Member

by Michael Cisco

  The ambulance arrives without using its siren, gliding down the street with its headlights off and its flashers spraying red and purple blazes up and down the block like mute fireworks. I stand up and wave my arms to them. Suddenly the scream of a siren breaks in on me, and another ambulance rushes up squealing, followed by a police car, then another. I listen to the sounds receding across the rooftops and dwindling away in the alleys and side lanes.

  Clouds cross the sky, miles above the uplifted blue face, blue turned to blue, and I rest my aching back against the wall. After a long time, one of the police officers emerges from his car and strides over toward me. He stops at the fence in front of the house.

  “Over there,” I point. “Is this about the dead man?”

  The police officer walks over to where the man is now sitting up, actually getting onto his feet. The cop takes him by the arm and helps him up, a little late to do him any real good. The man stands unsteadily and rakes his thick, unruly black hair with his hands again and again.

  “Did you call, sir?” The policeman asks softly.

  The man giggles.

  “Never better!” he says in surprise. Perhaps he mistakes the question.

  He takes two uncertain steps, and says “oooh.”

  “I called,” I say, coming down to meet them.

  “Why?” The man asks me suddenly, turning his attention to me. “What’s your business bothering about me?”

  “You get drunk and fall down in the street, don’t be surprised people make phone calls.”

  The man rakes his hair until it stands out in tufts like ruffled turf. He might be Indian, although his complexion is difficult to make out in the sodium lights, and he’s giddy—he bursts out laughing.

  “Is there actually any medical emergency?” the police officer asks.

  The man, continuing to laugh, shakes his head. His face is convulsed with a silent, spluttering merriment.

  “Leave me alone,” he chuckles, stepping a few more paces and waving one of his arms stiffly. “Just leave me alone. I’m fine!”

  “Have you been drinking at all tonight?” the cop asks me.

  “Yeah, bottles and bottles!” the man laughs. “Big, tallll, black ones!”

  “I don’t drink,” I say flatly.

  The policeman snaps on his flashlight and sprays me up and down with it.

  “Never better!” the man giggles again.

  “You live here?” the cop asks me.

  “Not in this house.” I wave at the open door, the figure of the man inside just as it was. “That’s the man who made the call. I asked him to.”

  The police officer shines his light in through the open doorway. The man at the table starts up abruptly and rushes toward us, passing into the shadows, then slams the front door shut.

  An ambulance driver is patting the man down, straightening his clothes. The former cadaver is telling him to keep his hands to himself, and swatting them away, but he keeps his high spirits. Abruptly the ambulance driver throws up his own rubber hands in disgust and turns away. His blue shirt dims as he recedes into the dark.

  “I’m fine! Never better!” the man says again, and now he starts to leave, walking off in earnest. He swings his head about a little as if to clear it, and for an instant he transfixes me with a look from one of his eyes, a washed-out iris of no particular color around a tiny black pupil, glinting at me out of the shadow of his own brow. Rambling off now, he waves his left hand at us all without looking back.

  I turn to the police man, who glares at me.

  “You got a whole crew out here!” he says in heavy exasperation.

  “Isn’t this an emergency? Wouldn’t you complain and berate if he really was dead and I hadn’t bothered to call anyone? Besides, he’s drunk in public. Isn’t this a crime?”

  “If you hadn’t called, we wouldn’t be here to be-whatever you or not.”

  He turns to go, saying something into his intercom. Once more I catch a glimpse of the man, who has recovered the use of his swinging walk, just as he turns the corner at the far end of the block, and disappears.

  “Is this your bag?”

  The voice suddenly jerks me back, and I turn to face the second police officer. I still can’t shake the impression that the man had been dead, and still was, and had been all along, and that that had been what was so funny. It seems the second police officer has been making his own investigation while the first and I talked. He’s a taller, skinnier man than his partner, but with thick forearms, exposed by his rolled-up sleeves. From one of his upraised hands, he dangles the bag, holding it as if he were in doubt as to how clean it is.

  “No,” I say.

  Without a word, he opens his hand and lets it drop. The bag lands more or less where I first tossed it.

  *

  (I am never one of you. It’s an experiment worth doing. There’s no anger, or hatred, or any particular attitude or other involved, but only a persistently renewed experiment in an utterly basic, unobtrusive deviation.

  It should be done coolly. I will train my steps away, gently and stealthily, doing nothing too demonstrative. I will bend the timber without breaking it, observing the gap I make as it widens slowly. Why hold others to the standard I set myself? Why not draw strength from each failure to connect with the others, as proof of the deepening of the difference? I only started out looking right down the same barrel as the rest of them, to be a cog in the capital soul killer.

  There is, though, a run of the mill type of resentment that likes to pass itself off to itself as impartial, clinical judiciousness. I have to be sure I don’t mistake an insistence on difference for misanthropy. I can insist on being different because I unwittingly despise others and look down on them, and am outraged by the fact that I bear any resemblance to them at all; I can wish I were another species, with a completely different anatomy, or a machine, or a phantom. I demand they defer to me, acknowledge my superiority, without realizing that, by this, I continue to attach my thoughts to their thoughts. I even take pride in what I call my modesty; my opinion of arrogance is indexed to an estimate of how common it is. If my character has any stable quality in it at all, it is this kind of smoke and mirrors. I haven’t started to adolesce yet.

  The practice also calls for careful writing. This is not simply recording. It is a procedure meant to establish and strengthen alternate associations. This should gradually work me loose. The metaphor is the extraction of a single stone from a wall, without disturbing any other stone. It begins as the stone to be removed is seized firmly and tugged this way and that, up and down. Tiny cracks will appear in the mortar that helps hold it in place. Persistent tugging makes these cracks grow. Fragments of mortar begin to crumble from the wall. The wall is made of so many stones that the removal of this one won’t cause it to fall, nor does this one support much weight, nor does it weigh the others around or beneath it down much. A stout iron rod can eventually be inserted into the gap opened on one side, if necessary. I don’t know what that would correspond to in the metaphor. Eventually, the stone is popped out.

  The writing is this careful working loose of the stone. I’ve walked thousands of miles in my apartment, but I need air, and when night falls I take it, I catch it as it falls. What I see in windows as I pass by are litbelongings and opportunities. I’m invisible after darkness finally falls. People still see someone when they look at me, but they can’t tell who it is or anything about it; I’m vague to them, like any number of people who blur by me in the streetlights. Occasionally, when a lower window is not lit, I see myself in the form of an elastic silhouette, or a grim, spectral face, with two deep grooves between its eyebrows.

  Speed, already there, surrounded by insanely slow-moving people, the chronic, convulsed impatience of the naturally quick. I want speed and concentration.

  Order, speed, and inner quiet.)

  I pass the same street, Crescent Drive, where I’d seen the man collapse. Without really thinking about it, I speed up, as if that
street were specially designated as a place for me to have episodes. That doesn’t stop me from noticing something down by the curb as I go by, and, about ten paces along the next block, I feel compelled to stop.

  I go back. There’s the bag, lying between a parked car and the curb, just where it has been. I can’t believe no one’s taken it. It isn’t even the same car parked next to it any more; someone drove off, leaving the bag there exposed, lying in the street against the curb, and then someone else parked there and left without bothering it.

  Now a little, middle-aged woman with fluffy grey hair and a heavy sweater comes up to me, points and asks, “Is that your bag?”

  “No,” I say again, feeling like a liar.

  “I wonder whose it is,” she muses, gazing down the street.

  “Don’t know,” I say, moving away. “Is this my bag?”

  —“Is this your bag?”

  “No.”

  (That the resounding void that engulfs me should happen to have these buildings, lights, streets, and people in it—what difference should that make? Is this space any less? Is this limitless void diminished by these things? Is my sense of it so weak that these trivial impediments can sever me from it?

  Near my place, I pass a woman going the other direction, and I glance at her face. She’s attractive. I forbid myself to look back at her. I reach my door and unlock it. I don’t look back at her. I have the compensatory satisfaction of adhering to my resolution. Even glancing up at her as she passed was a slip.

  I climb the stairs, find my way into my apartment, and wash my hands in the sink. I don’t look at myself in the mirror. My appearance is unimportant, an accident. That I have this body, or that body, this or that face, can make no difference.

  It’s almost too late to eat. I have some nuts, then some biscuits which taste exactly like nuts.

  Aiming at something is a mistake. There should be no preconceived idea of this or that end. But is this possible to achieve? Or to maintain? It depends on whether or not “the goal I have no preconceived idea of” is still a preconceived goal. That would make conceiving itself the problem. Perhaps I should chase after a deliberately phony idea. A dummy I know is fake, just a pretext to advance toward; like the tape at the end of a race, or the rabbit doll the dogs chase. But then, if there is no other, no true, way to think of it, won’t it take care of itself anyway, since I can’t help but aim for something or other? If that’s true, then the selection of that fake goal will only be more of the greater illusion, the notion that I have of what I’m doing. Making a selection is inevitable. So why not make my seemingly free unfree free choice? The idea is to get away from humanity, or whatever this is; I don’t actually need to know even one thing about a place in order to leave it, unless it’s so that I don’t unwittingly go back there. I can’t help unwittingly going back there; of course, I will. Constantly. But I don’t need to do anything more to cope with that than keep leaving again, just as constantly. If I’m always leaving, I’m always correcting for the tendency to return. What that gets me, I don’t know. I came away moaning, I remember, moving as gingerly as an old man. Relaxing my mind had only brought about a causeless, meaningless sadness. Is this who I will be, soon? That failure, again?

  In the end I will have to admit to myself that I cherish the pedestrian little hope that, in my frustratingly brief swings out past the line, assuming I’m not fooling myself by thinking I make it even that far, I might catch sight of something that could hold me there. In my mind’s eye, I distinctly see the bag, dangling obscenely from the policeman’s hand, or lying there by the curb, like a deflated, black lung. It was a scratched-up, triangular black leather bag with a wooden rod inserted along the top, a handle and a strap, and flaps with clasps on each of its two sides.)

  What was wrong with it, anyway? Why would the man have left it—or was he only so out of sorts he’d forgotten about it? Ghosts always remember what they’ve come back for, but the dead are generally assumed to forget.

  Actually, it was a good bag. Exactly the kind I need.

  (Lately, I’ve been reduced to carrying my let’s call them my effects in a dingy, ochre-colored gym bag that infuses its contents with an offensive plastic smell and is too small.

  The discipline involves systematically tacking away from ordinary human thought, as it seems to me. I don’t have time or inclination to figure ordinary human thought out any further than that. The practice has already begun, that’s the main thing. I am going, have already started, systematically to shift the set of common associations.

  The idea of gratifying hunger arises, for instance, and then the subject is liable to think about food. So, when he gets hungry, the practicioner will train himself to think instead of something else, like the play of certain colors, or rubbing the palm of the hand lightly over a cool, bare plaster wall. He writes away—writing is essential to this. Record keeping.

  I can’t go without sleep, so I’ll sleep all the time instead. I’ll learn to go about my business while sleeping. I can’t do without food and water, and people, at least people I habitually see, so eat and drink constantly. I will eat food chosen at random, at random intervals, according to certain charts and tables. Or a coin toss.)

  I suddenly do want that bag. I want it very much!

  The voice in the apartment below seems almost to sound inside me, dancing down there, down in me, like a rubbingorgan. He does speak much more loudly than seems necessary in such a small room, smaller than mine.

  (The moon is so low it floats between the buildings, as though it were part of the city. The sky is criss-crossed with contrails not formed by jets. Around me I keep catching sight, fleeting sights, of these midnight neighbors. My brain just won’t stop racing along, racing and racing, indigo reasoning; there are more humans alive today than have lived throughout all of human prehistory. This means that there is more history being lived in this single day than in perhaps years of time in the ancient past. History is getting ever thicker, because humans are more plentiful and because of the accelerating production and accumulation of documentary material of all kinds.)I scour both sides of the street, under the cars and everywhere; the bag is not there.

  (I walk down the street fuming with rage and hatred against everyone and no one, with no where to send my anger. Fucking onerous precorpses—there certainly is no hostility specifically directed against me, me in particular, the city doesn’t hate me, the city is hate. I can never be avenged; I can only cause unmerited suffering to someone else. These people have cultivated a little plot of flowers, rich purple flowers, and they’re blooming.)

  I stop to take in the smell, and then it occurs to me: there had been an object, a familiar object, under one of the cars, after all.

  Yes—the fallen man’s telephone is still lying there. I examine its incomprehensible controls, gingerly tapping at them. The phone flares blue and I suddenly feel very conspicuous, crouching there by the parked car. In fact, someone is already craning a neck, trying to get a good look at me over a low hedge.

  As I hurry away, I do hear muffled calls from behind me. I walk distracted, bumping into people, trying to get the thing to work. After a few moments I become aware that the telephone is receiving a call, but in my confusion I disconnect when I meant to answer. The telephone begins to hum and shiver again right away, and I manage this time to press the correct switch.

  “Well well well!” a sharp, rather snide voice says.

  “Excuse me,” I say hastily. “Is this—to whom am I speak-speaking?”

  “So...” the voice says. The vowel is drawled, but cut short by a crystal cough.

  An intuition tells me this is my chance. “Where are you?” I ask, putting as much command into my voice as I can.

  “Is—” the voice is cut short again. The speaker seems to be having trouble keeping a clear throat. “Is this...”

  Expecting a question, I wait, still hurrying down the street.

  “Is this a mistake?” the voice hisses.


  Glancing up, I recognize the bag, hanging from the shoulder of a woman on the corner across the street. She’s standing there by the cornerpost of a low chain-link fence, speaking into a telephone.

  I cross the street.

  “I’ll tell you in person,” I say loudly, as much into the telephone as to the woman herself.

  “That’s my bag,” I say sharply.

  She raises the telephone slowly and says something into it, too softly for me to hear. She seems to be continuing her conversation, but she looks at me from time to time, and might be wrapping it up so as to give me her full attention. I can’t know that, though, because her face is in the shadows. I take advantage of the opportunity to stare at the bag, to be absolutely sure it’s mine. If it were hers, after all, wouldn’t she simply try to get away from me?

  The woman is wearing a plain dress, in style and color. She pockets her telephone.

  “Did you speak to me?” she asks quietly.

  Her hair is very softly pulled back into some loose arrangement at the nape of her neck; a great many strands have come loose and hang down around and before her face, and this, and the melting indistinctness of her features combine to make me imagine I’m seeing her face through smoke. What part of the night there is behind her seems much more enormous than the night I crossed to find her, and I’m taken aback by something majestic, even though she gives the impression of being so exhausted she can barely hold herself upright.

  “Say...”

  She’s looking right at me. It makes me nervous, not unpleasantly nervous.

  “Excuse me,” I say. “But is this... may I ask where you came by that bag?”

  My voice sounds weak and it disappears at once into the colossal night that gapes behind her.

  “That bag there,” I add, pointing, with a thrill, a not unpleasant thrill.

  “You were so strange. The way you came up on me, I mean. You... walk—strangely. I’m sorry,” she goes on right away, “I mean, of course, naturally you may ask about it.”