors pay only minimal attention to a patient’s description of his or her ailments. Doctors know that showing too much interest in a patient’s monologue might suggest that the doctor has not heard similar stories many times before and this lack of familiarity with a patient’s case diminishes in patients’ eyes the physician’s authority. Subverts the purpose of a consultation. Who’s the expert. Who’s in charge here. Who gets paid.
* * *
I say barely any of the above out loud, then say either to myself or to the woman in the lab coat—One thing you learn walking along the edge of the sea as I often walk—there’s no edge. There are many, many edges. Countless. Sea and land are separate and not. Always changing. Never the same edge twice. Endless edges. A paradox, a mystery you might consider, if such puzzles tickle your curiosity.
* * *
I listen to voices inside myself in the manner I think doctors (some technicians, too) listen to patients’ voices. Though doctors get paid for sitting, nodding, and doing nothing while a patient rattles on, the real work doesn’t start until a patient shuts up. So why do patients narrate long-winded versions of their stories. A patient a novel from a bookstore rack the doctor samples. No obligation. When patients talk too much, doctors ring the receptionist to send in the next person or call time-out for a toilet break or lunch or two weeks of family holiday in the Bahamas.
* * *
Democracy promised similar autonomy to ordinary citizens like you and me. The choice to pay attention or not. Respond or not. To ration our compassion, our identification with other people according to whatever public or private reasons we choose. The right to steer clear of ambiguous edges of other lives and harbor no secret motivation nor temptation to slip beyond our actual life. Beyond a single self. A sort of slippage clearly impossible anyway.
* * *
As if to shut me up and get real work started, a needle interrupts the conversation. Sorry, the technician says when I flinch. She had positioned my left arm—shirtsleeve rolled up, elbow bent, forearm resting on her desk—then tied an elastic band above my biceps, palpated my flesh to choose a vein, and promised, Just a little pinch. Cool swipe of alcohol my last awareness of her presence before I had closed my eyes to drift outside myself or deeper inside and avoid the little pinch she had warned I would receive.
* * *
When you shut your eyes, miss, and the world vanishes, do you ever worry you might forget how to reverse the world’s vanishing trick and be stranded in limbo forever. Maybe you glimpsed that worry in my eyes and assumed this guy’s squeamish about having blood drawn. I’m not, miss. And you needn’t apologize for performing your job, please. The poke you administered is a clever response to my riff on edges. A reminder how precisely, instantly a needle can locate a body’s edge. An impeccable argument. I can counter only that blood circulates. Constantly moving like a sea. And being a medical person you know more about this than I do. Blood is body and body blood. Blood cells die and are born, a flowing, changing soup. Cells replenish the body as body replenishes cells. Time a factor. Time always is since it doesn’t end or begin or at least we will never know how or when. Takes time for a needle to pass through blood that is body then body that is blood, layer after layer of neither blood nor body, both without being either, if you’re following me. Many edges flickering past and you or I wouldn’t believe a person possesses only one edge if we were tiny enough to ride the needle, see through its eye.
* * *
Certain constants, constraints may exist, I suppose. Situations or ideas or bodies confined within a stable boundary unlike the sea’s infinite edges. Permanent divisions, arrangements, races, maps. Hierarchies. Homeostasis. Periodic table of elements. Laws, rules, chemicals, algorithms, golden ratios. Certain predictable combinations and permutations of numerical, logical possibility. Ineradicable essences. As a student of science you may be able to cite some.
* * *
Or perhaps not, the newer physics claims. Untruths inside Newton’s and Einstein’s truths. New speculations, dispensations aim not to displace totally those once unquestioned classical understandings of the material world but rather to offer alternative theories and explanations that imply any truth not truthful enough.
* * *
Like lies I tell my wife. Lies that brought me here. To be examined. To be treated if necessary. Or worse, to be informed I’m untreatable. A lost cause. Like all those other refugees, illegal immigrants, and migrants adrift today. Stripped of moorings. Edges collapsed. No way in or out. No illusions. No reliable language, family, country, money, clothes, name. No past except unpleasant memories of abuse, helplessness, hunger, war, dependency, labels and tasks that confined them from cradle to grave. No future unless a new set of labels and tasks drops providentially from the sky.
* * *
Still, the social instinct our most irresistible, irrepressible urge. Our need to fit in with others, fit them within our edges. The imperative that drives me to engage you, a complete stranger more or less, in conversation. Without the social instinct, wouldn’t each individual’s fear and selfishness, our relentless pursuit of individual survival undermine the biological imperative of our species to multiply.
* * *
Driven by the desire to multiply, we develop other mathematica
l skills—subtraction, addition, division—as well as the sciences of language and statistics to rationalize growth, loss, chaos, the escalation from individual to couple to family, clan, nation. We discover we are more and less. Not alone yet more alone. We pay doctors to listen. Examine.
* * *
When I examine the social instinct, I consider the meaning of words such as duty, obligation, responsibility, and visualize a tall, narrow, antique wooden filing cabinet. I pull out her drawer and my wife’s inside it, miniaturized, perfectly believable. Gently I lift her out till she’s stretched in the palm of my hand. She is peaceful. Aware there are no probes, no purges as part of the examination. Just my eyes running over her, missing nothing—expert, loving—and then I place her again on her soft, mauve pallet in the drawer. Drawer pushed back inside the cabinet notable for its craftsmanship, attention to detail. No change in her. No more than it would be reasonable to anticipate after all the years together, confined within, more or less, the same edges.
* * *
All edges socially constructed. That is the enlightened view today, and maybe you share it. Ideas, categories—water, earth, gender, wind, fire, color, etc.—that regulate, connect, and separate people are temporary, provisional, imaginary formulas. Why do these fictional edges we invent threaten as much as comfort us. Why don’t they moderate fear of extinction. Serve us in the abyss where we touch nothing and nothing touches us. The abyss of extreme proximity with no contact. Proximity without touching because the abyss intervenes. It gets rid of everything, including what we make of ourselves, think of ourselves. The abyss as close as we ever get to knowing what comes next. And next a dead end. Nothing’s there. Nothing’s what our edges abut. Surprise and no surprise. Abyss even sounds a bit like emptiness. And abyss sounds like miss, doesn’t it, miss. But abyss not us. Not anything. We learn to take it and we get it.