Without waking his mother, he found her fold-up shopping cart and a shovel and spread a black bag open on top of the cart. He tried to scoop the shovel under the cat’s compact body, but the heat had glued its liquids to the pavement. When it finally gave, an uncertain smell invaded the air and a smattering of insects vanished through chinks and fissures in the stone wall. He laid the body onto the cart as best he could. On his way to the park, the white tail dropped straight down and he had to readjust it several times with the shovel. Slowly, he got used to the lifeless presence. He dug a hole, small but deep, in a secluded corner between the trees and the gate of the adjacent school. He had to hide repeatedly from the police lights and a few men staggering around from bench to bench, talking to themselves. He finished late and wept.
Lips that could explain all this.
The skin will be several shades of gray to evoke the motion of walking. From a distance, we’ll watch it wind its way through the branches made of green tile shards.
He dreamed of wasps. They appeared in the shower. He saw blood on the tiles, but he couldn’t figure out where it came from. His mother woke him. She picked up the bowl with the remnants of incense sticks from his nightstand. Heavy-lidded, he watched her peel the screen from the window and toss out the ash. She walked back to the bed and stroked his face and hair. I got the wasp out of here, she said, as if she’d stepped right into his dream. I like knowing you’re safe, she said, smoothing her hands over the bedsheet. The fifteen-year-old sat up with a start. There’s no temple today and it’s hot out. Why don’t you go off to the beach. Don’t your friends go to the beach? He accepted the kisses she planted on the top of his head and he rubbed his eyes. He didn’t want to go to the beach. He had to see the pastor’s son. His mother looked at him, puzzled. A smile spread across her face, flooding it completely. There was no cause for her joy but divine intervention. Don’t forget the bug spray. The mosquitos are out of control today.
When this partnership occurs these beings are able to telepathically receive thought images sent by their caretaker.
The breakfast table was set. It was a blessing that there was anything more than cheap cereal. There was a certain happiness, the boy noted, in pleasing his mother, and in how he found that happiness in the lips of the pastor’s son. A wasp paused on his toast. He looked at it intently and followed it with his eyes all the way to the hole in the screen. He felt a prick.
The long mane of the pastor’s son showing him the way.
The blow to his arm spilled his blood and left the liquid remains of the mosquito’s body smeared across his ring finger.
To install a mosaic on cement, we will need a trowel or spatula, a sponge or rag, a hammer, a bolt cutter, some plaster, and some adhesive or white cement.
They’re bigger than average. It was the voice of the pastor’s son behind him. The fifteen-year-old had reached the building before the others. They stood with their faces near the gate for a long time, studying the half-finished mosaic: the orange of some wings, the green of the foliage, the black of the rats just grazing the ground, the several grays of the feline that the fifteen-year-old was shading in. They were so close that the fifteen-year-old could smell the soap, deodorant, and sweat on the body of the pastor’s son. The fifteen-year-old’s eyes took in the body next to his. Their eyes met. He’d never noticed it before: a certain motion in the eyes of the pastor’s son that made them two-toned, deeper, more disconcerting.
There is a choice to accept the human on the part of the Felidae (or not). This third meld occurs by mutual agreement.
The pastor’s son’s whistles were recognized indoors. The pastor emerged in suit pants and sandals, shirtless, scattering a cloud of mosquitoes.
Golden and silvery fish leaping as if rupturing clouds in the sea, soothing an infestation.
Kuan and the fifteen-year-old decided to walk along the edge, towels over their shoulders. Kuan guided him across a beach where people were spaced farther apart, swam naked, and smoked marijuana. Their hands touched in the warm water that lulled them like a cradle. Hungry, the fifteen-year-old felt the salt on Kuan’s lips. They made their way along the back path. The dry branches shadowed Kuan’s face. They undressed. They kissed each other’s entire bodies. They pleasured each other with their mouths. Seeing all of Kuan was new to the fifteen-year-old. Feeling everything was new. He saw the long cheekbones of a sheep in Kuan’s features, the narrow eyes of a wolf cub, the brightness of a parrot, the muscled hooves of a fawn, and the mane of the pastor’s son.
His hat collecting his dreadlocks to make it easier.
The wet between his legs slicked together with the damp of the sea. They stretched out to smoke a joint, rinsed out their trunks, and went back to the beach. They walked, picking their way among the fishing lines, until they reached the structures that hadn’t been demolished by the hurricane. Three or four raised huts stood at the edge. Latino families inhabited the first and most ravaged of the lot. In the others, men and women sat in chairs, their skin reddened by the sun. The kids walked quickly, feeling eyes on them that identified their foreign accents and warm complexions. The beach opened out and they could see the end of the island in the distance. They latched onto the thought that they were witnessing the vast Atlantic. Seaweed tangled around their toes. They crossed the kingdom of seagulls poised on their eggs, the mosquitoes swirling among them, a certain air of rot. They glimpsed a group of people. They were pulling cans out of a cooler and wearing the newest clothes they’d ever seen. If the kids kept walking, it was because they felt invincible together. They talked. They smoked. They kissed and held hands.
They are brilliant divinely intelligent Crystalline-Light Beings, nonphysical from your perspective. They are masters of incorporating spirit into physicality and assisted in the original engineering of full strand DNA for mankind.
Before they came to the first beach chairs with a poster that said private property no trespassing, they saw the corpse of a turtle. It was five feet long, its shell was broken, and it was decaying and infested with larvae inside. A vulture watched them defiantly from close by. The stench was overpowering. It was almost impossible to believe that eight reddish-blond men were silently enjoying the ocean just a few yards away. A little farther off, a woman was tending to some children. She spoke to them in Spanish as she covered her nose with a handkerchief. They did the same. Uneasy, they decided to retrace.
We will stick the pieces together with a little plaster, which we will make out of white cement and apply with a spatula.
He was no longer sure whether it was the insect bites or the toxic repellent that had irritated his skin. He pulled his T-shirt back on. The air was so humid that the cloth instantly clung to his long torso. He paused for a moment under the trees in front of my house, where I was writing, and stretched his arms. The fifteen-year-old had grown taller lately. He moved without the fragility of a new thing.
We listened to the calm of the slow summer morning, which was quickly interrupted by a dog howling in a nearby house. We went still. They were howls of pain. Some new neighbors stopped to deliberate over whether they should ring the bell and call the police as the dog’s anguish grew louder and shriller.
He is equally conscious of being fully manifested simultaneously in other dimensional planes. Quite often they interact within the other realms, while present physically in this one.
The howls suddenly stopped. After a few minutes, the new neighbors turned and walked away. But the fifteen-year-old didn’t, and neither did I, observing the scene from my front steps. After a few moments, a woman emerged from the house where the howls had been. She opened the gate and started her car. Bellowing, the fifteen-year-old forced her into the vehicle. She screeched away without shutting the gate. Murderer, he screamed, then sat down on the sidewalk with tears in his eyes and held his head in his hands.
There was another dog a few doors down. In the summer, his ivory arctic fur was a torment. He had one green eye and the other was a blue
so pale it was nearly white. A gentler animal had never walked the earth. It was as if all his wildness had been beaten out of him. After noon, the owners of the house would leave the dog tied to the gate on a short leash in the blazing sun. He struggled with all his might to fend off the rats that crept out of the garbage heap.
The fifteen-year-old couldn’t take his eyes off the dog. He opened the gate, called him by name, and stroked his head. Docile, the dog let the boy wet his head with water. He didn’t make a sound when the fifteen-year-old knelt before it. When the father of the house peered out at the scene through the grates of the air conditioner, the boy raised his fist. A few days later, the dog was gone.
Once the pieces are in place, wet a cloth with water only—no thinner—and wipe them to remove any remnants of cement plaster.
The fifteen-year-old dodged the tourists as they surged out of the elevator. Before he stepped in, he photographed the glass tube that would take him up the 136 stories of the tower.
The Beings that we term animals operate in great and greater intelligence, albeit in a thought-pattern matrix uniquely formatted to the natural aspect of the Earth-Plane.
Inside, he found the pastor’s son all by himself, his arms stretched out along the elevator’s metal railing as he leaned back against it. You’re late, he said. Everyone else already left. The fifteen-year-old’s body instantly drained of all the strength he’d felt surging through him as he and his earbuds made their way upstream, following the human current through Midtown. He lowered his eyes to his legs so they wouldn’t turn to wool. But you’re still here, he said by way of greeting, standing in the center of the elevator. Where is it? he asked. The pastor’s son replied with a gesture, signaling through the glass, pressing the highest number on the elevator interface. The metal doors shut only halfway, and the elevator suddenly filled with tourists, all wearing T-shirts of the same color and carrying backpacks and cameras. Their steps were short as they distributed themselves, looking down at the floor and nudging the fifteen-year-old subtly toward his companion. The final push landed him mere millimeters from the pastor’s son, from his white shirt, his long hair, his delicious sweat-smell. The pastor’s son didn’t take his arms from the railing, and so their arms grazed each other with a rhythmic softness.
The elevator started upward, leaving the skyscraper’s glass lobby behind, rising above the picture windows, the awnings of the stores across the street, the people shopping in department stores. The fifteen-year-old turned to watch as they abandoned the roofs of the other buildings down below, the chimneys, the occasional balcony, and discovered the roughshod tin sheets that mark the tops of buildings in New York. He felt his stomach come to life with a vertigo that morphed into something else, spurred by the nearby breath of the pastor’s son and the brush of his arm when he grabbed the railing to steady his balance.
One of the tourists let out a phobic yelp and jostled his way forward, demanding to be let out. He sweated and clutched his temples. As soon as the elevator stopped, the tourists threw themselves at the exit, leaving such a piercing silence in their wake that the fifteen-year-old wondered whether the pastor’s son could hear his heartbeat. Here we go again, said the pastor’s son. The elevator kept rising and the boys, hands clutching the rail, watched the city plummet away from them as their bodies turned into clammy cathodes. On the 78th floor, they saw flocks of birds streak past with pointy wings and orange breasts. The fifteen-year-old’s imagination flew off with them for a moment.
He saw the beginning. On the façade of the skyscraper in front of them, peeking through smaller buildings, the yellow of the mosaic appeared, framed in blue. That’s how I learned to make them a few years ago, said the pastor’s son. Like you right now. This is all that’s left of that summer. The pastor’s son pressed the stop button as he said this. He said, not every emergency is a call for help.
The mosaic glimmered. In the middle were the bare feet adorned with gold beads. Its many hands were laden with gifts and food, its head wreathed in gold like a holy corolla. Its trunk wound around its body and the boy immediately recognized its deep, seductive eyes, like an amethyst of his hallucinations. Around the central form, various drawings of birds formed celestial figures that were cats, dogs, humans, skunks, and anteaters. Insects were beginning to accumulate beyond the window and the fifteen-year-old looked down at the 136 floors beneath him and his legs dissolved. But his body didn’t collapse. The fingers of the pastor’s son had entwined at the nape of his neck. Heart in hand, the fifteen-year-old saw a panther’s face bring its lips to his, streaking his limbs with a tingle that didn’t feel like it belonged to him. His mosquito legs became one with the arachnid threads of the pastor’s son. Outside, the sun had faded and clouds of bumblebees hovered zealously around the birds that unspooled their spiritual choreographies in the last rays of sunlight. The fifteen-year-old was cornered. On top of him, the body of the pastor’s son held him captive, his horse-legs beating over the dunes, his fish-mouth waiting to receive, and the sky was water and he heard himself make the sound of a sheep whose throat is slit before the slaughter.
When we’re done, we will look at the mosaic together and behold what we once were.
They’d gotten dressed quickly when the elevator shifted back into motion. The city was dark by then. Between the buildings, though, he could still make out the last glimmer of sun flashing on the other, earlier mosaic that the pastor’s son had installed with another temple group. There were the trunk and the feet, the cloth golden as a crown.
What was different from what he’d experienced on the beach with Kuan? he wondered, sidestepping passers-by on his way to the subway. And he also wondered whether what he felt for the pastor’s son, a sensation he’d collected and harbored for nearly four months now, would vanish as swiftly as what he’d felt for Kuan. In the days before the start of the new school year, he’d stopped feeling the need to see Kuan, and his legs didn’t weaken when they stood together to look at the finished mosaic.
On the first day of school, the fifteen-year-old didn’t eat the cereal his mother had set out for him, and he left early on his bike to visit the mosaic. The temple yard was still cluttered with remnants of the goodbye party the pastor had thrown for his son when he went away to college. Kuan was gone, too, having left for Wisconsin, family and all. In the fog, the colors of the mosaic on the western wall gleamed onto the street. He saw the figure of the cat again, his own ilion, which looked like it was made of thousands of other beings unfolded into branches and mosquitos. The bird section plummeted toward the rats that emerged from the bottom of the frame and seemed to set their claws on the edge of the street. Along one side, a tree rose up that sheltered the sleeping possum, a rabbit, and some squirrels. In the middle of the scene, near his feline, came whole flocks of southern animals: the surges of swine, the clatters of colts, the mysteries of mares. The shoals flashed across the frame, painting a sky that wouldn’t have existed without the sunflower of their skins. And in the middle of it all, its naked feet with beads around their ankles, its deep, seductive eyes, its trunk furled around its body. All that would be left of that summer was the mosaic. Nothing more. And he decided he’d never go back to the temple again.
The Object
I slept through the entire hour-long subway ride from my place in Crown Heights to the neighborhood in upper Manhattan that was supposed to be called something else now. The change didn’t hurt anything, says the man in the seat across from mine, smiling immensely. Now we all get to be here. The doors snap shut. I realize I’ve left my book on the seat, the one by José Emilio Recabarren I’d checked out of the library. Accepting the loss, I make my way toward the object.
The small door amid all the restored buildings makes me nervous, especially when I walk into the bookstore, where the few customers turn to glance at me sidelong. It occurs to me that I have no interest in these objects, nor they in me. Only a couple catch my eye. Small presses, tasteful editions, the names of the translators putting
the other, larger names in perspective.
I pick up an object I think Carlos would find interesting and examine it carefully. Meanwhile, in a corner, a man with the beard of a retired scientist and a too-red nose addresses a young man who’s just opened his eyes and tells him how space can be folded. The young man’s mouth looks hungry for the first taste of an object whose tips and edges he tries to decipher. The old man moves closer to show him how it’s done. The young man lets his teeth show and finds my eyes, making room for me to answer him somehow.
The books are piled up on the sides of the stairs, the authors’ names overlaid like raw material. With my gaze alone, I select the ones I’d like to take with me but know I’ll never buy, counting, given the state I’m in, the coins in my pockets. As I reach the second floor of the bookstore, I nearly stumble. I leave my footprint on the open pages of a DeLillo book. There’s a vast open space with maybe seven rows of seats blocking the way. The organizers are expecting an enormous crowd. But only two seats are taken. I glance at the clock: it’s almost time for the launch of Gordon Lish’s latest short story collection to begin.
The books are piled up on the shelves and I notice that the store sells textbooks to Columbia students. Several of them vanish into the aisles, arms laden. A well-dressed man sits on the stairs to read a book about Fanon, but he shuts it and opens a different one, trying to hide the title. Standing at the end of the aisle, I see an old armchair positioned in the middle of the makeshift stage, clearly chosen to grant the venue a literary air. The armchair is the object, I hear one of the macabre old men say as they chatter edgily and tilt their heads toward the back of the space.
I sit in the third row, behind some women who quickly move closer to the stage when the man in the armchair asks them to. Farther back, the seats are still empty. The man with white hair, vampiric skin, and a raspy voice requests once again that we advance toward the object. I am the object, he says. The chairs in front of me have been bottlenecked by the women’s movements, so I stay where I am. The object takes offense at this and uses it as an incentive to expound on the meaning of art and how apprentice writers ought to approach the object. Gordon Lish presents a series of anecdotes to illustrate his point: when he worked at Esquire, he covered a convention held by Exxon to whitewash their image. Several Nobel Prizewinners were invited to speak. Like any good reporter, he refers to everyone he can remember by name. Like any good tyrant, he orders the audience to repeat them. All men. All gringos. I notice that all of the people occupying a miniscule fraction of the available seats are employed either by the bookstore or by the press, except for me. Lish continues to elucidate his object theory using several of his own disciples: those who approached the object versus those who followed other paths in life. He disdains the second group. He praises one whose name appears in the credits of TV shows no one has seen, another who’s been nominated for an award, and a woman whose name he can’t remember. He also evokes various disciples he has edited himself. He makes a few mathematical calculations and divides humanity into people who approach the object and people who approach money. For some reason, he says, he got both.
Cars on Fire Page 8