September 8, 2005
We are missing our wife/mother/grandmother, Geraldine Solomon, age 52, light-skinned African American female, freckle nose, green eyes, heavyset. They forced me to go to Houston. Father, daughters and grandchildren in Houston at Astrodome. If you found her please read this to her as she lost her glasses. Geraldine’s family can be reached at http//www.nolamissingpersons/katrina/
houstonastrodome.gov.org. She requires daily insulin injections. Authorities say they know she is missing and say they’re looking for her, so please let them know if you found her. She might be sick from her diabetes but will answer to the name Geraldine if she is conscious. Last seen by her husband Fred on morning of August 30 on the roof of their home before high water and winds swept her away. You told me I had to let go or we would both drown. You need insulin and some food and water now. Lord, please look out for her.
September 9, 2005
We’re praying for you wife/mother/grandmother. Department of Homeland Security/NOPD looking for Geraldine Solomon. If you have seen her or know her whereabouts, even if she is dead, please contact Fred Solomon at http//www.nolamissingpersons/katrina/
houstonastrodome.gov.org. We believe she is still alive as she is a very strong woman but might be weak now and needs insulin once a day. Her glasses are missing so please read this to her. Her family is at the Houston Astrodome. We were forced to go there but Fred is trying to get back to New Orleans and will be looking for you soon as police let me go home. I am trying, Geraldine, so hold on baby. We miss you and the grandkids need their mama. Geraldine is short and heavyset and has a big laugh and smiles a lot. Very kind woman, and if she is delirious will still answer to her name. 52 years old. Neighbors know her as Miss Geraldine. Please read this to her if you found her, and please get her some insulin.
September 10, 2005
We’re praying that Missing, Geraldine Solomon, married to Fred Solomon at New Orleans Courthouse, May 8, 1972, is found by her loving family. Geraldine’s born and raised in the Ninth Ward and neighbors know her as Miss Geraldine. She is short and heavyset and has a light complexion with freckles on her nose and forehead and beautiful green eyes. You will know her by her eyes. Fred Solomon lost his wife from the roof of their house in the early morning hours of August 30 in high winds and water. Geraldine can’t swim, but I heard a Coast Guard helicopter nearby shortly after she got swept away from me and I pray to the Lord that they found her. If you have come across Geraldine, please let her know that her husband Fred is coming soon as he can. Hold on. Please get her to a hospital. She is diabetic and needs insulin shots every day. She can read but lost her glasses, so please read this to her, even if she is delirious or unconscious. She will understand you. I’m in Houston, baby, but I will come back soon as I can find a way back. Her family has been evacuated to Houston. Geraldine likes the music of Bobby Blue Bland and Fats Domino and she particularly likes gospel music. She also will listen to rap that is not offensive. If you know of her or found her she will respond to gospel even if not awake. Your grandbabies need you. Your children need their mama. I need you. Hold on. Scar on her right arm. Wedding ring on left hand. We are in Houston. Her family can be reached at http//www.nolamissingpersons/katrina/
houstonastrodome.gov.org.
September 11, 2005
Geraldine Solomon of 3682 S. Desire, Ninth Ward is still missing and her family fears the worst. She is a short, heavyset black woman with light complexion and green eyes you can’t miss. She has freckles. When she’s in the sun the freckles become more noticeable. She’ll be hungry and tired and might not be herself. Play her some gospel music. She’ll respond to it. If you have seen her or know her whereabouts please contact her husband Fred at http//www.nolamissingpersons/
Katrina/houstonastrodome.gov.org or Homeland Security or NOPD. Geraldine’s missing 12 days but her family prays and hopes for the best. She loves music. Can dance like a teenager. Sometimes in the right mood she’ll sing and can sing like an angel. If you have seen her please contact us. Where are you, baby? Please. I’m coming. They won’t let me go, but I’m coming.
September 12, 2005
Missing: Mrs. Geraldine Solomon, age 52, of 3682 S. Desire St. Please contact NOPD, Times Picayune Missing Persons Bureau, or any official of Department of Homeland Security, New Orleans Bureau. My wife. I can’t go on without you. Mrs. Solomon was swept from the roof of her home on August 30, approximately 7 a.m., during the levee breech. Why, baby? I should never have let go. Mrs. Geraldine Solomon is African American female, 5′2″, 145 pounds, light complexion, freckled nose and forehead. Pray for Geraldine.
September 13, 2005
If you have seen or know the whereabouts of Mrs. Geraldine Solomon, age 52, of 3682 S. Desire St., please contact NOPD, Times Picayune Missing Persons Bureau, or any official of Department of Homeland Security, New Orleans Bureau. Mrs. Solomon was last seen by her husband, Fred Solomon, August 30, approximately 7 a.m., during the levee breech. Mrs. Geraldine Solomon is African American female, 5′2″, 145 pounds, light complexion, freckled nose and forehead.
NEIL GAIMAN
My darling,
Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me, placed coins in the palm of my hand). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you.
I write this in English, your language, a language I also speak. My English is good. I was some years ago in England and in Scotland. I spent a whole summer standing in Covent Garden, except for the month of Edinburgh Festival, when I am in Edinburgh. People who put money in my box in Edinburgh included Mr Kevin Spacey the actor, and Mr Jerry Springer the American television star who was in Edinburgh for an Opera about his life.
I have put off writing this for so long, although I have wanted to, although I have composed it many times in my head. Shall I write about you? About me?
First you.
I love your hair, long and red. The first time I saw you I believed you to be a dancer, and I still believe that you have a dancer’s body. The legs, and the posture, head up and back. It was your smile that told me you were a foreigner, before ever I heard you speak. In my country we smile in bursts, like the sun coming out and illuminating the fields and then retreating again behind a cloud too soon. Smiles are valuable here, and rare. But you smiled all the time, as if everything you saw delighted you. You smiled the first time you saw me, even wider than before. You smiled and I was lost, like a small child in a great forest never to find its way home again.
I learned when young that the eyes give too much away. Some in my profession adopt dark spectacles, or even (and these I scorn with bitter laughter as amateurs) masks that cover the whole face. What good is a mask? My solution is that of full-sclera theatrical contact lenses, purchased from an American website for a little under 500 euros, which cover the whole eye. They are dark grey, of course, and look like stone. They have made me more than 500 euros, paid for themselves over and over. You may think, given my profession, that I must be poor, but you would be wrong. Indeed, I fancy that you must be surprised by how much I have collected. My needs have been small and my earnings always very good.
Except when it rains.
Sometimes even when it rains. The others as perhaps you have observed, my love, retreat when it rains, put up the umbrellas, run away. I remain where I am. Always. I simply wait, unmoving. It all adds to the conviction of the performance.
And it is a performance, as much as when I was a theatrical actor, a magician’s assistant, even when I myself was a dancer. (That is how I am so familiar with the bodies of dancers.) Always, I was aware of the audience as individuals. I have found this with all actors and all dancers, except the short-sighted
ones for whom the audience is a blur. My eyesight is good, even through the contact lenses.
‘Did you see the man with the moustache in the third row?’ we would say. ‘He is staring at Minou with lustful glances.’
And Minou would reply, ‘Ah yes. But the woman on the aisle, who looks like the German Chancellor, she is now fighting to stay awake.’ If one person falls asleep, you can lose the whole audience, so we would play the rest of the evening to a middle-aged woman who wished only to succumb to drowsiness.
The second time you stood near me you were so close I could smell your shampoo. It smelt like flowers and fruit. I imagine America as being a whole continent full of women who smell of flowers and fruit. You were talking to a young man from the university. You were complaining about the difficulties of our language for an American. ‘I understand what gives a man or a woman gender,’ you were saying. ‘But what makes a chair masculine or a pigeon feminine? Why should a statue have a feminine ending?’
The young man, he laughed and pointed straight at me, then. But truly, if you are walking through the square, you can tell nothing about me. The robes look like old marble, water-stained and time-worn and lichened. The skin could be granite. Until I move I am stone and old bronze, and I do not move if I do not want to. I simply stand.
Some people wait in the square for much too long, even in the rain, to see what I will do. They are uncomfortable not knowing, only happy once they have assured themselves that I am a natural, not an artificial. It is the uncertainty that traps people, like a mouse in a glue-trap.
I am writing about myself perhaps too much. I know that this is a letter of introduction as much as it is a love letter. I should write about you. Your smile. Your eyes so green. (You do not know the true colour of my eyes. I will tell you. They are brown.) You like classical music, but you have also ABBA and Kid Loco on your iPod Nano. You wear no perfume. Your underwear is, for the most part, faded and comfortable, although you have a single set of red-lace brassière and panties which you wear for special occasions.
People watch me in the square, but the eye is only attracted by motion. I have perfected the tiny movement, so tiny that the passer can scarcely tell if it is something he saw or not. Yes? Too often people will not see what does not move. The eyes see it but do not see it, they discount it. I am human-shaped, but I am not human. So in order to make them see me, to make them look at me, to stop their eyes from sliding off me and paying me no attention, I am forced to make the tiniest motions, to draw their eyes to me. Then, and only then, do they see me. But they do not always know what they have seen.
I think of you as a code to be broken, or as a puzzle to be cracked. Or a jigsaw puzzle, to be put together. I walk through your life, and I stand motionless at the edge of my own. My gestures – statuesque, precise – are too often misinterpreted. I want you. I do not doubt this.
You have a younger sister. She has a MySpace account, and a Facebook account. We talk sometimes on Messenger. All too often people assume that a medieval statue exists only in the fifteenth century. This is not so true: I have a room, I have a laptop. My computer is passworded. I practise safe computing. Your password is your first name. That is not safe. Anyone could read your email, look at your photographs, reconstruct your interests from your web history. Someone who was interested and who cared could spend endless hours building up a complex schematic of your life, matching the people in the photographs to the names in the emails, for example. It would not be hard reconstructing a life from a computer, or from cellphone messages. It would be like filling a crossword puzzle.
I remember when I actually admitted to myself that you had taken to watching me, and only me, on your way across the square. You paused. You admired me. You saw me move once, for a child, and you told a woman with you, loud enough to be heard, that I might be a real statue. I take it as the highest compliment. I have many different styles of movement, of course – I can move like clockwork, in a set of tiny jerks and stutters, I can move like a robot or an automaton. I can move like a statue coming to life after hundreds of years of being stone.
Within my hearing you have spoken many times of the beauty of this small city. How, for you, to be standing inside the stained-glass confection of the old church was like being imprisoned inside a kaleidoscope of jewels. It was like being in the heart of the sun. Also, you are concerned about your mother’s illness.
When you were an undergraduate you worked as a cook, and your fingertips are covered with the scar marks of a thousand tiny knife-cuts.
I love you, and it is my love for you that drives me to know all about you. The more I know, the closer I am to you. You were to come to my country with a young man, but he broke your heart, and still you came here to spite him, and still you smiled. I close my eyes and I can see you smiling. I close my eyes and I see you striding across the town square in a clatter of pigeons. The women of this country do not stride. They move diffidently, unless they are dancers. And when you sleep your eyelashes flutter. The way your cheek touches the pillow. The way you dream.
I dream of dragons. When I was a small child, at the home, they told me that there was a dragon beneath the old city. I pictured the dragon wreathing like black smoke beneath the buildings, inhabiting the cracks between the cellars, insubstantial and yet always present. That is how I think of the dragon, and how I think of the past, now. A black dragon made of smoke. When I perform I have been eaten by the dragon and have become part of the past. I am, truly, seven hundred years old. Kings come and kings go. Armies arrive and are absorbed or return home again, leaving only damaged buildings, widows and bastard children behind them, but the statues remain, and the dragon of smoke, and the past.
I say this, although the statue that I emulate is not from this town at all. It stands in front of a church in southern Italy, where it is believed either to represent the sister of John the Baptist, or a local lord who endowed the church to celebrate that he had not died of the plague, or the angel of death.
I had imagined you perfectly pure, my love, pure as I am, yet one time I found that the red lace panties were pushed to the bottom of your laundry hamper, and upon close examination I was able to assure myself that you had, unquestionably, been unchaste the previous evening. Only you know who with, for you did not talk of the incident in your letters home, or allude to it in your online journal.
A small girl looked up at me once, and turned to her mother, and said, ‘Why is she so unhappy?’ (I translate into English for you, obviously. The girl was referring to me as a statue and thus she used the feminine ending.)
‘Why do you believe her to be unhappy?’
‘Why else would people make themselves into statues?’
Her mother smiled. ‘Perhaps she is unhappy in love,’ she said.
I was not unhappy in love. I was prepared to wait until everything was right, something very different.
There is time. There is always time. It is the gift I took from being a statue – one of the gifts, I should say.
You have walked past me and looked at me and smiled, and you have walked past me and other times you barely noticed me as anything other than an object. Truly, it is remarkable how little regard you, or any human, give to something that remains completely motionless. You have woken in the night, got up, walked to the little toilet, micturated, walked back to your bed, slept once more, peacefully. You would not notice something perfectly still, would you? Something in the shadows?
If I could, I would have made the paper for this letter for you out of my body. I thought about mixing in with the ink my blood or spittle, but no. There is such a thing as overstatement, yet great loves demand grand gestures, yes? I am unused to grand gestures. I am more practised in the tiny gestures. I made a small boy scream once, simply by smiling at him when he had convinced himself that I was made of marble. It is the smallest of gestures that will never be forgotten.
I love you, I want you, I need you. I am yours just as you are mine. There. I have declar
ed my love for you.
Soon, I hope, you will know this for yourself. And then we will never part. It will be time, in a moment, to turn around, put down the letter. I am with you, even now, in these old apartments with the Iranian carpets on the walls.
You have walked past me too many times.
No more.
I am here with you. I am here now.
When you put down this letter. When you turn and look across this old room, your eyes sweeping it with relief or with joy or even with terror …
Then I will move. Move, just a fraction. And, finally, you will see me.
VALERIE MARTIN
My Darling,
The train was an hour late out of Penn Station; there was a fire on a platform in Newark, or so they told us, and then there was a further delay while they switched tracks; it was almost three hours to Philly. Normally this would have made me livid but I was in such a daze of euphoria and so hopeful about the future, our future, that I scarcely minded. I got to the apartment around eight and there he was, unwashed, unshaven, sitting on the couch with the remote between his legs, flipping through the stations. The volume was deafening and I had the sense that he heard me coming from the hall and turned it up just to annoy me.
‘I’m back,’ I said, standing behind him.
‘How did it go?’ he asked. I didn’t want him to see my face because I knew it was suffused with joy and it’s hard on him when good things happen to me. ‘It went really well,’ I said. ‘I got a part.’
‘What?’ he said.
I pitched my voice very low, barely audible. ‘I got a part,’ I said. He flicked off the TV and turned around to look at me, not certain himself, I thought, how he was going to react.
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