Romare Bearden's collages remind me of how my mother, another one of my idols—a life-saver like Fanon—talks. Her stories flatten and fatten perspective. She crams everything, everyone, everywhere into the present, into words that flow, intimate and immediate as the images of a Bearden painting. When she's going good my mom manages to crowd in lots and lots of stuff without creating a feeling of claustrophobia. She fills space to the brim without exhausting it. Without surrendering the authority of her long life, she always talks about the precise moment she's inhabiting. Makes the moment present and large enough, thank goodness, to include everybody listening. Bearden's collages and my mother's narratives truly democratic—each detail counts equally, every part matters as much as any grand design. Size and placement don't highlight forever some items at the expense of others. Meaning equals point of view. Stop. I sound like a museum audiocassette guide when all I really need to say is dance—my mom talking or Bearden at the turntable mixing cutouts with paint with fabric with photos with empty space are works-in-progress inviting me to dance.
And speaking of guides, perhaps Thomas should change his protagonist's name to Tristram, you know, as in Tristram Shandy, the eponymous hero of Sterne's backasswards novel. Except Tristram's a clue fingerpointing in the wrong direction. Blaming the dead. As if Fanon and Tristram don't have enough troubles, their own wounds, wars, and ghosts to account for.
Helicopters whomp, whomp, whomp-whomping in the distance across a gray sky. They look like insects skimming the tops of tall buildings, sniffing and declining whatever goodies the towering stamens and pistils offer. An unusually busy traffic of choppers. Are they practicing. Has the shit hit the fan. Vehicles burning, a restaurant car-bombed. Are the helicopters ferrying survivors to emergency wards or bearing newscams to broadcast a spectacular accident, report a traffic jam, a power plant exploding, a flood, a parade, you never know anymore, the sound of choppers may be innocent but once bitten you never look at stray dogs the way you once did.
In the playground below my ninth-floor window an Asian guy heaves a long shot at the basket and when the ball knocks through the hoop the man thrusts both arms into the air. Three. A little extra spring in his step as he lopes to retrieve the ball. The guy doesn't hear choppers whomping overhead. Couldn't care less about the choppers mission, the mission of terrorists, the bodies squirming in agony or hunger or smoldering beside a highway or suffocating in elevators filling up with smoke. Thank you, Jesus, for blindness that every once in a great while allows one of us to hit the target.
THOMAS TEACHES WRITING IN MY OLD SCHOOL
There are rules for making a novel, says Thomas, standing assbackwards to his creative writing students, muttering rules over his shoulder while he jots them on the blackboard. On this, our first day together, and thus a sort of birthday, let's begin with point of view, the telling voice, the voice telling the story, the narrative heart that must always be alive, beating at the telling center or there would be no story, no novel, and to illustrate his point, various diagrams and underlined words with arrows like guided missiles connecting the dots begin to appear on the dusty blackboard—green not black its actual color—at the front of a small classroom holding a dozen or so hopeful white college students—their actual color not white nor any other paintbox color—who have gathered together in the name of fiction, a crew of wannabes yearning to learn the secret of doing what Thomas has done—break into print—break into the conversation about their lives books have been conducting since long before the students were born, books unread by them, books whose authors are mostly dead or much older and therefore not exactly qualified to speak about present lives. Does Thomas concur, hearing the nub of chalk in his hand tap-tap-tapping, as if the green chalkboard's a wall between cells and he's tapping a message to a fellow prisoner or the board a door he humbly taps, seeking permission to enter the office of a senior colleague, much older, smarter, more distinguished than Thomas will ever be, the chalk a blind man's cane tap-tap-tapping the way French impressionists composed a world with dots of color, and sure enough, a picture, familiar and embarrassing, greets Thomas when he steps back to regard his boardwork, a photo remembered from a thirty-year-old article in the alumni magazine of the college where he copped his first gig, a feature about neophyte instructors, featuring rare Thomas, the only member of his race on the faculty, Thomas wearing a sharp, Ivy League-cut herringbone suit, facing a class, the late-sixties shaggy backs of student heads in the foreground, and behind Thomas in the photo's background the rules for writing a novel sketched on a chalkboard—actual color unknown, since the photo's black and white—rules appearing just as slapdash, as spontaneously improvised and freshly minted in the ancient picture as they seem today, same ole, same ole shit recycled almost exactly, startling then shaming Thomas.
What if a former student fast-forwarded to this classroom or one of his present students bumped into the old photo. Would she or he demand a tuition rebate. Demand Thomas's head. On the other hand, don't all professors teach from yellowed lecture notes, scruffy index cards, falling-apart looseleaf notebooks, manila folders stuffed with brown-around-the-edges clippings. Why not. What else do you have to teach, if not the truth of your experience, your witness. Your old school theories precious like the music you grew up listening to, dancing to, fucking to. Midnighters. Five Royales. Turbans, Dells, Diablos, Spaniels, Flamingos. Oldies but goodies. Better now. Right on. All the questions and answers in one harmonized, swooning, dowah falsetto riff. Same truth. Same greasy teenage fingers dipping nonstop into a bowl of potato chips because gobbling chips and daydreaming safer than getting out on the floor and dancing. Same hopeless wishes and lost, lost loves. All good. All true then and now. Word.
Rules are truth, aren't they. Rules remember truth and pass it on. They are called rules because they truly work. Because truth and beauty mate when we apply the rules. Sometimes. Do. Wah. Why would the rules change each semester. Each decade. Each century.
Now don't get me wrong, folks. What I've scribbled on the board is neither a suicide note nor a foolproof set of instructions for assembling a novel. Rather, I'm suggesting, no, asserting, there's some, I repeat, some method in the writing madness. Writing madness. Isn't that precisely what we do. On another day we might begin class just as profitably there, with the madness, and accomplish as much, maybe more than beginning with method. Two sides of the same coin. Same shield, the Igbo would say. Can't brandish one side without lifting the other. Remember Otis singing his fa-la-la sad happy song.
Not guilty, Thomas pleads. Though the rules decorating a blackboard in the photo your classmate Ms. Jones or Mr. Smith unearthed and kindly distributed to each of you may resemble the rules I've outlined on the board today, I assure you, girls and boys, they ain't the same. Not the same no matter how much they look the same. I'm a different man today. Times have changed. You're different today than you were yesterday. None of you kiddies born yet that day thirty-five years ago in Philadelphia when I scribbled rules on a U of P green blackboard.
It had never happened. No need to defend yourself, Thomas. No disgruntled, vengeful, ungrateful student had stumbled upon sensitive material and busted you, Thomas. No terrorist had attempted to jack your class. A very unlikely circumstance. As unlikely as receiving a severed human head in the mail. (A very, very, very unlikely event that did happen to Thomas, but only once.)
Anyway, Thomas looks good in his herringbone suit. The Bible told him so. The Bible of his ex-wife's mouth, a Bible because in the courtroom she swore no lie had ever crossed her lips, then enumerated the many untruths Thomas had inflicted upon her, his sins just cause for the extortionate alimony payments she argued the judge should award. She'd told Thomas he looked good in his herringbone suit one morning when as usual he'd left himself not a minute to spare, his legs and heart already rehearsing the brisk twenty-block walk from the apartment beside Regent Park to his university office. He didn't say she looked good that morning, but she surely did look good, just out
of the shower, wearing a green shorty robe, her curly feet and calves bare, snuggled up on the couch. On his way to the door he'd paused, unable to resist a last pat of her damp black hair. She'd laid down her book and grabbed something, probably the tail of the herringbone suit's jacket, and like Tarbaby wouldn't let go. Before he could say what they both knew he must say, Gotta run, she had his zipper down and was rummaging inside the baggy herringbone tweed trousers with an enthusiasm reminding him of Charley's Pat, working his penis through the slit in his boxers. The surprise kiss froze him in his tracks, especially since she planted her lips on a part of him her mouth, unsolicited, rarely visited. Standing next to the couch, herringbone elegant and formal, he felt awkward, a little like a soldier unexpectedly called to attention. Earlier, glancing up from reading her book when Thomas had been fluttering around the room searching for a paper or book he'd need at school, she'd said, My, my. You look handsome this morning in your herringbone suit, professor. The kiss brief. A kind of mouth caress, a bit of friction, a squeeze. His joint just starting to swell as she tucked it back in his shorts, then a bulge under his herringboned fly she grinned at and rubbed through the rich fabric after she'd zipped him up.
Whose life. A scene floating up from a novel's turning pages. One among a string of easy, page-turner scenes, he almost hears the music scoring them, assuring the audience that an author's in charge and things will work out just fine or disastrously, perfectly unfine, just keep reading. Why couldn't he write this novel. Or even better, why not live it. Love it or leave it, Thomas.
THOMAS LEAVES
France flies past through the window of the train. Does it, now. Is that what France does. Did, will do. Fly past. Fly fast-forward through a train window while Thomas, Fanon manuscript in his suitcase, daydreams other times, other places. For instance Philadelphia, his first university gig, city of love, of fire. How large the window. How many pages in his Fanon book. How small France. What speed flying. Who says so. What happened to the head. All of France in the window. An unfurling panoramic scroll of the entire nation present and past. Or one postcard scene at a time. Be specific. Well, more like one colorful postcard at a time, the cards succeeding each other very rapidly, so quickly, twenty-four frames per second, we experience an illusion of motion and also of standing still as we watch and can't tell which. Where are we. Why quibble. The view pretty either way. France flies through the train window or we fly by France, the country collapsing in ruins behind us, each card, toppled by the weight of the scene it bears, knocks over the next card in line, and the next and the next, nothing will ever be the same after the train flies down the rails. A bullet through the heart of the country. Through Thomas's head. Mile after mile of France disappearing into eyes trained through a window, eyes riveted on nature flowing or flying or galloping past. Out there beyond the train, on the other side of the glass, sits a world apart, but it also flies through the window and, like the head, lands in Thomas's lap, France beyond and within this steel time capsule of TGV racing express from Paris, Gare Montparnasse to Vannes, Gare Vannes, from the metropolitan center toward rural south and west, past cows, fields, chateaus, barns, factories, silos, huts, bridges, sheep, thousand-year-old thatch-roofed villages, horses of various ages, sizes, colors, no people to speak of for vast welcome stretches on the unfurling scroll until a large town closes like a fist around the train and then it's all about people, the visible ones, more or less his size, passenger size, scattered here and there along a station platform or the uncountable tiny invisibles populating the opaque-windowed belly of this town beast hunkered down over the tracks, an immense cold shadow blanketing our carriage, darkening our sky, brightening the train's merciless interior lights till the TGV creeps past the urban zone after stopping a minute to take on fuel and passengers, who knows what else, maybe a tariff's due or the engineer fell asleep—or maybe he's paying homage toot-toot to his crippled mother who lives here on the sixth floor of one of the government-subsidized apartment buildings, toot-toot, the views shuttling through the window too much of the same thing so he doesn't look, doesn't notice when or if the TGV is moving or not, not flying for sure, remember, remember France flying by through the window. Ooh-la-la. Like a snowstorm. Or firestorm. Oh. Oh where. Where is she now.
On one of his early morning walk/runs beside the East River the bright idea was born of carrying the yet-to-be-written book about Frantz Fanon to a famous, infamous film director who lives somewhere in southern France or perhaps in a chalet near his birthplace in Switzerland. Either (a) an actual journey to France with the manuscript in his bag—which would of course entail writing the Fanon book or (b) imagining such a trip and imagining a book, both fictions facts in the larger fiction of a life he constructs daily. Neither option (a) nor (b) an easy task. Neither extricates him from the burden of the alternative hovering in the wings. (A) and (b) in each other's way. Either way all voyages end nowhere. After a lot of bother, sooner or later you're home again, with more (and less) time on your hands to kill so why not kill time softly, gently, like the song advises. Travel like the hero of Au Rebours who never left home. Let your fingers do the walking. Click. Click. Click. A world delivered twenty-four-seven to your door.
Out the window, maxed to warp speed again, the countryside shudders past. Green fields, fields plowed black, straw-colored fallow fields, heather purplish fields under a single, seamless blue sky, a patchwork quilt of earth tones rippling, jostled, set in motion by our thunderous passing, the train a thread jerked through a needle's eye by a palsied hand, oh lord, this seems like the right thing to write at this moment though tomorrow tomorrow who knows about tomorrow you do lord of course but I mean us, me, we terrestrials pressed under the glass of imperturbable blue, what the fuck do we know. The fleetingness feels such and such a way right now, this instant that I write it on the page, though you know lord and even little ole ignorant me knows I'll be sorry tomorrow, maybe sorry everafter for whatever I write jiggedy-jig today sitting in my seat on the TGV through rural France, fair weather today, tomorrow who knows.
Serene above networks of circling choppers, planes are flying in New York City's airspace again. A decision disrespectful of the 9/11 dead and dangerous for the living. Old flight paths resumed because they maximize fuel efficiency and profit. Business as usual. New tower, tallest in the world, they promise, will rise to replace the old ones. Each silver plane a mad cow. Poisoning the sky as it's been poisoned by being fed its bones, its wastes.
Three new stories in the news catch my eye—faith-based prisons, cell phones with tracking chips, a man arrested for raising a tiger and an alligator in a Harlem apartment. The same story really. The Big Squeeze at both ends, so nothing left alive inside people's heads. Those three stories in the news and the fate of certain stories no longer in the news trouble Thomas too. Whatever happened to South Africa. He'd always hoped to see South Africa before he died. South Africa a good destination, perhaps, for his orphaned head.
I walk a lot to stay fit and focus my thoughts. Thomas follows or some days leads, and on good days Frantz Fanon joins us. He gets a chance to sightsee in New York City, an opportunity not offered by his other life. The only America Fanon saw firsthand a huge hospital. I study his eyes, wonder what he thinks as I narrate our tour.
If you cross over the FDR highway on the pedestrian ramp just south of Williamsburg Bridge, descend the temporary wooden steps (probably concrete and permanent by now), hang a quick left through the ornate gateway of a tall black wrought-iron fence, then continue to bear left toward the water by following paths or cutting catty-corner through construction, you'll find after a minute or so an unbarricaded entrance to the walkway along the East River. Turn right on the walkway and soon you'll see the Manhattan Bridge about a mile ahead, and beyond it, seemingly beneath it from this perspective, the Brooklyn Bridge. A half-minute more on the rusty-railed walkway edging the river and you reach a vantage point allowing your eyes to follow the course of the river south, downstream. You'll see the Eas
t River doesn't run in a straight line, it bends and bulges on the way to the sea, a thick, meandering serpent, friend to a pilot who employs the river and bridges spanning it to guide his plane to its target. The river widening finally to a broad plain, shimmering sometimes, sometimes misty, the horizon visible only if you imagine it out there, a line where water touches sky and Manhattan Island ends and the East River merges with the Atlantic Ocean, where even in the clearest weather your eyes can't tell land from sea from air—out there just before all details are extinguished, on most days you can see the Statue of Liberty.
As you proceed on the walkway, the Statue of Liberty remains visible for only about two hundred yards before a large abandoned warehouse on Pier 40 blocks your view. Cut off from seeing very far downriver, your gaze shifts naturally to the opposite shore, its docks, giant loading cranes, the jumble of tall smokestacks, billboards, factories, storage tanks, or you may check out boat traffic—the Zephyr, Sea-Streak, yellow water taxis, tugs, NYPD launches, garbage barges inching to the sea—or glance down over the railing at water you hear splashing the river's concrete channel. The walkway doglegs, detouring Pier 40's backyard of clutter and ruin enclosed by Cyclone fencing. You're underneath the noisy canopy of FDR Drive, the least attractive stretch of the walkway, on South Street, where a series of hangarlike municipal buildings and parking lots for official vehicles—garbage trucks, EMT vans, fire engines, cop cars, ambulances—prevent access to the river for about a half-mile until a break in the fence lets you go left, following freshly painted white lines of a bike path. Here at the foot of Chinatown the walkway resumes its riverside course, just missing the shadow cast by the Brooklyn Bridge and its ramps high overhead. To catch the sun, steel benches, set close to the railing, are spaced along this half-mile straightaway that leads to another detour where you must go either right to South Street again, or left through the remains of the Fulton Fish Market. Either choice brings you to a pier crowded with shops and restaurants, a brace of tall-masted nineteenth-century ships preserved as floating museums, and, beyond this touristy patch, a series of terminals for ferries and sightseeing boats, then a helicopter pad, then the Staten Island ferry dock, a subway station, and finally Battery Park.
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