by Martin Roper
I drop the letter on the deck. The citronella bucket seems to attract as many mosquitoes as it keeps away. I light another cigarette. I touch the letter off the flame of the matchstick. I go down to the car and turn it on, blast the air conditioner way up. I turn right and head for the highway. The cassette player is broken; I turn on the radio. The world is still there, talking on the radio. The same eager and self-important American voices on each station. I come across a news channel: an explosion somewhere. Dreadful solemnity scarcely containing itself. I am sick of it all. It never changes. I switch channels … and with the support of listeners like you … I switch the radio off and listen to the air-conditioning. I turn onto a back road, dirt billowing into the sky. Fear twists in me; the fear that is always there in the gut. I stop the car and get out. My spectacles steam with the heat. I walk for a long time, pass a man with a dog. Two turtles hanging from each hand. Gun under his arm.
—Evenin’, he says.
I return his wary smile. Cornfields stretching for miles. Nothing but the eerie clatter of stalks, dry with the cruel August heat. They must be eight foot tall. Row after row of well-behaved corn. It stops with purposeful abruptness. It has the same effect that coming up out of the subway on Fourteenth and Eighth always has on me; space and light. The cornfields become hog-fields. Dozens of little A-frames. The hogs themselves are nowhere to be seen. At the edge of the field stands a man in a long robe, arms out, fingers spread: beseeching. He looks, for all the world, like an apparition. I look around. I expect to hear a snigger. It’s ridiculous to be frightened. I can hear for miles off. I walk closer. A statue. A stone plaque, a foot or so to its left:
JEAN BROUSSARD
A burgher of Calais
Auguste Rodin 1840–1917
I look around again. It makes no sense. A sudden breeze and the gentle rough clack of the corn leaves. Even the breeze carries suspicions. But there is no one to explain. There is no one to listen to questions. Only the sky, the cornfields, and the incongruous statue. I laugh at the stupidity of myself; there is nothing: nothing but a pile of broken images from a past littered with petty dishonesties; nothing left but a tangle of misunderstandings. I turn and run. I run and run, the corn leaves lashing my face, whipping with the fierceness of Holfy’s belt, the night my father lashed me for wetting the bed, lashing me in the face with the belt. Ruth screaming. I am running and running, the insanity of running frightening me, forcing me to run faster, to blot out the madness, to run as if I had purpose, and laughing and wet with sweat. Blood is running out of my nose into my mouth and I’m lying on the ground with the taste of blood and dirt in my mouth with the sky over me and I get up from the dizzy blueness and run again. I stumble, fall, pick myself up. Cornstalks whip and creak. I fall, my side sore with exertion. No sound but the sound of my breathing and my heartbeat. The sky is cloudlessly blue, makes me long for the greyness of Dublin. But Dublin is too long ago. Ursula is too long ago; my father loading the car with Ruth’s things; my hand lifting the bottle of Jeyes fluid to my lips as a dare with Ruth; the blink of time that was Holfy eating my kisses. There is no space for forgiveness. The corn clatters off itself in rebuke.
The earth, hot and sun-cracked. Alone with no one but myself. You don’t have a self. Holfy lied about her age. All this activity for a me that isn’t. A bird steps out in front of me. A pheasant. It could be a Martian for all the difference it makes. It stands stock still, staring into the stalks, has the appearance of some bizarre mirage shimmering in the humidity. Tear tracks burn into my skin. Bronzed feathers. Mottled with black and green. Roadrunner. Mee Mee. Its eye, deep in a fleshy red patch, swivels, takes me in, swivels back, and in two graceless strides it flaps into the sky, the breeze of its whirring wings convincing me of its presence, and is gone. Kok-cack, kok-kack, it screeches into the silence it leaves behind. There is a room that is empty of everything except regret. I will die some day and Ursula will not have walked in it. She will stand by my grave and think nothing happened: believe I did not know this place.
* * *
A thin white trail scratches the blue sky. The plane is so high it’s scarcely visible. Coming from somewhere far away, and going somewhere far away. Must make Midwesterners feel the insignificance of life here, of life happening elsewhere. The white line carves through the sky, bisects me. I am looking into myself. The end of the line fades. I was wrong about Agnes Martin. It’s everything stripped. It’s the opposite of ego. It’s finding the thing. I understand nothing. Life is fundamental accuracy of statement—not art. Life is. Then—only then—art. Martin was religion—that’s why she didn’t believe in it. One day the heart stops.
* * *
A child found me in the field. They were detasseling the corn. Three weeks pass in the hospital. I remember a man I don’t recognise come visit and I remember listening to him say the burns from the sun will heal and I will pull through. His name is Parizeh.
Two fat packets are waiting in the mailbox when I get out of hospital, both from New York. Depression is never darkness. Darkness is relief. Sleep is relief. Depression is the brightness of a sunny day, flowers fat in their blooming, two people greeting each other on the street and laughing. Depression is beautiful music that does nothing to the emotions. Depression is seeing this and knowing it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. If there was someone to phone I would but there isn’t.
I am left looking at myself. I have always been unhappy. I look up at the sun and doze. The evening sun is as close as I get to content. Cars pass by on the highway in the distance. This is my life. It was my birthday today. Birthdays were such fun as a child. Playing with a Lego set. Red and green and white and blue. Where does life go? Where do the smiles go? Does someone else smile the smiles I’ve stopped smiling? I open the packets. A postcard spills out. Six words:
You imitate Durrell badly. Forget Durrell.
Then a PS: Still like you.
* * *
Life gathers in such phrases.
She’s written her comments on the back of my writing.
Let me put it another way: writing is like painting. You do it. Keep doing it. Feel it working through the brush. Writers have the advantage of never running the risk of going too far. There’s always the last draft. The stress in painting is one stroke too many. Why I turned to photography. Photography is definable. Not matter how many clicks there are, they are all finite. Then the magic of the darkroom. Processing is Christmas presents.
I came across this today: That for which we find words is something dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking. Nietzsche.
The first time I heard a woodpecker. He was inside a small trunk that was no fatter than a wrist. I climbed over the small fence and listened. Like a timid but insistent child he was, tapping. I tapped back and he stopped. Then tap tap tap. All the genius of creation stored in such a small and simple bird. There was a time I thought I would do anything for love. Thought that it was possible. That there would be a divine coupling. Someone who would see the world as I see the world. Such an atrocious assumption. I’ve kept the old rotary phone and got it hooked up yesterday. I sat there looking at it like it was the enemy for half an hour. Haven’t called anyone yet. The options they give: I didn’t know what half of them were, call waiting, call blocking, Jesus, she went on and on and all I knew is I didn’t want any of them. You have to pay to have people leave you alone.
* * *
The presents I bought my mother as a child. Dishcloths, delft, cutlery. Perfume with all the subtlety of disinfectant. Earrings that looked like toys hanging from her ears. Rigor mortis is setting into the tulips. Brilliance happens by accident. One day, sitting there and it happens. The woodpecker deep in the bowl of a tree. Pecking. Staring at it and listening and its mate lands on a branch and sings a warning and out it flies, a fluttering flash of feathers gone and nothing but silence left.
One day Holfy was not there and I wanted her to be. I was angry at her for forgetting but
as I sat there and as I waited and waited for her something in me closed. It is unnameable whatever it is that closed. I danced that night in the apartment. For the first time in my life I danced on my own.
I felt the cold edge on our love when I didn’t run out after her in the morning when I knew she had forgotten to take the film out of the fridge. I felt it in the note I didn’t leave tucked in her bag to wish her luck on the job that morning in the Puck Building. I felt the coldness in the things I didn’t do for her, in the things that she had no idea I wanted to do for her. Love became not doing but loving her still. The curious thing is that she didn’t notice and then I learned something: people don’t miss what they don’t want.
* * *
Mr. Parizeh comes to visit with his son. He asks if I’d be interested in a couple of pups he needs rid of, looks out the window towards his truck away from any hint of kindness. I walk out to the truck and look in at the pups scurrying around the back of the truck, two sets of paws up on the tailgate. I lift them out and set them on the dirt. They run about yelping with happiness.
* * *
I go to the supermarket every day. I walk around the store the same way: carrots, potatoes, milk and butter at the end of the aisle, meat, bread, beer if it’s a Friday. Not that Friday exists in America. There are no patterns except the patterns we make. I fool myself into thinking I’m in Dublin sometimes. I have stopped exchanging the currency rate in my mind. I think in dollars. I am no longer surprised at how expensive it is to buy a deliciously red and tasteless tomato. I have learned to live in America through its supermarkets. No one told me what the stores were: Walmart, Econofoods, Quiktrip, Sams. There was no identity in their names. Their identity reveals itself through the people who shop in these stores. Even before I go inside I can tell by the cars in the lot who will be there and what they will be buying to create their dream futures, making worlds that will never exist. Paper or plastic, they say at the checkout. Do you want a paper or plastic sack to take your dreams home. Life is about finding ways to control. Shopping is control. I am a consumer now and I love it. It is as reassuring as a cigarette. It tells me who I am. This, more than anything, is what I need.
* * *
It happens slowly. One day you hear a name yelled on a street, called out in a film, the eye catches sight of it on an envelope in some office, and it causes no pain. There is nothing but a memory, faded like the sounds of childhood. There is nothing left. Her name is drained of meaning. At first, I thought it meant an emptiness akin to death, but I was wrong. The emptiness is something precious. It is the wisdom of finally knowing myself. The layer of need under it. Most men have it, a wordless, unadmitted need. I must sound cynical. I am, a little. For a long time I thought something was wrong with me. I wanted a woman that—I laugh at my stupidity—would be everything I wanted in a woman. How utterly ridiculous an idea I had. I couldn’t get a word processor that would do everything I wanted—how could I ever get it from a woman. How little good it does the soul.
I go about my business, smile at people, keep myself tidy, go to bed at the same hour, get up at the same hour. I maintain a surface of normality. I tell the pups when I feed them and they wag their tails. I have wasted so many years. The pups bark. They want to go out. Go out, I say, opening the door. They shoulder each other and rush through the door out into the forest as if the day will bring them something that it did not bring them yesterday. Pearl jostles Boogie and she barks viciously, and they go their separate ways. They stop and sniff the air, waiting. Then they run back to the screen door I have already closed. They sit and wait at it. The same tedious routine every morning. Every morning I wake up and know Ruth is dead. The loss of her grows every day. Him too. Life is tiring, just with trying not to hate the past for being here. I hang soap bars on the trees to stop the deer eating the leaves.
I go for days without talking. I don’t shoo the dogs out of the way. I am learning my place in the world. At night there are the cicadas. They deafen the night with their mating calls. There is an owl somewhere and her call is calming. The only sound in the house is the electric drone of the fridge coming on and off. Sometimes, when the silence builds, when it becomes loaded like a gun, I cough and the cough is enough to dispel the loneliness. It is a strange loneliness that has soaked into me because I am not lonely for people. For a long time I thought it was loneliness for Ruth and my life with Ursula. But that is not true. I am lonely for myself. I have gone away a long time ago and I have only just noticed. I have deserted myself.
I read in the paper that a fourteen-year-old swam out into Hoover Lake and tempted a swan out of the reeds with muffins. Then he beheaded the swan. The swan’s mate has not moved for six days. She stays by the murder spot.
The cicadas are screeching greedily in the night. I get so drunk I wet my trousers. I lift the telephone and listen to the tone. Vulgar hum. I list everyone I know. Imagine a conversation with them. Talking on it with Holfy. With deaddeaddaddy. With deaddeadRuth. With Ursula. With the fuck of a mother I once had. That time when the balloon burst and she lifted me off the counter and hugged me. There is no number to dial. Can’t think of a single person I can talk to without apology or disgust swallowing my words.
Everything is nonsense. It is the greatest nonsense of all believing I had to be alone, that I enjoyed the solitude. The phone rings one day and my heart races. I don’t care who it is, I am happy to hear a sound not of my own making. Then it stops before I pick it up.
Who knows what is true, what is accurate. It seems I have never been happy but I must have been. Is it that my mind is drawn only to the saddest moments? My parents arguing in the hall and asking us to decide which one we wanted to go with. The abject terror I felt. Where were we going to go? It was nighttime. We couldn’t go out in the bad night. We would disappear if we left the flat and went out into the night. I looked up at my mother and father and at Ruth. Who would pick who? I picked Franko, the man who used to come into the shop every night, because I couldn’t decide between them. I don’t know how it got resolved in the end. All I remember is that fear that I would not be with my parents. I don’t remember thinking about not seeing my sister again. Just the terror of the cold, black night and not seeing one or other of my parents again. I don’t remember if I had school the next day. I remember I had a coat on and I remember staring up at the door handle of the flat and wanting to reach up to it and have us all go in and go to bed.
The balloon. I was sitting on the counter watching everyone come in and out and buy their sweets and books. I was watching my mother and father take back the books and thumb through them rapidly with their fingers. The edge of their thumbs would tell them if a page was missing. Sitting up on the counter I could see how exciting the world was. You had to be as tall as a grownup to understand what was going on. Up on the counter I could see and understand everything. It was coming up to Christmas and I had a blue balloon in my hands. Sometimes I would rub my finger on its squelchy belly and my mother would tell me to stop. A man came in and bought a couple of books. He was smoking a dirty cigarette. He looked as wise as God must look, and as if he must know everything there was to know. He bought chocolate and packed up his books. Then he held the cigarette to the blue balloon and there a bang and the air snapped in my face. It was like a bad miracle. This is all I remember. Sometimes I think I remember the wrong things. I remember the plastic curtains that separated our shop from the flat we lived in. They were black and yellow and red strips of plastic that swooshed back and forth all day long and whichever side of them I was on I always imagined there was a magic cave on the other side that was full of riches and deep mysteries.
I would discover the pleasure and the laughter of being with a woman. There would be books and films and washing dishes and taking clothes to the launderette and our jobs to pay the rent but they would be the things we had to do until next we could be in bed together. This was the only reality. Nothing mattered more than the pleasure of our nakedness and the simple h
appiness of our warm bodies that surprised us with unceasing pleasures.
There is a hypnotic sense in this, as if I am leading towards some greater understanding, as if there is some inevitable truth that will reveal itself. There is not. Except perhaps the danger of nostalgia. Because it didn’t last with Ursula. We had six years together. An awful lot of time to arrive at nothing but a nut of bitterness and guilt. It is the insipid and insidious edge of niceness that cut into the truth and buried a lie. I did not want to complain about the sex with her. So I lied, and so did she. But desire ran inside me and flooded me in bed with her every night and I prayed for the desire to go away but it didn’t. I tried not to touch her. I tried not to bother her and slowly, when I began to realise that it was not getting better, that she might never get better, that I might not get better, I began to hate my desire. And the hours passed, and the days, and the weeks, and the months, and the years, and still nothing was different. I no longer blamed the desire. I blamed her.
* * *
Turn thoughts off. Turn them off. They’re no use. It’s done. That’s all there is to it. The drink is taking hold of me. I’m thirsty for it even as I drink it. I want to send my little Ursula a postcard, tell her everything. But no. The other way. Walk away. Get up and work on the barn, even with the heat. Work the only solace.
* * *
Lightning in the bright summer evening. It starts to thunder a little before nine and it goes on into the early morning. The electricity goes off. The sudden crash of wind lashing through trees in darkness. I stay up all night watching the earth showing itself its splendour. The sound of wood ripping, lightning strobes flashing on the fields. Rain. Rain so heavy I turn the radio off and listen to its thunderous assault. Loneliness gnaws at the deadness in me. It wrings my guts with a plea for company. Ursula. Holfy. Anyone. I could talk to anyone. The sky flashes, threatening me.
