In my fat book, on one of the back pages lined with four columns of tiny print describing full-page illustrations, I found some information about Plate 124, a human figure carved from ebony, a person who could have been normal-sized once, maybe even taller than a basketball player, but some god or devil had sneaked up behind the guy and dumped the whole world's weight on him, squashed him so he looked like three blubbery lips, pancaked one on top the other. Head, belly, and butt blobs you could tell because arrowheads of braid zippered the head blob, a navel poked in the belly blob, elephant toes etched on the bubble-butt blob which rested on the ground.
Talk about a brother being down. Talk about burdens bowing a bro's shoulders. This African man or woman, both since anything anybody could be all squeezed together, glowed black on the white page, smooth, shiny as a bowling ball. Could be a bowling ball. Just needed finger holes, a little more rounding, squashing, to be perfect for bowling. And you know you can always find people willing and happy to do the dirty work. Turn us into something useful. Squeeze some more. Peel our skin, burn it black. Bore holes. Ask Emmett Till. Ask James Byrd, Malcolm, Martin. Check out your children. Check around your own body, sisters and brothers, for fingerprints. For work-in-progress.
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. The other afternoon walking into work I glanced up and noticed some Spiderman terrorist had climbed the arena and tagged the dome's brow. Somebody must believe the building's dead. Wants to launch the big, dumb, flying-saucer arena back to sender, back to outer space, with a warning from the Book of Daniel: The days of the empire are numbered. Mene. Mene. Tekel. Aramaic from the Old Testament. The strange words spray-painted up there sounded like music when I tried them out loud. Many, many tinkle. Tinkle. Tinkle. A bouncy pop tune. The kind of ear worm you keep hearing over and over in your mind even when you don't want to. Like a headache, like tinnitis. Mene, tekel. Like turnstiles clicking. Money. Money. Fans piling in to watch us play. Tinkle, tinkly music blasting through the PA system before a game. Tekel of turnstiles clicking. Shiny shekels piling up. Tonight's gimmick a bar of Ivory soap with each ticket purchased. Our team's going to clean up this season. Clean up our act and go straight to the top. Number one. Ninety-nine and forty-four-one-hundredths percent pure like the Deep Throat Ivory Soap lady says. A promotion to end all promotions. Bring the whole family. If you buy enough tickets, soap forever. Clean forever. Step right up to the shower. Who doesn't want to be pure and clean clear through. Who doesn't want to win and win.
Beware, beware the gulf of Benin /Few come out /Many go in. Sailors sang that sea shanty, but nobody listened.
I watch old Sat-the-Bench, tipsy, sore with arthritis, rise and leave the circle. Below the string tied round his neck Sat ain't got no secrets as he hobbles away from us, hospital gown flapping open around his hips, billowing up to his armpits, gone with the wind. He gingerly steps into a puddle of sea a wave's left behind, another wave on its way. Oh my, my. Like old, blind Oedipus, Sat's not the strength he once was. Thin shanks, scored behind, bent back. Seeking sanctuary. Oh shit, Sat. Did you just wiggle your sorry booty. Did you flash your middle finger or was it two fingers signing V. Is that loose skin, dem dry bones just another disguise. Are you still playing games. Messing wit my head.
Sea rises to Sat's crusty ankles. Don't go. Don't go, I holler, loud as I can into the wind. The circle breaks up. My words splash like they hit a wall and rebound icy, salty in my face.
Never again. The first words a player says when we notice there's no one in the space we've been guarding.
Never again. Our messages, buzzing and swarming like flies above the damp spot where Sat hit, look at us like we're crazy. Like they just might change their minds and go nowhere. Like we should know better than to speak the two words they've just heard. Never again. Roll their eyes as if to say, Right. Tell me about it. Play on.
Sightings
THE FIRST TIME it happened I could forgive myself for being confused. Cutting across the hall from my office into the departmental office and glimpsing a man—pale, wearing metal-rimmed glasses, a thin man in a light-colored, rolled-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, busy with files he was returning or extricating from a chin-high bank of beige metal cabinets lining the wall to my right, just inside the departmental office ... nothing unforgivable about being confused a split second by the sight of someone I knew was dead, dead a good long while, dead and buried two thousand miles away in cold, high Wyoming, the dead man Roger Wilson's office down and across from mine, fourth floor Bardett Hall, the dozen years I'd taught at UW, so countless times I'd caught him hunched over his desk under a window opposite the door he always left slightly ajar or him standing, puttering in his share of the ubiquitous metal file cabinets that graced Bartlett and also preside here in this English department located in a building I find myself sometimes calling Bardett, or rather find myself unable to recall this building's name once Bardett pops into my head, even after ten years of coming and going through this building's glass vestibule and thick double doors, one with a push button and ramp for handicap access, nothing unusual or shameful about seeing dead Roger Wilson and silently calling out his name, surprised, hopeful, though I knew better than to believe I'd actually seen him, so I could easily forgive myself for being lost in space and spacing out a present colleague's name, turning him into a ghost too, who floated invisible above the figure in round bifocals, manila folders in hand, crouching over an open file drawer, my present colleague a phantom whose name I could not say though I struggled like a stutterer to push his name out, it wouldn't descend from the shelf in my brain where it was stored, technical difficulties, transmission temporarily interrupted, the flesh-and-bone body I was staring at could not belong to dead Roger Wilson who'd canceled his claim to a body long ago with a shotgun blast and become a lost soul, visible in this office only to me unless someone could enter my skull, pick their way through the mess of overflowing drawers, files, stacked newspapers, bags of trash, like after a foul odor summons cops to bust through a locked door and they find a recluse rotting on a mattress walled in by debris in a corner of his flat, if you could reach the place in my mind from which Roger Wilson had suddenly appeared, you wouldn't blame me, might forgive me as easily as I forgive myself for mixing up names, places, the living and dead, because it could happen to anyone, happens frequently and usually passes without comment, it's so ordinary and startling at the same time, people figure it's not worth mentioning, who else would want to hear about such an inconsequential moment of slippage, who will attend your funeral, the party for your retirement or publication of your first novel, let alone care whether you are mixed up an instant about the identity of a man you glimpse out of the corner of your eye, a split second of confusion leading nowhere except in a heartbeat back to the commonplace reality of a Tuesday, late in the afternoon, post-seminar, post a dawn commute from New York City to the university in Massachusetts where I've landed and stuck since leaving the mountain West, obviously exhausted and stressed from the long day of travel and teaching when I step cattycorner across the hall and there's old schoolmarm lean and severe, great white hunter and sorry-ass alcoholic, my buddy Roger, wasting his good mind and precious time as usual futzing with files, documenting the shamefully low graduation rate of minority student athletes or serving as liaison between physical sciences and humanities for an interdisciplinary, crosscultural project of team teaching or organizing a new, socially relevant concentration perhaps one day a major, a department where now there is none, its absence or presence a ghost agitating the fertile, slightly hungover brain of my former colleague who's risen from the grave to occupy—yes, yes, I'm able to say the name now—a place here in Logan Hall, then just as quickly relinquishes it, fades, and that's Charley staring at me, Charley Morin, puzzled because he's caught me staring, an unconventionally long and thus suspect pause, our eyes locked and neither of us offering an explanation, an awkward silence I interrupt finally to clear the air, to sweep away the indecision that must have emptied my ga
ze of expression and caused Charley perhaps to feel vaguely responsible, perhaps challenged, minding his own business, then sensing the weight of eyes on his bony shoulders, he turns, meets an undecipherable look with a quizzical tilt of his head, his eyes invisible behind thick lenses whose steel rims catch fire as he straightens, shoot a silver tracer to the ceiling, the crimson afterimage slowly deforming in the air, and I recall the words pillars of light I heard first coming from the mouth of a physicist and vice president at the University of Wyoming who was attempting to explain to me during intermission at a lunch meeting something beautiful and eerie I reported observing one night camped out in the Snowies, a mountain range with year-round white peaks thirty miles or so east of Laramie, same mountains where Roger Wilson was discovered splattered inside the locked cab of his red pickup after he'd been missing six days, pillars of light a nice, evocative phrase I'd thought for the effect produced by rare, spectacular conspiracies of light, temperature, moisture, and wind above high plains plateaus like the one Laramie rests upon, pillars of light a poetic image startling me in the faculty dining room nearly as much as I'd been startled by vertical shafts of oscillating brightness striating the night horizon, especially since the vice president who said pillars of light usually spoke in a bluff, clipped fashion, pedestrian to a notorious extreme, but as I crunched on my chicken salad sandwich, recalling a time when I couldn't stomach chicken or tuna salad with celery in it, recalling torrents of unsatisfactory words running through my head that night in the mountains, pretending to listen to my colleagues, you know, the way you can look and not look, the phrase pillars of light continued to echo and I became less grateful for the vice president's assistance, then his figure of speech collapsed and I saw poor bloody Samson, heard the temple crashing down around his shoulders after he snapped its marble columns, but I wasn't blind, I watched the words pillars of light disintegrate, or rather the letters lifting and reshuffling themselves, each letter like a person unshackled from an old life, letters quivering in a kind of jerky, cartoony dance, funny almost, like Molly described letters and numbers detaching from license plates, scrambled letters hanging in the air, jiggly, silly, she said, if you didn't know what the letters would do next, snap into place abrupt as a door slamming to spell out a command she must follow, she said, no matter how stupid or dangerous or humiliating she must do what the letters ordered and Gawd, she said, you can't imagine the godawfixl trouble I'd get into, the trouble afterward trying to explain crazy stuff to myself or explain it to my mom or Sarah or the shrink or any stranger who'd listen, she said, smiling, the worst once when my job sent me to Africa to sell barbed wire and steel fenceposts and I loved Africa, loved the people, really enjoying myself over there and learning so much, then I wake up in a cruddy hotel in Ouagadougou, I found out later, in a bed in some dark little hot smelly room, no idea how I got there, where I was, who I was, how long, just lying there bareass naked remembering one sweaty black guy after another pounding away inside me, no faces, no names, just hands pulling and poking and pinching, it could have been going on for days, I stunk like a skunk, man, drugged probably, hurt so badly I'd stopped feeling pain, fear, anything, blacked out I guess, didn't even know my name till I heard Mom's voice Molly Molly like she used to whisper tickling and shaking my shoulder, Molly, dear, it's time for school, that hotel room the worst, man, she said, smiling, the two of us in Boston at an outdoor Au Bon Pain table, craziness a different planet she visited occasionally, once upon a time, okay, many times, she smiled again, a faraway place, like not plugged into this one, she says, her bare arms opening wide to embrace sunny afternoon streets busy with shoppers, blond, hard-bodied Molly, bright-eyed, tan that last day I'd see her before she too killed herself, her hands betrayed only the vaguest tremor performing the magic of transforming water to tea, safe because she'd been taking her medicine daily, not skipping doses though the poison zombied her some days, enough good days, clear hours like this one I'd caught her in so she continues to pop a purple, elephant-sized pill each morning, See, she says, holding up one extricated from a small deerskin purse lavishly fringed like the deerskin jacket I'd passed down to her, unstylishly tight on me, tons too large for Molly but she loved it, her trademark a fringed teepee draping her from early adolescence through her teens till it just about fit her broad swim-team shoulders, Look how big, and I'm naked again in the ruins, a huge black Wyoming sky over my head, a sky filled with streamers of bright blood, the wakes of slow-motion falling stars, funnels of pale fire wavering above a bombed-out city burning just beyond the next mountain's dark crest, no words, no made-up names would do, each time I looked up I was stunned by distance, by silence, no words for the raw power destabilizing me. Was order or chaos striping the sky. Neither. Both. Why did beauty scare me, why does strangeness threaten, hello-goodbye, dead Roger Wilson, goodbye, hi, Charley, excuse me for staring, man, but when I bopped through the door I had a flashback, you know, a weird kind of time wobble and it wasn't you in the corner of my eye over there but some other guy in another place another time, and damn, for a second it had me going, very real, real and very odd, you know what I mean, it shook me up, and Charley's face crinkles, no more needs to be said by either of us, just a minute's worth of wannabe super-witty and hip banter, spread like thick, gooey icing over a hopeless cake, like exchanges with Roger if he responded to the silence of my footsteps stopping or the stealth of my glance trespassing the space he'd left open for just that purpose or when we'd bump into each other in the hall, bump a foolish word like jump, as in jump in the shower, both words untrue, their embedded metaphors describing events that don't occur, acts unperformed, fictions, as in I was touched by his gentleness, or ran into an old friend, or touched by the pain of his wife and kids, moved by her struggle, touched by a sudden, senseless suicide.
I hadn't thought much about Roger or Molly for years. For some reason never paired them, though they knew each other well and were linked by the obvious fact of suicide. I'd been long gone from Wyoming when I heard they'd taken their lives, Roger first, then Molly, each death a kind of postscript to a portion of my life I thought I'd laid to rest until these painful footnotes forced me to raise my eyes to a text that hadn't disappeared just because I'd stopped reading it.
Let's just say, without specifying why or which one, a hunting party in the Snowies fits here, now, in a blank space I need to fill, the ground giving way beneath my feet, no warning, the wet snow instead of packing hard under my strides goes mushy and oh shit I start to slide and might not ever stop. Always winter and white when I remember hunting in the mountains, though once a preseason scouting outing at the end of july, only month you can be nearly certain it won't snow, the old-timers say, hot July days and the high country perfect as Eden, the Alibi Bar crew with families tagging along, a big camp pitched on the bank of a stream, yes, cleansed and starting over is how it felt on that summer weekend I didn't expect to surface here, my wife and kids, borrowed tent and sleeping bags, finding bones on a hike with my two boys, whole lot of bleached bones scattered on a flat boulder at the mouth of a cave we decided had to be a cougar's den, sunlight polishing stones that bedded the talking stream, at night absolute blackness inside our tent, old canvas funky as a gym, everybody blind, whispering as we settled down to sleep, the tent could be empty or full, you needed to touch to see, your own hand invisible until it gropes out someone.
No, not that July. Let it go. I'm trekking through serious snow, high-stepping into someone else's deep tracks. I don't want to discover a bottomless drift or treacherous crevice or the thin ice of a black-hole lake hidden just below the snow, ever-present possibilities up here, especially in spring when the season seems to change after you slog thigh-deep in snow for a mile then topping a rise see a meadow below scoured clean except for frozen puddles of whiteness with dark stubble poking through or dried swirls of snow trapped here and there in coils of spiky sagebrush. I'm not alone. Had been warned against it—tales of foolish people, their bones picked clean by the ti
me a hiker stumbles over them in May—so I never tried the Snowies alone in winter. Didn't own a four-wheel drive anyway to get me close enough once passes barricaded in November. Not alone, not able to say whom I'm with. Could be my best buddy John, rifle cradled in his arms, out there on point plowing ahead of me, John's tracks my boots trace, or I could be with Alex and Sarah, Molly's older sister, or with brown Chris and Harry or white Max, Walt, Fred, Herb, and John again, the Alibi Bar crew, each group distinct, every person a small-town character of sorts with his or her story you wouldn't hear in the Snowies since hunting parties organized so nobody would have to tell their tale, nobody have to listen. A particular chemistry and energy defined each combination of personalities, yet as I look back, one group blurs into the other. Only fragments return, random bits and pieces effortlessly more real than this fading present. Details I can hear, see, touch, smell, taste, my senses so sure of themselves they expect more, desire more, but there is no center. I'm here, not in Wyoming, and each promising detail bodiless, the network of memories it spins out cannot hold, evaporates, brings back everything, nothing.
Hunting simplifies and clarifies like war. Pleases like war. Not only because humans are predators who enjoy stalking and killing. In fact, for the hunters I knew the fun seemed less in killing than in getting ready to kill. Imagining themselves killing. Gathering their hunting gear. Anticipating themselves dressed to kill. Lies afterward about kills that never happened. All of it—beginning with purchase of a license in September at the little Fish and Game shed behind Albertson's in West Laramie—frees them. Hunters can't wait for the season to start, but they must, and waiting's a welcome clock counting down their ordinary lives, rendering everyday duties slightly less demeaning.
God's Gym Page 16