Silence a good way of listening for news. Please. Please. Is anybody out there? The singer can't see beyond the smoking cone of light raining on his shoulders, light white from outside, midnight blue if you're inside it. Silence is Please. Silence is Please Please Please hollered till it hurts. Noise no one hears if no one's listening. And night after night evidently they ain't.
Who wants to hear the lost one's name? Who has the nerve to say it? Monk taps it out, depressing the keys, stitching messages his machine launches into the make-believe of hearts. Hyperspace. Monk folded over his console. Mothership. Mothership. Beam me up, motherfucker. It's cold down here.
Brother Sam Cooke squeezed into a phone booth and the girl can't help it when she catches him red-handed in the act of loving somebody else behind the glass. With a single shot she blows him away. But he's unforgettable, returns many nights. Don't cry. Don't cry. No, no, no—no. Don't cry.
My silence? Mine. My silence is, as you see, as you hear, sometimes broken by Monk's music, by the words of his stories. My silence not like Monk's, not waiting for what comes next to arrive or go on about its goddamned business. I'm missing someone. My story is about losing you. About not gripping tight enough for fear my fingers would close on air. Love, if we get it, as close to music as most of us get, and in Monk's piano solos I hear your comings and goings, tiptoeing in and out of rooms, in and out of my heart, hear you like I hear the silence there would be no music without, the silence saying the song could end at this moment, any moment silence plays around. Because it always does, if you listen closely. Before the next note plays, silence always there.
Three-thirty in the A.M. I'm wide awake and alone. Both glow-in-the-dark clocks say so—the square one across the room, the watch on the table beside the bed, they agree, except for a ten-minute discrepancy, like a longstanding quarrel in an old marriage. I don't take sides. Treat them both as if there is something out there in the silence yet to be resolved, as if the hands of these clocks are waiting as I am for a signal so they can align themselves perfectly with it.
I lie in my bed a thousand years. Aching silently for you. My arms crossed on my chest, heavy as stones, a burden awhile, then dust trickling through the cage of ribs, until the whole carcass collapses in on itself, soundlessly, a heap of fine powder finally the wind scatters, each particle a note unplayed, returned perfectly intact, back where it came from.
When Monk finishes work it's nearly dawn. He crosses Fifty-seventh Street, a cigarette he's forgotten to light dangling from his lower lip.
What-up, Monk.
Uh-huh.
Moon shines on both sides of the street. People pour from lobbies of tall hotels, carrying umbrellas. Confetti hang-glides, glittery as tinsel. A uniformed brass band marches into view, all the players spry, wrinkled old men, the familiar hymn they toot and tap and whistle and bang thrashes and ripples like a tiger caught by its tail.
Folks form a conga line, no, it's a second line hustling to catch up to Monk, who's just now noticed all the commotion behind him. The twelve white horses pulling his coffin are high steppers, stallions graceful, big-butted, and stylized as Rockettes. They stutter-step, freeze, raise one foreleg bent at the knee, shake it like shaking cayenne pepper on gumbo. The horses also have the corner boys' slack-leg, drag-leg pimp-strut down pat and perform it off-time in unison to the crowd's delighted squeals down Broadway while the brass band cooks and hordes of sparrow-quick pickaninnies and rump-roast-rumped church ladies wearing hats so big you think helicopter blades or two wings to hide their faces and players so spatted and chained, ringed and polished, you mize well concede everything you own to them before the game starts, everybody out marching and dancing behind Mr. Monk's bier, smoke from the cigarette he's mercifully lit to cut the funk drifting back over them, weightless as a blessing, as a fingertip grazing a note not played.
In my dream, we're kissing goodbye when Monk arrives. First his music, and then the great man himself. All the air rushes from my lungs. Thelonious Apoplecticus, immensely enlarged in girth, his cheeks puffed out like Dizzy's. He's sputtering and stuttering, exasperated, pissed off as can be. Squeaky chipmunk voice like a record playing at the wrong speed, the way they say Big O trash-talked on the b-ball court or deep-sea divers squeak if raised too rapidly from great depths. Peepy dolphin pip pip peeps, yet I understand exactly.
Are you crazy, boy. Telling my story. Putting mouth in my words. Speechless as my music rendered your simple ass on countless occasions, what kind of bullshit payback is this? Tutti-frutti motherfucker. Speaking for me. Putting your jive woogie in my boogie.
Say what, nigger? Who said I retreated to silence? Retreat hell. I was attacking in another direction.
The neat goatee and mustache he favored a raggedy wreath now, surrounding his entire moon face. He resembles certain Hindu gods with his nappy aura, his new dready cap of afterbirth in flames to his shoulders. Monk shuffles and grunts, dismisses me with a wave of his glowing hand. When it's time, when he feels like it, he'll play the note we've been waiting for. The note we thought was lost in silence. And won't it be worth the wait.
Won't it be a wonder. And meanwhile, love, while we listen, these foolish things remind me of you.
Are Dreams Faster Than the Speed of Light
HE'D PLAYED those idle, whistling-in-the-dark games with friends. If you had to choose, which would you rather be, blind or deaf. Lose your arms or legs. With only twenty-four hours to live, how would you spend your last day. Well, someone not playing games had turned the games real. The doctors couldn't tell him exactly how long he'd live but could estimate plus or minus a couple months how long it would be before he'd want to die. A long or short year from today, they said, he'd enter final storms of outrageous suffering and the disease he wouldn't wish on a dog that had just bitten a hole in his ass, the disease he calls X cause its name's almost as ugly as its symptoms, would shrink his muscles into Frito corn curls and saw through one by one, millimeter by millimeter, with excruciating slowness all the cords stringing him along with the illusion he's the puppet master of his limbs, and dry up his lungs so they harden, burn, and crumble and he'll cough them up in great heaving spasms of black-flecked phlegm. No one knew the precise day or hour but sure as shit, given his symptoms—the jiggle in his legs, spiraling auras wiggling through the left side of his field of vision, numbness of tongue, fasciculations everywhere rippling like a million snakes under his skin, bone-aching weariness totally out of proportion to the minimal bit of physical activity required to survive day by day—the specialists agreed unanimously his ass was grass, maybe he'd last one more Christmas, if lucky, just in time to beg Santa for death if death hadn't already come creeping and smirking into his room.
The riot of pain the doctors promised doesn't scare him. Drugs will dull most of it, won't they. He just hates the anticipation. Always prided himself on being the kind of guy who liked to bull-rush the enemy, get it on, get it over. As long as he had a chance to fight back, he could handle whatever. From day one, his color plus a jock mentality had turned every encounter into a contest. Even the smallest choices. For the past year he'd believed the tremor in his hands a symptom of his crazy habit of always needing to win. You reach for the pepper and at the last instant, because your mind's still debating the pluses and minuses of whether to sprinkle pepper or salt on your pasta, your hand hesitates, flutters in the air above the nearly identical shakers. Sometimes you knock over stuff. Sometimes you laugh at yourself. Sometimes you want to scream. To kill. Or die. Each decision a drama. Your fate and the future of Western civilization hinge on whether you top your coffee with a dab of half-and-half or a dollop of skim milk.
Now it turns out the problem not indecision, not fear of doing the wrong thing and losing. No. Not his wacky mind causing his hands to tremble. His body's wacky. Loose connections in the circuitry of nerves. Connections blocked by inflamed tissue and arthritic bones. Simple motions frustrated by lack of information. Muscles atrophying because they don't rec
eive enough love from the brain. They forget how to contract or stretch. All the switchboard operators sprawled dead or dying after a terrorist raid.
When his eyes slink open in the morning he tells himself, You're still here, nothing's different. Nothing to worry about, anyway. Over is over. Once gone, you're really gone. It's the air conditioner, the fridge, stupid, not death droning in your ear. Crowds amaze him. Busy swarms of people who haven't heard the news. Hey, he wants to shout. Listen up, everybody. It ain't just about me. Each and every one of you has got to go. For sure. Damned sure. Maybe the woman scowling into her paperback or that guy propped half asleep against the pole will be gone before this year's up. How would the others packed at this particular moment into this particular subway car behave if they knew what he knew. Knew their score. A week, ten days, a long or short year. Would their hearts beat faster when they tried to figure out what to do next, tried to figure out what this time means, this minute or day or month remaining. Everything and nothing. Would they hear each click of a faceless clock counting down what's left of their lives. Would they understand they'd never understand. Not even this simplest thing about being on the earth. Caught in a net that's nothing but holes.
The doctors say his time's almost up and suddenly he's old, just about as old as he'll ever get. An old man, all the people who once mattered long gone so the death sentence a fresh start too. He owes nothing to anyone. Owns the little time left. Though he can't afford to waste a second, no rush either. Size doesn't matter. Everybody gets a whole life—beginning, middle, end—no matter how quickly it's over. Like those insects ephemerids he'd read about, their entire life cycle squeezed into an hour of a May afternoon. Like his siblings, the twin boy and girl who couldn't stick around long enough to receive names, dying a few hours after birth, taking his sweet, sweet mother with them.
How long does it take to die. Well ... that, of course, depends on many factors ... He watches the doctor's face, watches himself lean forward, and in a weird way he's watcher and watched, patient and doctor, weather and weatherman. The doc's gleaming brow reassures, sleek flesh befitting his whopping fees, the location of his office, the trust you must invest in his words, healthy sheen, vacation tan. Tiny ellipsoid spectacles slide down his nose a smidgen as he closes a smidgen the distance between you, kisser and kissed. He's seen the same commercials you have, represents just this side of convincingly the actor acting like a doctor, this doc with big hands and big face and a habit of staring offstage at the imponderably heavy-duty shit always lurking just beyond the high-definition scene in which the two of you are engaged in delicate conversation about fate—your fate, not his, because this doctor's a permanent member of the cast, always available to move the plot along, advise, console, subtle as a brick revealing the brutal verdict. I've never figured out how to inform the patient, he confides. Fortunately, I don't see cases like yours very often. What can I say, except it's one of those things in life we must adjust to as best we can. Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. It's a job and somebody has to do it, somebody's got to die. Did the doc really say that. Was he complaining about his tough job or commiserating with his patient. Does it matter. He steals the doctor's voice again, pipes it through the plane. This is your captain speaking ... We are experiencing an emergency. Please remove the oxygen mask of the helpless passenger beside you before you remove yours.
He'd begun compiling a list of chores, necessary things to do to prepare for the end. A notebook page full before he realized the list was about expecting time, using time, filling time, about plans, control, the future, wishful thinking, as if time were at his disposal. As if he possessed the power to choose—blind or deaf—as those silly scare games proposed. As if he weren't already eyeless, crippled, helpless, just about out of time. Next move always the last move. When he switched the list to must do, he was relieved by its shortness. Only two items: he must die, and before his time's up he must end the bad ending of his father's life. Couldn't leave his poor daddy behind to suffer any longer—how long, how long. He must take his father's life.
An unimaginable thought at first. How in hell could you kill murder whack terminate snuff your own father. Ashamed of the thought, then guilty when he doesn't act. If he loves his father, why allow him to suffer. Somebody needs to step up to the plate. Who, if not him. In the limbo of the veterans' hospital his father's shrinking body, in spite of its skinny frailty, of the burden of its diseased mind, might not fail for years. Meaningless years in terms of quality of life his father could expect, meaningless except for whatever it means when a fatally wounded animal suffers, means when an intensely proud, private man whose major accomplishment in life was maintaining a fierce independence winds up on display, naked, paddling around in his own shit. Cruel years of pointless hanging on. Years the son does not have now, thus different now, on his mind daily, monopolizing the little time, his only time remaining.
The father so present dying, so absent alive. For years, decades, starting even before his daddy had passed him to his grandmothers and aunts to raise, they'd been losing touch, becoming two men who see each other infrequently, not exactly strangers, more like longstanding acquaintances who hook up now and then in restaurants or bars, talk ball games, politics, an easy, no-strings-attached fondness. They observe an almost courtly politeness and restraint, as if questions about the other's personal life would be not only prying but breaking the rules, a kind of betrayal even, an admission of desiring more than the other so far had given and thus a rebuke, whiny dissatisfaction, after all these years, with an arrangement formed by mutual consent that had seemed to serve them both well enough.
Since he wasn't God and couldn't simply will his father's death and be done with it, killing his father necessitated tending to messy details. A weapon, for instance. And words, his unreliable weapon of choice, wouldn't suffice in this crisis, either. Wouldn't buy more time. Or finish his father's time. Yet a word, hemlock, popped into his mind, clarified options. A quick, lethal does of poison no doubt the most efficient, practical means of accomplishing the dirty work. Hemlock shorthand for his plan, code word for whatever poison he might procure. Hemlock certainly sounded nicer than strychnine, anthrax, arsenic, cyanide, cyclone B—poisons he associated with murder mysteries, pest exterminators, concentration camps. After repeating the word to himself many times, it took on a life of its own: Hemlock, a cute, sleepy-eyed little turtle. Hemlock finally because it reminded him of the painting.
During its first year, when the veterans' hospital was overstaffed and underused, only a small group of patients occupied the locked-down seventh-floor ward, and walking the brand-new halls with his father, he'd been reassured without realizing it by an illusion of spaciousness and tranquillity some clever architect had contrived with high ceilings, tall windows, gleaming floor tiles, unadorned planes of wall like a gallery stripped for the next exhibition. Almost as if he strolled with his father through that familiar classic painting, the one whose tide he couldn't recall then or now, The Academy of So-and-so at Somewhere, he thinks, remembering a slide from a college survey of art, philosophers in togas, their elegant postures, serious demeanors, a marble dome, sky-roofed arcades, a scene, said the voiceover, embodying intricate thought, calm speculation, the slow, careful accumulation of beads of truth on invisible threads connecting Socrates to Plato, Plato to Aristotle, Aristotle to Virgil or Dante or the pope, whoever these bearded, antique figures populating the painting were supposed to depict, wherever the idyllic version of Greece or Rome was supposed to exist, living and dead in earnest conversation—maybe it's heaven, the strollers immortals, maybe he had needed to flee that far away from the nearly empty, spic-and-span scrubbed corridors of the seventh-floor ward to feel what he felt then and wishes he could feel again: the peace, false or not, of those first walks now that everything has changed, very aware now, mainly because it's missing and irretrievable, of the comforting illusion he'd once enjoyed, the sense of order and safety impossible today beside his father in a
traffic jam of shambling, drugged, dull-eyed, muttering men in aqua pajamas, father and son slowly shuffling back and forth along corridors where windows begin above their shoulders and ascend to the top of high off-white walls, giant glass panels cloning light but allowing no one to see in, no one to see out.
Did the building in the painting have a basement, underground kennels the artist chose not to include. Where were the people who clean and polish the marble. Where were the sick and dying. The maimed in body and spirit. Where were the good citizens with brown faces who look like us, Daddy, who are doomed like us, Daddy.
Are dreams faster than the speed of light. Should he ask his father. Wouldn't his daddy know all the answers now, the whole truth and nothing but the truth tucked away in his silence, silence deep as the painting's, his father mute like those white-robed sages frozen beneath a canopy of marble arches, all the time in the world on their hands, the ever blue Mediterranean sky at bay above their heads.
He stands pressed into a tall corner watching his father, a brown, wooden man on the barber's wooden stool. Next to his father on a folding chair another aqua-pajamaed man, face pale as the ghostly philosophers', a dentist they say in his other life, babbles nonstop, cracking himself up, ha-ha-ha-ha as if he's still the life of the party, entertaining a captive audience of dental technicians and patients in the tooth-pulling parlor where he reigns until it's his turn on the stool.
The barber, who comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays to the VA hospital and sets up shop in an alcove near the nurses' station so he can holler for help if a patient gets unruly, snips, snips, snips, scissors snipping like a patient swarm of insects darting around his father's head. A crown of snips if you drew lines from one snip to the next. The black-handled scissors restore the handsome, well-groomed man his father has always been, disguise the madness lying in wait to seize his features. Scissors snip, snip, snipping, the barber intent as Babo in Melville's Benito Cereno, as Michelangelo coaxing the sleeping David from a block of marble, like the voice trimming and snipping these words, these words words words snipping, killing, drifting away, white hairs, brown hairs, gray hairs, little commas and tightly curled spirals that accumulate on the cloth draping his father's shoulders, hairs that have grown too long and wild, telling tales Beware, beware, his flashing eyes and floating hair on the tight-lipped, vacant-eyed man shuffling toward you in one of the corridors radiating like spokes from the panopticon hub of the nurses' station.
God's Gym Page 6