Viewmaster

by Ferdinand Stowell

I often used to day-dream of that party I’d have in which I am reconciled and fallen back in with all those former friends and lovers and family members who have withdrawn or been rejected from my life. It was imagined as a bigger than life Great Gatsby party on cascading lawns that billow to the sea. The lawns are green, the sea gray, the sky pillowy white clouds on a field of blue and all the colors signify something, like purity, corruption, American expansiveness, etc. I’d view it all from atop a terrace; watching children run in circles around the legs of adults and then genuflect lazily while they grip the cloth of beautiful dresses and bespoke trousers. I’d smile and tip my head, nod it approvingly and close my eyes as I tilt it back to mimic the ascent of the sun in the sky.

  But even day-dreams aren’t impervious to time, which adds another ripple to the denouement, this genteel tableau. For inevitably the party breaks up, as parties must, and I wander back to the porch, the lights of its high Palladian windows catch little yokey glimmers from the setting sun. The porch, I note, is always trapping bees that get waylaid in their travels. I pity the stubbornness of drones programmed for one purpose; they keep butting their little heads against the domestic order of glass set in a window frame. I consider what perfectly invisible impediments to greater mobility our homes are. And then a thought wings me sharply – my house, my grand house, is a pity.

  But houses can’t stop the movement of affections, their coming and going. My life now seems breezy and relationships the air that constitutes it, blowing me onward, taking me far from where I started. Today one might be sleeping with yesterday’s nemesis, tomorrow might see your best friend no longer friendly. It’s surprising how lost the events of yesterday could become and how the passage of a few days could seem like years.

  Maria and Adam are all the party I need right now and loving them has helped me rekindle that love I’d once had for all those people I’ll never see again and the love I might have had for all those people I’ll never get to know.

  I think about the spores of culture blowing across the globe, dropping seed and taking root in the most improbable of places – mansard roofs and rubber trees, fluted columns on dog houses, pidgin English spoken through Palladian windows, Korean karaoke in tapas bars in Boston. Culture all gone to seed and happily so, blowing in the wind, freed of its weight, giddy in its display, snubbing the problematic.

  I marvel at the pack rat palaces of this city, heaped with all the deposits of debris the wuthering heights have adorned them with. There are enough Corinthian capitals (7 out of 10 19th century San Franciscans chose Corinthian over the other leading orders) in San Francisco to adorn the columns of all the temples of the ancient Hellenistic world. In the Haight-Ashbury alone, it has been shown, there are enough columns to furnish the Acropolis three times over.

  San Francisco, I discovered, doesn’t need to be conquered: it is a city that waits for you on its knees, a city that becomes a willing prisoner. Still, battle had been done - a cost is paid when hearts and minds collide, when a being wars against itself. I would measure my failure in degrees of separation, my success in a coalescence of thought and action. When I examine the wastes left behind, they are merely heaps of small things. The smallest viruses, those invisible, insidious things, can kill a perfect host and destroy a whole populous of good health and good feeling.

  A builder of card houses, I hold my breath and stare at the fragile city with its plasticene cornices and curved panes of glass. Sometimes a mere breath, a single gesture can shatter alliances, break down: on leaving – and one must prepare for the leaving, as one drills for disasters – one must be careful, so as not to disrupt those unstable plates of earth, the pile of dirty dishes that San Francisco sits upon.

  Sometimes when I’m doing errands around town, I notice how many people there are out in the streets and consider how many more there are inside that I can’t see and that it’s like this in every neighborhood I go through. And if the population of the whole world were only this big, I still wouldn’t have time to know all these people. What if I toured the world with the express purpose of touching as many lives as possible for some new world record for human contact? Is it physically possible to press the flesh of even a billion people in one lifetime?

  When you think of all that goes on inside your head and then multiply that by six billion – Wow! I thought there were only two billion people, that’s what I get for not periodically updating my set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I was surprised when I learned in 1978 of India’s independence. I considered writing a letter of condolence to the British consul.

  Of course not everyone has that much going on inside their head. I once worked with a guy who would sometimes share confidences that were below my level of interest. He came to me one day and said, “I just had the weirdest day yesterday. I was having these conversations with myself in my head, I mean I was actually talking to myself! And the most amazing thing was – I was responding! To my own comments! Isn’t that crazy?”

  “It’s called consciousness, Bob.”

  “No, I’m almost sure it wasn’t consciousness. Oh, God, I hope I don’t have a brain tumor or something.”