Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand
Page 9
Kesa, a monk’s robe, silk and gilt paper
brocade
folded to give the illusion of patchwork;
the illusion of poverty is an opening or a closing.
The illusion of a relationship is a closing, a property.
*
Available to the aspiring murderer
were five types of poisons:
snake, toad, scorpion, centipede
and either spider or lizard, depending on the climate.
*
The cure for death is life.
The cure for life is more life.
The cure for X is the inverse of X
thus X is a cure for itself.
*
Silence is so accurate said Mark Rothko
when asked for an explanation.
IMAGINING, IMAGE MAKING
If in the darkroom I saw the sun
as black, a hole in the emulsion
and I would see the planets circling
like bits in the bathtub faster—Mercury,
Venus, Earth—closer to oblivion
than the distant giants—Saturn,
Jupiter, Neptune—but the dimension
of time was only a tool then
part of the process under my control:
time to allow the fainter image
to etch itself into the thin coatings
of paper, of celluloid, of cerebellum.
Manipulate is what we do
to be ourselves, to see ourselves.
VISIBLE IS WHAT OTHERS ARE NOT WHAT I CAN DO
daughter of wind
anemone was believed to bloom
only in wind;
a tree in South
Africa lives underground—a few scattered
leaves on short stems
visible on the sandy surface
unseen trunks and limbs and roots
writhe forever darkly
pyrogenic—mutated defense
against fire a refusal to rise into air. It is a
geoxylic suffrutex
the most deceitful
tree in the world. Is immortal.
*
Wind is itself invisible its effects reflective
of light. Some plants pollinate by wind—
anemophilous. The wind deadly but is itself
generative of an aesthetic.
In order to study the effect of the wind upon the stars
Ottaviano Mascherino built his Tower of Winds
in 1580 in the Vatican. A star is the light it produces.
The light is distorted by air thus the wind affects the stars.
A star is light. Only light. It is not other.
It is beautiful. This is a poetics.
*
Assume a time in the universe
when no being had vision
all that happened
was dark deceit
did happen
*
I would lie on my belly and with a small trowel
dig carefully beside the twig until I reached
a limb and I would expose to my sight to air
and light the trunk and then I would follow
root down to nothing more of wood
but earth.
*
Hasselblad 500 EL camera number 1038
one of fifteen used on the lunar surface, the only one
to return
*
Grüner See is a lake in Austria that dries out in fall,
is a county park in winter is
famous as an underwater version
during the spring melt. Visible because
of the clarity of cold water, old snow.
*
In many photographs
especially candid portraits
interesting shadows
sometimes of the photographer
an acccidental signature,
sometimes the evening elongations
of an elderly couple smiling into the Instamatic
*
I know an artist who lives
beside the sea who hangs wet
seaweed from a device of her
own devising to which she attaches a pen
then places paper below to enable wind to draw
depictions of contingency.
Deceit is an art and science.
*
Socrates: I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is
unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter
have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question
they preserve a solemn silence.
Something with Everything
Porochista Khakpour
OVERTIME
Then came another impossibility: what they called a three-day weekend, an extra day annexed to that standard two-day weekly rest period. But was it a holiday? An emergency? A dead president? Relax, said his boss. It’s just an extra day. Enjoy it! Get away! Party!
He decided to take overtime instead. Work like usual. Take it home with him. Stay on top of things. Nothing wrong with that. Even though he couldn’t quite recall the last unnamed and holidayless three-day weekend since those employee-development days of grade school, he was certain he would have done the same thing before. He didn’t mind working.
As always on the days when there was work to be done, the world outside presented itself as particularly sunny and bright. People were out. He could hear them: someone on a loudspeaker booming, women laughing, kids singing, dogs, applause, crowds—everyone, gone all out …
He wasn’t interested; inside, he worked. Now as any real man would, he too required occasional short breaks—but on the whole, few and less, and more rigidly orchestrated, than those of most men. Sometimes, occasionally—and in fact, qualifying as truly rarely—his mind would wander. For instance, a few times, he stopped, suddenly hearing the ticking of his detestable new clock, the one he had recently purchased for that very detestability. It had to do with the second hand and how it didn’t skip and tick likemost second hands. No, this clock only ticked on the minute and the hour, opting to be slower, patient, downright grandfatherly in its announcement of time’s arbitrary increments, than most clocks with their nervous, neurotic, nonstop adherence to the keeping of the smallest, pettiest, chattiest unit of time possible. Its hand was slick, slippery, continuous, with the tick-lack a continuous reminder that time was passing in a manner larger than him. You are dying, said the clock, reminding him of something he already knew, but its oily magician’s flow—its parody of time, and yet its absolute accuracy—highlighted the reminder with more tactless ferocity than the many digital faces he surrounded himself with, as if slurring wooork. Within a couple minutes—at most—of his mind wandering, his surveying of a minute’s tick, he always returned, relieved, refreshed, ready, eager, to do.
Other times it would be the phone. Solicitors. Wrong numbers. People needing things he couldn’t give, people misjudging him and his needs, people wanting others. When he worked, he let it ring and ring until the machine got it. Usually nobody left a message.
On that night, the first of the three-day weekend, the phone rang endlessly and fatelessly. He tuned it out, and turned to the piles neatly stacked on his coffee table. The work he had to do wasn’t so bad, he thought. He didn’t mind it, he told himself. In compensation for it he would get money and, in fact, because of “overtime” they would pay him more. Not more than he deserved, he thought—in fact, still less than he deserved—just more than usual. The work involved papers, folders, envelopes with windows, numbers and percentages, sentences, signatures, names, addresses, e-mails, URLs, clauses, colons, semicolons, em and en dashes, trademar
ks, copyrights, ampersands, etceteras. Sometimes as he input and output and calculated and claimed, he was not sure what exactly he was doing but it did not matter. It was work. And, in fact, that very mysterious nature of it and its processes could be seen as nice, like all the incomprehensible yet “automatic” things in the world that just were. Nice. No need to question. Another nice thing: Nobody was asking.
His medication did not adversely affect—nor did it actively enhance, he would maintain—the process.
That evening, he noticed, with marked awe, that it would just not let up. In its third or fourth ruthless round, he knew he could just not be the bigger person. Ed finally decided to answer the phone.
THE CALL
“Hello, what are you doing?” Although it sounded somewhat familiar, Ed didn’t recognize the voice the first time, and the voice, sensing this, repeated again: “Hello, what are you doing?” Ed thought about it. It hit him—his coworker LJ. It was the greeting that gave it away. The last time—the only other time he had called—he had greeted Ed with the same odd question. LJ was not quite a friend but someone who worked at the cubicle next to him. Twice, they had lunched.
“Oh, just work,” said Ed. “Working.”
“What! What ever happened to the three-day weekend!”
Ed had nothing to say to this.
“Anyway, Ed … I am calling to make you an offer. And I suppose it also means making you stray from your path!” He chuckled hard.
Ed had nothing to say to this.
“I want to invite you to a party. One thrown by a very charming woman. Tonight.”
Ed paused. He had work to do. And yet this man had never asked him anywhere like that before. Ed assumed someone in this position might feel flattered. But he did not fully understand why this man who barely knew him was asking him out to a party. Well, he knew him a bit. Perhaps he too had few friends. In fact, LJ had to be a real outcast—he certainly looked the part. Ed recalled the raw redness of his exposed scalp, his constant sweaty-leather smell, his thin dress shirts, and he thought, here was a man who had not known what it was like to be accepted ever. Poor LJ, he almost thought—almost—but he did not know this man well enough to pity him even. Plus, it almost sounded like a date. But he did not know him well enough to not be repulsed by him either. He did not know why he had called, why he had invited him, if it was because he thought it was a party Ed would particularly like, if he assumed he knew Ed enough to invite him, if he did know Ed well enough to invite him, if he thought they were friends, if they were friends, if he thought they were more, if they were—
Ed shuddered. He said, “I’m sorry, LJ, but I have my work. And a lot of it.”
LJ snorted. “Please, Ed!” he said. The plea fell somewhere in between a sarcastic exasperation and genuine pleading. “This woman, who is throwing the party, she is very charming.”
Ed began to wonder if it was about the woman. It was possible that LJ was trying to find out what Ed thought of women in general, or, more specifically, charming young ones, that is, if she was young, if he had said that, if Ed had heard right—
“You want to know about her certainly,” continued LJ. “Casper speaks very highly of her too. Certainly, you trust Casper as well.”
Casper was their manager. They reported to him, and yet he was also their coworker, part of their team, all ruled by one director, who was ruled by one president. Casper, everyone thought, balanced being a good leader and a good coworker. Casper was liked. Trust was a whole other issue, but on some level Ed could say he did like him.
“Is Casper going too then?” Ed asked.
“Oh yes. Does that change things?”
That annoyed him. He turned to the table with its simple, straightforward piles of work and told him, “No,” and that he had to go.
LJ hung up with a snappy “Last chance—’night!” It was not entirely, but almost, rude.
Ed returned to his work. It was difficult to concentrate, and he found it annoying to confront that. In his head bumbled LJ in a thin lemon dress shirt, so flimsy you could make out his orange hairs, paired with old stiff polyester brown trousers—Ed placed LJ next to Casper, in his daily uniform, matching the smart black-and-white-silver cap of hair with the perfect white shirt and dapper black designer slacks, all of which looked expensive and rare in its plainness. LJ with his snorts and spittle; Casper with his tight smile and focused eyes. What a pair. Still, he had to admire Casper. The charming young—young?—woman would undoubtedly take to him and his position, that is, if he was not married or taken, details that Ed kept himself out of—
Suddenly, a sound he was not used to: the doorbell. When he opened it up and saw that it was Casper, he was surprised at not being surprised. Of course he had figured out where Ed lived—he did, after all, sign his checks every month. But it was still odd that he had acted on it. That he and LJ were pushing it so much, that the party dictated it, that the event somehow had managed to rope him into their world—
“Hello, Ed!” said Casper. “Well, I think you know why I am here. I was en route—”
“To this party of LJ’s,” said Ed.
“LJ’s? Well, yes, he is going, but I would not have called it that.”
“Oh, right, you know the lady too.”
“Well, know is relative,” laughed Casper, “but I do, I suppose. Certainly as well as LJ does. Certainly as well as many do.” He paused. “Many people know her.” He paused again. “Anyway.”
The silence felt taut. Ed thought about what to do. He had work but here was Casper, his boss—well, both his boss and not his boss—asking him to go out. It could be a test, he thought; perhaps Casper was here to make sure he would not go, to see if he would stick to overtime, and the rules of work. But that was unlike Casper. Casper, he reminded himself, was a good man. He in fact liked Casper OK. And he had come by personally to invite him. That was nice, certainly something he should not pass up. But the degree to which Casper was a boss-boss was hard to determine.Was he a boss, was he a coworker, was he a friend? More? Argh, Ed thought, disgusted with his confusion.
“Anyway,” Ed absently echoed. “Please know I am tempted, but as you know, I took the work home and all, and with overtime—”
Casper retained his smile and shook his head. “Ed, Ed! Overtime is not such a literal science. Did you not eat, did you not go to the bathroom?”
Ed nodded.
“OK, well, are you deducting those actions from your hours?”
Ages ago, Ed, in his first overtime stint, had considered that. He had thought there was a person out there who was good enough to do that. He had thought it was the right thing to do and yet he couldn’t actually do it. It was also a petty action. An action some people would find absurd. It was petty, absurd, and yet correct—confusing—and therefore best not to deal with a thing like that.
Ed admitted he wasn’t.
“Well, then! Don’t take life so seriously. It’s not worth it.” Casper paused. Ed could swear something had caught his eye in his living room, and he felt embarrassed that his house was so bare and badly lit. Did most people play music in their homes? Ed was not sure. “So you’ll come. Yes?”
Ed looked back at his home, the stillness, the dining-room table with its empty salt and pepper shakers, the single shabby placemat … and the pile of work.
“Maybe,” said Ed, feeling annoyed at himself for dipping further into the giving in and yet already so far into it with just that very maybe that he felt annoyed at feeling annoyed and resisting, therefore adding, “Maybe just for a little bit …”
THE RIDE
Buckled into the front seat—involuntarily, as Casper’s luxury car was such that it would automatically shepherd you into safety—Ed sat awkwardly, with no idea where they were headed.
“Where exactly is this?” Ed asked, after what felt like many minutes on the highway.
Casper said a name Ed did not know, and so he forgot it immediately.
Outside, the traffic
was bad. Long chains of cars sat grimly, white lights to red lights, in grim procession. This was the type of situation in which there was no out.
“Where is it again?” Ed asked.
Casper repeated the name, and again Ed immediately forgot it.
For a long while, they were silent, until Casper suddenly asked, “Some music? Music it is then,” and he turned on a station that played the music of a youth, Ed suspected, neither had any link to. Over heavy guitars, a young woman—or perhaps a young man—was yelling, aggressively, repetitively, with something significant at stake apparently. Ed deciphered the he/she’s shrieks as “Do me / do me all night,” or something very close.
Casper tapped his fingers in time against the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, as they continued not to move—until they finally did—and eventually, in a time span Ed could not fairly evaluate, Casper announced, “Ah-ha!” It was an apartment building of some sort. Ed could not tell if it housed the wealthy or the poor. It looked nice enough—white, newish, lawned—but such official standards of care, Ed knew, meant that the socioeconomic makeup of the tenants could go either way.
They parked and Casper said, “Go ahead. I’ll be up in a minute.”
Ed looked at Casper’s smile questioningly.
“You see, I’d like to take a nap, that’s all,” said Casper. “You understand.”
Ed nodded slowly, without understanding. Some people at work did take what was referred to as power naps. Perhaps that was what Casper was doing. Casper loosened his tie and placed his head on the steering wheel. With half-closed dreamy eyes and a barely-reigned beam, he murmured gently, “You’re welcome to join me if you like.”
“No thanks,” said Ed immediately. He was brusque, intentionally, he maintained, but hopefully not rude, he hoped. “I mean, I’m not tired, and well, since I am here, and not tired, I might as well, you know, make my way and go—”
“Well, then I’ll see you in a bit,” said Casper, his eyes suddenly shut. “Please lock the door.”
Ed locked the door and hurried up the path. The party announced itself immediately: music in some elevated distance, laughter, chatter, shadows cutting frantically in the windows, lights, all the things of parties, he remembered. He suddenly felt excited. He had nothing to lose. Still, before he embarked upon the stairs, he turned slowly to look back at Casper’s parked car, and all he caught was the silhouette of his boss/coworker slumped over the wheel. It was absolutely normal, and yet …