by Thomas Heise
New York City (lyric)
. . . And how I came to be with you again in the ruins of the Chrysler plant, beneath the coil of silver tubes dangling from the disembowelled ceiling, as if the whole place, what was left unplundered, had been eaten by worms, and the plaster from the mural of workers on the assembly line crumbling like regret when we touched it, and the dreams of Art Deco in which life is elegantly modern and destroys the world in its little way like the Île de France crossing the Atlantic with its passengers tipping oysters as if it were yesterday or 1913 with girls dancing the whirligig and moonlight on the seagulls following the flow of the waste stream. And how I came to be with you again, without warning, when the first notes of a piano recall the aromatics of an oriental lily in a certain hotel in Berlin on Sunday where on a florid but threadbare carpet rested a borzoi with blue eyes so content and utterly still in an enigma all of its own we thought it might have been porcelain. There in the ether stretched through the misfortune of our time zones, and the rows of ones and zeroes where I come to be with you again for a brief moment, relieved, then the screen refreshes its memory and the Skype goes blank and the sky a Mondrian of aeroplanes coordinating a descent into the cantilevered city of glass and a woman sings through my headphones “I am the storm and I am the wonder” and how in the midst of my Swiss illness I came to be with you again in Akihabara, Kreuzberg, on a staircase in Astoria, in Nişantaşi whose malls have x-ray machines to guard the flowering chandeliers of Murano, a burning garden, in the Shilin night market where for a moment I lost you in the rabbit warren of vendors and pushcarts until at the end of the block under a plasma screen selling its own magical lucidity you waited with a rainbow on your face. In the postindustrial quarter the fishbowl cameras film the school of shoppers swimming through the honeyed light of exhaust when an epiphany suddenly happens and reactionary modernism is replaced by Jeff Koons who made it smile and Chloe in the Afternoon becomes the Ingres painting it once was, the odalisque with her elongated gaze in a room so warm you could bend the air. And a door slides open to a seacoast of rolling surf crested with fog and a Russian cargo ship piloted by a satellite eases past without a sound, as if someone forgot the volume has been muted, and the silhouettes playing chess in the sand dunes appear in a pantomime as if they too might blow away in the salted wind and welter and whether or not I came to be with you again, catatonic on the grey waters of my mattress wondering equally what soared above in the stars — radaradaradar — and what swirled below in the illuminated vortex, love and death collapsing into the hole of the other from which each erupted, and how I came to be with you again in the afterlife of sleep I would not remember when I woke, to find myself, as always, locked in the unshakeable present tense of the mako shark. Most certainly a chemical explanation exists for this defect. The woman who rubbed your soul so your life felt electric for once absconds in the middle of a wet snowstorm, steering and staring through the rearview mirror until her guilt is small enough she can no longer care for it. And then just like that she returns in a pair of Louboutins in the Galerie du Passage carrying the very word desire into the folds of the theatre curtains, the shutters clicking. In the time it takes for the smashed wine bottle to be recycled into a windshield in Genoa, or for the foreign correspondent to report the body count in Sadr City as a sports score when the roar goes up, or for the bird to become a hybrid that sings for its other half (Khlebnikov’s ear perched at the lip of the café table) once the deciphered genome has been rewired and an aria from Tosca explodes from a cellphone in a handbag made of python, everything, even our breathing, stops. As it does when the Eurostar slips its head under the Channel and we fall drowsy from excitement. And how I came to be with you again has yet to be determined. The citrine light beyond the minarets and wild quince trees of Tangier are a promise redeemed when the human heart has run out of water or lost its restore point so nothing else works, except goodbye. And now the film is too beautiful we want it to start over before it ends, and in the crushed dark we realize its final flourish has begun. And now the espresso machine is a miniature city and we live on its edges. And how I came to be with you again when remembrance is a species of forgetting. And now the pages of the evening refresh and the man in quadrant four with his back to an alley, is on his way, waving his hand, this early urban winter endured mutely; this is his signature, the same words he won’t say transcribed onto the dark sky of his mind, brighter for what they’ve been through. And now in the hollows of the fertile night every woman is a debased copy of you at your dressing table perfuming your hair as you retrieve a letter from your pocket I had written to you for such an occasion.
Recollection
— I remember a long tracking shot of pale houses (white, red, soft yellow) and a single, grainy tree in each yard unfolding in the slowed-down time of a camera fastened to a white van edging soundlessly along the road — I remember like most children, I came into the world under disgraceful circumstances, the exact details of which I am unsure, are conjecture, supposition, maybe buried in memory — I remember when I learnt of a species of moth that for nourishment sips tears from the eyes of sleeping birds, my first thought was it was too wonderful to be true — I remember thinking the birds only pretended to sleep — I remember lying for minutes beneath the waters of a bathtub as I stared at the distorted stars painted on the ceiling going black — I remember everyday for a year I had no prospects for recovery and would sit in the melting sunlight on a balcony in early spring, the piano of Satie playing in my head and then within a breath was in a café in Mitte where you slowly swirled milk counterclockwise in a cup of tea, a moment added to the history of a day only to forget it tomorrow and by these small accumulated notes: a life — I remember gradually coming to on the metro to discover all other commuters slumped in their seats — I remember what the next bend in the lane revealed hardly seemed real: a small city designed in Helvetica vertically wedged into the cliff at an angle intended to make one nervous — I remember how the images kept unfolding in waves, hurtling forward with an unsustainable velocity, a hawk tumbling through the night air unable to right itself — I remember the day it occurred to me a father’s purpose for an abandoned son is perhaps none other than to spark a need for pursuit and an over-investment in the truth origins supposedly disclose — I remember how Kafka had called the city a “dear little mother with claws” — I remember how my very normality was cause for suspicion — I remember as a child I was lost in maps, a magnifying glass in one hand and my heart in the other, as if I could follow the rumours of my parents through the Alps — I remember being told of a previously undetected mutation, a slight bend in the gene sequence, had occurred, which across the length of generations would turn significant, could set a family off course forever — I remember a public square where couples had gathered to dance to a violin and a man in the corner with a microphone and I remember this though I was not there — I remember a neighbour stirring a wooden broom handle in a burning trash barrel’s leaf embers on his dark lawn, the blue Venetian lanterns blowing back against the shutters of the inn, the little town on the seacoast deserted as the hour swept in from the horizon — I remember wading into the sea, under the dark white expanse, a thousand needles of blue light from bioluminescent plankton and for the last time in my life I felt buoyant — I remember along a desolate road the massive electrical transmission towers leading into the city arose through the fog and started to hum — I remember from my father, whom in retrospect I would call X because nothing else fit, I had inherited a fascination for cartography and wariness of strangers — I remember his face surfacing through the water, developing like a Polaroid — I remember in those formative years, before I discovered writing, I hovered over the globe, as if a Fabergé egg whose surprise was a series of miniature family portraits which by winding a gear would unfold from a top hatch and click into place like a wing — I remember the promise of lyricism, which over years was reduced to a plain recounting of the facts and this left us in crisis, tr
apped in the hard architecture of the actual we ourselves had built, what had begun only as a single room to store our certainties like pressed flowers and ornate bottles of perfume we no longer wore but could not bring ourselves to discard when the essence was gone, and almost imperceptively this expanded until the conviction the here-and-now was all there ever was congealed into our new truth, that we would never love again, and so we stood in the window watching the snow cascading through the cedars for the fourth day and understood our failure was our unwillingness to see anything more than the acres of cold while wondering if the mailman, delayed in his rounds, would arrive fatigued at the door with a letter from elsewhere, a story, even a postcard we had sent to ourselves from Buenos Aires where we had never been —
New York City (lyric)
The city doesn’t have to make sense, it doesn’t love you or anyone. And if you were to say, I have lived in your arms a long time and the view of the refinery fires is all I’ve ever dreamt of. And if you were to say that the soft glass of the Mies van der Rohe is a machine is an island is a time zone and that there are wolves in the park and see I love you mother would it matter to the Exxon station or the squatter’s hut. And if you were to say these RGB sunsets over the rusting-shopping-cart pasture are going black and that surrealism is dead replaced by voicemail and the girl with the pink hula hoop you just imagined and the man counting the aeroplanes in their holding patterns wonders if they’re Chinese. The city is not a collection of people, it’s where we plant our antennas, the central node the roads lead from in eight directions. And if you were to say I am a bundle of vibrating strings and the city is in decline as an idea and on the time-elapsed film the mid-century apartment tower is taken apart like regret by unseen hands and in its dusty space sprout weeds and in its weeded space is melted gold. Moscow Caracas Budapest Tbilisi Yerevan my ears are ringing Kyoto São Paulo Microsoft Mandalay New York. And if you were to say our world will run out of air and if the sun breaks the windows at Sainte-Chapelle I am bathed in flames once more and if you were to say I separate the ineffable from the slave maker ant and confuse them again and I do this multiple times or my mind will atrophy in the blue suburban juntas and the dinner of onions and herring will grow cold in the cul-de-sac. The Well Wrought Urn holds the ashes of Baudelaire and the Rosa Mystica bleeding her aromatic oil on Palm Sunday offers her figure for your poems. And if you were to say the city in the visual static of a snowstorm in 1958 before the invention of the Taser and the metro entrance is an impromptu society of hats gathering for a journey to a nouveau resort. And if you were to say to the iron lung pushed through the streets you are more important than Ulysses. And if you were to say passer-by, cinema of lush flowers where you slept like Proust. The sky a perfect rectangle with a star nailed in each corner. Aoyama: year nine times the probability of grace is not enough. And if you were to say Hyderabad Favela Agora the sex workers in Lahore have gone on strike. And if you were to say, I hyperventilate into a brown sandwich bag when I read this. And if you were to say, what did you expect, bottles thrown from the roof.
Oslo, Winter 2011
For two seasons, I was struck by migraines that would come without warning and with such extraordinary force the air would ripple in concentric circles pushing out from any light source. Often I would find myself on these occasions propelled backward into crowds on the sidewalk, which in a gesture of common humanity would catch me. And once whilst midway over a bridge in St. Petersburg, where I was intently focused upon an ephemeral white butterfly with three wings on a branch illustrated in a field guide I held as I walked, I heard a high-pitched whistling in the clouds turn into a roar with such a shock it catapulted me against the guardrail and shook loose scenes from an unremembered life that began to melt across the dome of my closed eyelids. My mother’s flickering face downturned under a lamp as if refusing to be acknowledged, while with tweezers she carefully placed a pair of lashes, like two tiny spiders, into an envelope, the camera panning over a map of Europe, vignettes from a rugged seashore where in the grainy Mediterranean sunlight circa 1970 three women, beautiful but unfamiliar and incomprehensible to me, were laughing without any volume and when I opened my eyes I found the city had appeared to pause — the barge below loaded with blue Toyotas parting the stalled waters only now had begun to move again. As if repeatedly watching a film for details I might have missed, I would in subsequent years replay these scenes, but was panicked to find in this most unstable of mediums — memory — the scenes were degrading with each view, as if merely looking could set off a chemical corrosion that could not be reversed and would one day leave me with nothing more than a handful of rust-coloured powder for what was once life, captured. As I watched in my mind at night, I would zoom to inspect the delicate script on her envelope but would find it indecipherable or I would pause on a silhouette of a face on the wall to her left like a cameo (was it a lover’s unannounced arrival?), or I would roam over a faded house in the lower frame that looked artificially aged. And the small oval floating in the back of the sky, no larger than a fennel seed, was a dirigible from which Italy was a single unbroken stem of a flower. Or had an atom of dust momentarily landed upon my eye, it was impossible to say. Each time I would recall these memories, the realities of where I was sitting, in the atrium of the Grand Palace Hotel in Berlin or on an aeroplane bound for New York, would calmly dissolve, leaving me with the sensation of being underwater and in the presence of something mysterious and protean, as if I were within an enormous school of sardines in the Aegean, swarming around me, turning from aluminum to black depending on the angle of the fluid geometries they formed and dispersed from instant to instant with each wave of my hand. When I think back to the other unaccountable hours in the grip of a migraine, time irretrievably lost except for a creased movie ticket or a hotel receipt for an unremembered sleep as evidence of my whereabouts in the arterial backwaters of a minor city where the black and white sky looked like a QR code, I recall how in the blotting pressure of those episodes I felt another consciousness attempting to access my own. In those days every keyhole, every telephone, every bottle of medicine glowed, as if lit with energy from within, the way ripe lemons are, and this led me to dwell on the inner radiance often found in saints depicted in medieval altarpieces or on the electrical fields of green light that envelope German children and livestock in the countryside during summer thunderstorms. In those days, I would fall silent at the apex of the pain when the tectonic plates of the past and present collided in my cerebellum and suddenly each man in the crowd erupting from the metro into the white noise of the city was my father, whose face had never been imprinted upon mine and thus could be anywhere, suddenly like an actor’s began to appear whenever I hazarded a glance at a billboard or a side of a bus. The mere possibility of such an encounter made a monotonous life more urgent, and yet I ask, who does not want to be pursued, to be laid claimed to, knowing that one’s existence was a matter of dire consequence for another? I would shield myself with an umbrella and depart into a stream of storefronts on Rue de Rivoli in the rain dropping pointillist dots on the sidewalk or slip into a bookstore and amongst the maze of shelves find a dusty and hidden corner favoured by amorous couples where I would begin scribbling notes on the back of a magazine retrieved at random, only to tear out the page as proof when I next awoke what had befallen me was not a product of my paranoid imagination, a fabricated world made from the things the mother brings and the things the father takes away. How else to restore those pirouettes of memory, hours walking the deslivered air? Thunder in the imagination. Those overwritten pages, where my writing rendered the print under them nearly illegible, were a ramble of words in ruins. That October, I relocated to the outer ring of Rome on a deserted street with a Poste Italiane and a crumbling osteria with irregular hours haunted by the owner, a man of sixty but already deep in the crow’s autumn of regret from which few reemerge, who would watch football for hours on a silent monitor as the ceiling fan turned listlessly. I noted the lines
etched on his ancient face were tributaries found on those who lost children at the onset of middle age. As if waiting for someone to appear out of elongated shadows of a forgotten past that kept growing, I watched what were seemingly the neighbourhood’s only other residents, the widows who had taken the black in a show of devotion and were now, for all intents, married to each other. I would pass them in the fish market in the mornings and in the early evenings as they stared at me, like I was a rumour, as I made my way to the café, where I sat a week without relief before my journal, a failed clairvoyant with a flame and a circle of hair. Each nightfall, as the blue wind dropped on the villa’s blank side, as in a de Chirico, a dozen Chinese garment workers, whom later I read were deported, filed noiselessly through the alley beneath my window. Each held a plastic bag orange as a floating lantern that I could see until the last of them turned a corner and was gone.
Prague, Summer 2010
In 2010 as my condition worsened and my gaze turned increasingly inward, curled like a nautilus, I began to worry I was ever more unfit for the world and that my Galápagos Syndrome had progressed to a stage whereby the internal chambers of my life into which I often retreated and the external forms (writing and speaking) by which I addressed myself to others were completely torqued together, utterly indistinguishable, so I had at last assumed the shape of my own introspection. I had become a creature that in spiraling fashion finds its own curiosity of interest. That summer, a doctor in Prague whom I consulted after a bout of narcolepsy had turned into seemingly incurable insomnia, informed me that I appeared to be, as he put it, “out of focus” and the excess fluid he detected around my eyes suggested I had become “submerged” within my own dreams, which as a result of my condition, no longer surfaced in sleep and had come to be a permanent feature of my waking life. He told me what I already knew of the mysterious connection between the mind and body that allows us to experience something simply by imagining it and told me he could do nothing except advise me in a series of guided imagery exercises he predicted would be to no avail. He recommended with a dismissal that I begin with a visit to the Kafka Museum on the Malá Strana bank of the Vltava where I would find numerous photographs of the city’s favourite son displayed beneath water in rooms painted with light-killing black, apparently in an effort to replicate a vision of the world that abhorred clarity. As I walked out of the Old Town that brisk morning in the general direction of the museum the sky contained a peculiar swirl of green one expects only on nights beyond the polar circles, a colour that caused the baroque statues guarding Charles Bridge to come alive in their silent, but saintly ecstasies, where they were hovering a few centimetres above each pedestal. It was then, as I remember it now, I came upon a set of crumbling stairs curling like a corkscrew and out of sight which seemed to take me an extraordinarily long time to descend, the noises of the city fading with each step that fell off into the air as I moved downward. As I held on to the makeshift rail, I felt I had greatly aged and could no longer walk without support. I was slowly moving through the space of this idea, contemplating how the weight of Prague’s accumulated past meant a future here was almost unbearable, when to my disbelief I glimpsed a woman climbing out of the river onto the low mossy ledge with goggles still fastened about her face, her body steaming and cooling in wisps of smoke, as if a wax figure lifted from a press that had just moulded her. I have always been transfixed by the sight of a woman the few precious seconds after she steps out of her bath, for the instant holds the prospect of two diverging narratives at the joint of their departure. The thought always ushered in the sensation of vertigo that even as a young boy would cause me to steady myself by placing a hand on the chair in the washroom, like a confused theatregoer who walks in tardy to a play, the curtains drawn. Yet as I hesitated there on the last step, her hair tapering to a dark point like the lead of a pencil down her golden back and the Vltava’s majestic lines dissolving soundlessly into the shadows of the bridge, I understood the utter impossibility of an alternate path in any story. This is especially true for the orphan: the death of one’s mother is admission into a life consumed with her. The strange torpor I felt in the woman’s presence was a sure sign, of my desire. But that, of course, did not register with her. She simply walked across the lawn of the thin riverside park, where she was greeted by another woman before they proceeded down a street on which the medieval guilds were once located and where, rumour has it, the King’s alchemists once huddled over a fire of gold with a spoon of mercury. It was not until six months later I recalled the doctor’s counsel regarding the Kafka Museum, the memory triggered when I had become preoccupied with a former escort, Ms. M., now a photo retoucher in Berlin who had on her temple two tiny scars like pale crescents in an alien sky, as I was once told my dear mother had from scratching herself in sleep. In fact, I often thought she was citing my mother. She thought the scars made her unique and when we made love would wear her fine hair like a ribbon behind her ear so the scratches could be seen, but knowing they were not original made her all the more remarkable to me.