Square Inch Hours

by Sherod Santos

  Mother Courage

  To the trim, tethered sailboats in the marina, a madwoman at the end of the pier sang a song composed entirely of obscenities. The woman haunted Brecht for weeks, but each time he tried to write her into a scene he was stopped by the impression that, no matter how he staged her, her presence was more symbolic than real. Given his distaste for literary effects—“not even my imitators would stoop so low”—time and again he struck her out, crumpling the pages and tossing them into the fire, time and again she came back as before. Was she better suited for an opera, perhaps? Or a poem? Was she better left alone as an entry in his journal: Early evening. Funeral bells. Madwoman raving at boats in the marina.

  The Consolations of Philosophy

  In his college days, Nietzsche wrote nine autobiographical sketches in which he not only examined himself—“the dividuated individual”—but projected himself into a future where, in the Dottendorf Library Reading Room, he would read what he’d had to say about himself. By the time the future came round, the man who read the man he’d been was the very man he thought he’d be: “In the past four weeks, I have finally understood my own writings; not only that, I admire them.”

  Pessoa

  At some point in his early twenties, the old-world Sensationist began to speak, not as himself, but for himself, the great author of his poems, Álvaro de Campos. And what was that sensation? “Of facing myself left behind on the seat of a trolley.”

  Zenobius the Rhetorician

  A travel magazine lists the charms of its far-flung off-season getaways: “Crowd-free, Stress-free, Snob-free.” The getaways are then divided into “Seaside Romance, Mountain Adventure, Desert Escape.” Above each destination, enormous stars are lifted into place by industrial cranes, and star-to-star the music of the spheres amplifies the candlelit terraces. Is there anything beyond our imagining, Praxilla? And if poems get written about lesser things—a soapstone bowl, the peelings of an orange, a braided horsehair ring—what are they in the face of all this?

  Ovid on the Near North Side

  Whether from willfulness or lethargy, each day he spent in the foreign city brought a growing detachment from the past, from anything, that is, that made the past accessible. At the same time, his life assumed the custom of necessity. Even morning walks along the river ended always at the kiosk where he’d buy his cigarettes and paper. Whatever small problems arose (though he wasn’t bad-looking, women seemed to find him unappealing), he at least felt less and less obliged to think of himself as a Poet. The part in the hair of the bus driver, the palsied hand of the grocery clerk, the deep gouge, like a bullet hole, in his apartment door, those were the fugitive images that crossed his mind as he pondered the great work of his final years.

  A FEELING OF AND, A FEELING OF OR

  Mid-morning, mid-summer, the bedroom window raised, and where the screen intersects with the frame, a web of circular tensile silks radiating outward from the central lair where a yellow spiny-backed spider waits, its six thorn spurs protruding rose-like from the abdomen, its casing imprinted with a wax seal ring. Attached to the foundation lines, clusters of white cottony tufts—lures, I suppose, for insects—and suspended from a single thread, a much smaller egg-shaped spider swaying imperceptibly in the air: an image from childhood that reminds me of “childhood,” a word that so often crosses my mind that it long ago ceased to mean anything other than a period of time when things occurred, not to me so much as him, all of them linked only by AND. As in the span of a single moment: the afternoon after the all-clear when the sun rose on a bloated, fly-stung pygmy goat in a gravel slough he crossed to wave to a woman with a Red Cross band on her arm. AND: the red pinball bumper cap (“5000 when lit”) in a tented arcade on Brighton Pier when he was twelve.

  OVERSEEN BY A SLIDING GLASS PANEL

  Eye-level in the unlocked common room, a fireplace fire played in a loop on the television screen. It was difficult to say where the loop began, though the logs continued to burn, and the flames continued to rise. As if testing the heat of the fire, a woman (no more than a girl) reached out to touch the screen. A cell phone rang unanswered. An elderly man, whose face I didn’t recognize, turned the pages of a magazine; across from him, tiny and archaic, an even older woman pressed the fingers of one hand to the corresponding fingers of the other. Out of consideration, no one looked at anyone directly but at everyone from the corner of an eye. Apart from that, we kept to ourselves. From a distance it might’ve appeared that we were there because we had nothing better to do, and nowhere better to do it, that nothing mattered less than the world outside. Even the artificial palm in the corner, even the attendant nodding at her station, even they conveyed the impression that, though we were present, we had thought our presence away—and, moreover, that we’d chosen to.

  I WENT FOR A WALK IN WINTER

  The snow didn’t fall so much as blow past horizontally. People heading east leaned into it, people heading west leaned back, then one after another they disappeared, as in the fade-out of a movie screen. As if the world were reduced to the simplest natural law—that of erasure—a hotel doorman struggled to clear a sidewalk path that quickly filled in behind him. So, too, the hollow left behind on a bus stop bench. Above the entry to a corridor, a blue and yellow neon sign lit my side of the street. I felt my body pass through it, and I felt its colors pass through me, as though a mood had suddenly come and gone, leaving only a tremor behind.

  After I returned to my apartment, I found it difficult to focus on anything; and when I switched on the television it took me a moment to realize that a movie in a foreign language was on, though what language that was I couldn’t say. The uniforms of the soldiers locked in battle were likewise unfamiliar, and the frozen landscape provided no clue. Muskets were fired, swords were drawn, orders were shouted and, I assumed, carried out, for bodies continued to drop in numbers carnage alone explained. Somewhere offscreen, wagons were already being readied to haul away the dead, and this too I took in, less to imagine the event than foresee the end: the battlefield cleared, the blood covered over by ever-amassing drifts of snow.

  THE BICYCLE RIDER

  Already in the evening the day seemed longer than it was, though it also seemed more coherent, more cinematic, as if by some unspoken logic everything was finally falling into place, one image picking up where another left off, each in the natural order of things. A man stopped a woman walking toward him on the street then together they walked off in “her” direction. Walking in “his” direction, three adolescent girls approached a policeman to ask their way. Beneath the news ticker’s digital scroll on the building behind them, three more girls posed for a photograph with their tongues sticking out. Having broken free of his father’s hand, a small boy hurtled toward them, his delighted shriek like a rooster’s crow, and his father’s call like the hoot of an owl. Things went on occurring just that way until, while waiting at a crosswalk for the light to turn, I began to doubt the truth of my perceptions. To suspect that like some Hollywood film I’d been making up rather than experiencing them. To escape that impression, I turned around and hurried off in the opposite direction, rushing to outpace people in my lane, passing on the left then pulling back into line, like someone riding on a bike. Someone with no other purpose in mind than to get where he’s going as fast as he can.

  THERE MIGHT’VE BEEN A CELLIST IN THE DINING HALL

  As we walked through the ward, I was surprised to see how the community he moved in wasn’t so different from the one he’d moved in when he was well. At least not in his mind, it wasn’t. The old gestures of social nicety still came into play. He greeted other patients with a wave, paused to shake hands with the janitor, tipped a nurse with an imaginary coin. Gone were the Italian shoes, exchanged for Velcro sneakers, the expensive suits and ties, replaced by sweatpants and an undershirt. Half his face was unshaven, his hair appeared more cropped than cut, and yet—as if in this and this alone his connection to the past was real—his nails were beautiful
ly manicured.

  TIME IS AN ACCIDENT

  Sitting in the park with a book that (finally) shed no light on the past, I began to move my lips as I read, focusing not on the meaning of the words, but on the syllables, cadences, shifts in tone. As if learning to read all over again, I traced the letters across the page, returning now and then to the beginning of a sentence and starting afresh. It wasn’t until a church bell rang that I lifted my eyes from the page. A moment passed, as did a dog on a leash, the leash in the hand of an elderly woman who had grown too small for her clothes. She advanced at a rate so slow it seemed in defiance of the laws of nature, like a figure in a frieze who in mid-stride appears to the eye to move. As if lugging behind it the weight of the world, the dog continued to strain against the leash, tug aside to sniff at something in the grass, rise up onto its hind legs to bark at squirrels in the trees. All the while, the book lay open on my lap, my finger pressed to mark the spot where I’d left off when the church bell rang, though I couldn’t have said what I’d been reading.

  SELF-PORTRAIT WITH SHAKING HANDS

  The Russian vendor I’ve bought the paper from for years asks if I am cold.

  No.

  Are you afraid?

  No.

  Why are you shaking?

  Am I shaking?

  What happened to you?

  For a long time after I find myself searching for what had happened to me, stopping now and then to see if my hands are shaking, are still shaking, which in fact they are. A sequence of events interrupted when, from an open window, I hear a song I remember from my youth, though a few moments later I can’t remember what song it was, only the pleasure of having heard it again.

  APART FROM A FEW STONE BRIDGES

  Half an hour outside the ancient city limits, down what was once a mill road and now a shortcut locals take to a highway in the north, lie the grounds of a ruined estate, its confines marked by boundary stones dense hummocky clumps of grass make difficult to see. In the turnaround, a marble bacchante, her life-size body balanced on a plinth, a castanet in her upraised hand, her eyes closed, or almost closed, in the pleasures of the dance. Except for the occasional passing car, sounds one would normally expect to hear, the natural and the man-made, don’t rise above my footsteps on the gravel path. On the choked-off limbs of the orchard trees, vines that appear to have grown, not up, but down the trunks before taking root. The copper-colored underside of dead leaves, and at the tips of the branches, deformed clusters of terminal buds covered in fungus like an animal’s pelt. All that I recorded twenty years ago—to what end I couldn’t say, beyond a wish to renew my ties to the world—on the back of a rental car folder, near the sluggish waters of the Lys.

  THE ITALIC GODS

  In the back room of a secondhand bookshop on Printer’s Row, I leafed through a stack of nineteenth-century topographic maps spread out on a table and weighted with a stone. I was the only customer in the store, and though he’d checked my bag when I entered, the desk clerk hardly glanced my way. Like the stone, his heavy head rested in the palm of his hand, the blackish-blue tattoo of a griffin rising off his knucklebones. One map charted Alexander’s march across the Dardanelles into Asia, along the Lycean shore through the Great Sand Sea to the Siwa Oasis where an oracle declared him the Son of God. Half a life ago, I came across a Johann Platzer painting of Gordius’s old wooden-wheeled cart (a kind still seen in Anatolia) where yoke and shaft are fastened by a knot made of cornel bark. More man than god, Alexander has raised his broadsword up to strike the knot, and fear is in the faces of those foreseeing what’s to come.

  The windowless room was damp and overheated, yet I was glad for its privacy, and I was grateful to the clerk who, as they say, turned a blind eye. Outside, dusk was settling and it had started to snow. Businesses were closing and the sidewalk was crowded with faces that were, by turns, kindly, expressionless, desperate, cruel and, as if each held up the homeless woman’s cardboard sign—“I Am Like You”—no one bothered to be different than he was. I was in no hurry to get home, so I continued on beyond my subway stop and by the time I reached the Wells Street Bridge, the crowds had thinned to a handful of people. All along the railing, pole flags for the military dead hung slack above the river. When I closed my eyes, I could feel the water sliding past the wooden pilings, and when I opened them again, the streets were so quiet it seemed all the cars in the city had shut off. If this wasn’t peace, it was nonetheless an image from which the experience of peace spilled over into the world. A moment in its own right, pointing toward nothing beyond itself, only it and what would become of it.

  SECTION

  5

  THE WINDOW ABOVE SUPERIOR

  An outdoor bench in the hospital gardens, the terrace bordered by waist-high, vase-shaped bushes. Because it was Sunday, the streets were empty and sounds not audible for the rest of the week were audible then. The opening and closing of a door. The voice of a man scolding his child. A moped stopping at the curb. Bird sounds, and not just city pigeons, but finches, chickadees, starlings, jays. The gardens weren’t too crowded, the sunlight wasn’t too bright, the air was neither too hot nor too cold. Though I observed them very carefully, the expressions on the faces of the people nearby were careful not to give anything away. To my left, the branch of a shade tree hollowed by insects still bore a few leaves, and where the forked trunk split, a plastic grocery bag was lodged like the nest of an animal or bird. And so the hour passed, each moment saved from a morning wasted in useless self-reflection, and by the time I went back inside, anything seemed possible, happiness as well, as long as my mind kept pace with whatever new sensations came my way.

  •

  On the wall behind her wingback chair, a painted canvas of Tuscan tiles, the brushstrokes varying from one square to the next, first left to right, then top to bottom, then left to right again. Though I expected it to be filled with tissues, the trash can beside me was empty, as was the acid green Lucite vase on her desk. It seemed wherever I rested my eyes I was reminded that I’d be talking to a stranger. As if I were a newcomer to my own emotions, the first thing she asked me was, “How do you feel?” I did my best to give her a thoughtful answer, but when I saw that she didn’t note it on her legal pad, I began to revise, augment, elaborate on what I’d said. This went on until I was no longer sure what I was trying to say, as if my words had only confused my thoughts, and I felt the urge to ask if I could start over. Perhaps to encourage me to continue, she took up the narrative and played it back more or less in my own words, more or less repeating my emphases and pauses as she carried the monologue through to the moment where I left off. But why stop there? Since we already shared a point of view, why not push on to the conclusion? Instead, we arrived at a “natural stopping place.” Pleased with the progress I was making, she stood and warmly extended her hand and I, in turn, received it (slavishly) in both of mine.

  •

  Having signed out earlier in the day, I bought apples at the farmers’ market, a wedge of pie at the bakery, a newspaper at a stand. On my way to catch the crosstown bus, I stopped to watch as one by one a tower crane raised a rusted (or rust-colored) I-beam from a flatbed up twenty-some stories to the roof of the new Maternity Wing. The framing in of the final floor provided occasion for a topping-off party in the courtyard of the art museum across the way, a slate space where, each at a different angle, a number of bannered canvas tents were anchored to bags of sand. I took a seat on the ledge of a concrete flowerbed planted with rows of Chicago Brick wrapped in woolen sweater scraps and sprinkled with mustard seeds. In a few small patches of light, some of the seeds had started to sprout, and as I leaned in closer to examine them, a woman I took to be the artist arrived with a watering can. Because, I assumed, the project required the theoretical silence of nature, my polite inquiries were met with an unresponsive stare. Sympathetic as I am to the aesthetics of silence, to the childlike fantasy of escaping the material world of words, the cursive spray of her watering can and the f
luent undulations that darkened the bricks gave rise to such intensity of feeling that even hours later, long after I’d stood and applauded the tedious speeches, I still bore the impression, the absurd, unshakable impression, that I’d been made the brunt of an elaborate joke. And the joke was part of the project.

  •

  As I was making my way back in the evening, I turned instead and wandered off between the high-rise apartments and village-like homes on the outskirts of the city center. I’d been trying not to think about anything, so I counted it a success when a tricycle abandoned in a gated playground didn’t really interest me. When I didn’t perceive as a personal threat the message taped to a door: KEEP YOUR DOG OUT! When a wrapper yellowed by egg yolk on the lid of a garbage can seemed no more significant than the can itself. As if sensing my lack of resolve, people coming toward me paid me no attention. Even those who happened to glance my way looked through me at something beyond. It wasn’t that I had ceased to exist, it was as though through an act of will I’d detached myself from my surroundings. Were I an ancient Chinese poet, I might’ve found a bench beneath a flowering tree and composed a hymn of praise: Pleased at last to leave the world behind.