Fifty Contemporary Writers
Page 8
And Brandon, my favorite, do they know what their acts bring, these people of cities on the edges of cities? Do they know that all this is ending? That how things are now is not how they will be? That this grand experiment’s over? That the Feds have cut rates per blowback from subprime and still these places are failing? That homes being built now will never be lived in? That at the auto plazas, units aren’t moving? That people work longer than ever before and earn less than they did at midcentury? That the petals have dried out and the stalks are all rotting? Because, Brandon, I know it, and this is why last night I put in my two weeks after being telephoned by a headhunter, an anonymous man two time zones away representing a firm working in catastrophe modeling, in the scientific prediction of disaster, in detailing what type of wrath to expect when the next Level Five descends on the Gulf Coast, or the big one arrives to shake down San Francisco, or the Southwest has its next batch of fires, or the Singapore Causeway succumbs to tsunami or a flood eats some county in Kansas, for these events, now, are just short of certain, and insurers want to cover their asses—need to know what kind of odds are in play, if gross loss will be millions or billions, and for this computer-assisted scenarios, software eschatological in nature, programs designed to map out the End Times second by second by second, and here’s what to expect when the Bay Bridge collapses, and here’s what this zip code will look like as rubble, and here’s what turns to ash if winds blow from the west as opposed to blowing northwesterly and Brandon, the money’s terrific, the sum offered much more than I would have expected for my input on our slow apocalypse, and for this reason I will again move my daughters and wife, and will sell my house and then buy a new house, and find yet another tree-lined tranquil street in a newly made master community, where each house looks just like the last one, some split-level in which I may hide a bit longer and wait while things turn truly sour, for coastlines to shrink and shelves to go bare and gas to hit twenty a gallon, and perhaps I won’t ever see it, will expire before we fully lose balance, and fall from our perch on the roof of the world, spiraling downward and downward, and it was to be different, there were to be bluebirds, there were to be grills near the shore of a lake, a postwar aria of infinite refrain; we were to applaud, and be applauded. There was the promise of promise. We had solved something. The dead were brought back from French beaches and honored. The dollar held. Wheat grew. We made things of substance. But it all went perverted, we purchased each other, and we left you, Brandon, with nothing, with hair dye and game shows and modified food, with the ghost of Social Security, with lead in the paint on the walls of your schools, with electromagnetic pollution, with esplanades of red brick where the hollow walk shopping, the headsets of their cell phones like blinders, with some small bit of wealth that can never make up for the damage inflicted upon you and Brandon, I’m sorry, I should have known better, I should have made more prudent choices, but what I loathe most about the person I am is also the thing that completes me so Brandon, please, one kiss, I’m done asking, we have financialized your humanity, we have taken and taken, and there’s no stopping this and there’s no cure for this and so coated in fear lust and haste are our happenings that we forget wholly implication, that these cities, like rash on the skin of the land, are emblematic of more dire virus, and once in a host will not go away but replicate over and over, and, Brandon, my pet, we’re low on vaccine, and the antibiotics are useless, and small bits of plastic float in our seas, debris no bigger than plankton, sharp brittle shards that won’t biodegrade, not now and not ever—proof we were here, in our miserable way, have washed up on every island, and wrecked every acre and nautical mile, and spun the hand on our moral compass, and without any pride or belief in ourselves exist without any power, and supplanting this war, and replacing this purchase, and we give ourselves over to skirmish and item, and our guilt gels around us, forms into things that we can’t escape so more things are built to contain them, and if we don’t like how they look they can always be brightened so Brandon, keep bleaching, burn through every root, because if you’re not pretty then you’ll get no money, and if you don’t feed us, we promise, we’ll eat you.
Two Poems
Cole Swensen
AND AND
After Laurent Pariente’s White Walls,
Musée Bourdelle, Paris, 2006
doorway without door
after door after moving through a small room
and through the doorway he saw
and the wall opened for him
through a white afternoon
and in one small room you’ll find
a man bending down to pick up something small,
a piece of paper, folding over, a white after white we have tried to repeat
but a lengthened difference
was my home shadow
I lived in a series of interlocking rooms that can carry
and the shadow carried him home.
When a doorway outnumbers its door, and here we have an uncountable opening in the shape of the empty, and in glancing to the left, in a series of flight, the angled guest.
Thus a doorway is always a distance, and if there’s a face in it, our corridors have corridors within them
and he traveled seven days without ever leaving the house.
Laurent Pariente’s walls are broken and something white follows you from ocean to ocean.
Laurent Pariente enters the house alone; the body becomes its own room, and so he must walk on, which is an accumulative art, an intersection of time and space that is the body slightly lost, which is the future until he had no house.
If once a white shadow, over, wing, over
want under
want either
and washed it asunder
these were the corridors we wandered to pieces
gone acre, now naked, what army of silent
To walk into the deaf house, the chalk house, the flayed house that Pariente has built a house in which there are no rooms; there are only corridors leading to walk into the thought house, the sparrow home, the mathematical hand. We are constrained to live in houses, where starts anemia, thus amnesia, and are dreaming: the houses of the mind fall for miles. And it’s relaxing, a matter of slowly giving, and often the fall is lateral, and you walk on without thinking.
Laurent Pariente has set out to use silence as a building material, and from there devolve houses composed entirely of angles. If sighted down to the vanishing point, if the earth goes ajar. Any doorway is a frame, which makes the face inside come alive. And she leaned on the door frame as if she had ages. Which makes the days harder.
Which is to say, geometry and light constitute a forest, which is in turn defined by its aleatory, its arbitrary, its errance is the geometry of a threshold seen across a salt plain delivered at regular intervals he placed a statue that became a monument because an echo becomes visible the more the forest grows larger from your listening, from your leaning in as though you were listening even harder.
are the days.
Space happens in pieces.
Pariente sculpts only what cannot be touched.
Interviewer: What do you think touch is?
Pariente: White.
Interviewer: What do you think white is?
Pariente: The face once all its impediments have been cleared away.
Interviewer: What do you think a wall is?
Pariente: Something, anything, that opens itself because it hears a slight sound and so turns around a little too quickly and cracks open at the spine, simply flays its own vertebral column, atmosphere layered, which is to say air—there it turned; a wall is a spiral stair in a slower mirror, which is a wall ironed out by fire
and I’m caught on the top step.
Wandering such hallways in the light
disturbs the careful balance of inside and out.
Interviewer: What do you think inside is?
Pariente: I thought of adding a small red square.
TO BE HAUNTED
Haunting is an incommensurability between what we see and what we know. The electric wires outside set up a hum. What occupies a fire within could burn the building down. And down and down. A town is a serial occupation in the same way that serial paintings take the same place with the slightest and inch it into difference there’s an animal you can’t quite name who stands between. Incommensurably who could not speak. Gray that would not end in endless gray increments the infra thin dimensionless denies the infinite and so sadness becomes dangerous. There’s an animal between us and we can’t find him. In the margins of fifteenth-century miniatures creatures thrive beyond description. It was from a love of animals that humanity was made from humans.
Ghost: from gast, as in soul-sprite breath-life, sliced wreath of a waning neck it comes from all over has been called the back-corner the night-child guest of lack-print and glass-phoid of shatter-this and all the way back unto 1385 when the word was first connected to the thing that wandered off from the body, a slight scarring on the surface most words for ghost are pieces of mica that carefully layered will make a window out of fire. It’s cold and the faces at the window do what faces usually do, they open onto a genetic history turns and it’s the eyes, everyone says you can’t say that’s not alive.
Who was an ordinary man who turned to light a stove who shadow-flew-on-wall will nothing there awake like anybody else who, picking up the mail and so the shattered half I watched a man walking down a hill who then came to him watched I a man and there within who slices bread who cut and did not bleed and straightened up with the shears in one hand and the zinnias in the other the corner of the eye is an enormous room.
He emerged from a doorway, she came out of the mirror, he simply appeared, I turned around and there she was on the hearth, the carpet, the stairs. Ghosts always look like they’re alone, which is to say, are seen one by one and so the field extends right there in the room or a vast plateau among wind. Holding out her hand, she came in from the garden and held out her hand as if to say take it, pointing to the small object therein, which turned out to be a tooth.
The ghost is in itself a boundary, is that that distinguishes between the past and the after which is endless and that a ghost itself cannot be older than the way a dead child is instantly than any of us will ever be more widely, a tendency toward repetition which is itself a clock that stopped that endless circling which traces a circle in the dust on the floor the sunlight sketches an hourglass was on again the revenant but no, time only seems circular to those on a spherical earth, something about gravity that while a long line stretches out, the errant of the heart you know they cannot swerve or perhaps the notion of cyclical time comes only from the sun if you lived anywhere else you’d find you never see them again.
Natural Daughter
Sandra Cisneros
“BEFORE YOU AND YOUR brothers were born,” my mother said to me, “before your father met me, he already had a kid in Mexico City. Illegitimately. With one of las muchachas who worked for your grandmother. A daughter.”
It was 1995, Presbyterian St. Luke’s in Chicago, the hospital where I was born and where my father was under the knife having heart surgery. While we waited in the hospital lounge, my mother bared her own heart to me, her only daughter.
“Sometimes when we were in Mexico visiting, this woman and her daughter helped out with our laundry. You used to play with the girl. But you were little, you don’t remember.”
I didn’t tell my mother then, but I did remember. The face of this girl, my natural sister, traveled back to me like a paloma blanca fluttering across the expanse of forty years.
And though my father survived the heart surgery and accompanied us in the world of the living for two more winters, he never mentioned his other daughter to me. I never mentioned her to him.
There are some questions a daughter can’t ask a father.
I thought about this sister a lot as I wrote Caramelo. After my father died, I wrestled with whether to exploit this family secret as raw material for my story. I had to promise my father’s spirit that in the end it would all turn out bonito. But the novel was finished years ago. She haunts me still.
I thought my novel would force my family to sit down and talk, finally, like a real family, with one person speaking and the others listening. I imagined my six brothers and I having a moment like in the telenovelas where the music rises and tears fall, but in the end we would all embrace.
But we never talk about things that matter. We talk about breaded pork chops, the Chicago White Sox, the dog’s skin rash.
And because I don’t talk about her, even thinking about this woman makes me feel like crying. So who could I seek out who could tell me about her?
As Divine Providence would have it, when I next telephone my mother in Chicago, guess who’s visiting from Mexico. Señor Coochie is sitting at my mother’s kitchen table as if willed into being. Señor Coochie is a character in real life and in my novel. He’s also my father’s compadre from way back, from the Mexico City of their youth, after Father came back from serving in the U.S. Army in World War II.
The first thing Señor Coochie tells me about my half sister is: “I think you’re mistaken.
“I remember your father had a ’41 Buick, a big yellow convertible. And good suits Señor Curiel the tailor made for him, and those expensive shoes. Italian leather. They cost a lot. He liked to dress good. Beautiful suits. Beautiful shoes. 1948, ’49. I knew your Uncle Little first, that’s how I came to meet your father. Through Little. Little and I were still riding bicycles, and we would see your father come and go in that big ’41 Buick of his. What a car! He liked those big-shouldered suits. What I remember was the ’41 Buick. But a daughter? No, I think you’re mistaken.
“A ’41 Buick. Beautiful, but it gave him a lot of car problems.”
Señor Coochie is a master storyteller. He takes his time when he should take his time. He slows the story almost to a halt when he has your interest, and then speeds the story along like a dancer pattering toward the footlights, pausing right before a furious final pirouette.
“This was around the time when this girl Silvia was my girlfriend when we were just chamacos, just kids. She was maybe fourteen, so let’s see, maybe I was sixteen or so. These days Silvia takes care of my house in Juchitán when I’m in Mexico City. I let her stay there rent free, because she’s old now and I feel sorry for her, but, oh, my wife is jealous! She thinks this woman and I have got something going on. Look, she was just my girlfriend a long time ago. When we were just chamacos. Cha-ma-cos. But I broke it off, because she was fooling around on me. I said, ‘Silvia, I think it’s to your benefit if you and I go our separate ways … .’”
“But what does this have to do with my father?” I ask.
“Oh, well, that. No. I think you’re mistaken.”
*
After I interview her about the secret sister, my mother says, “So what else is new?”
It’s been a decade since that first conversation we had in the hospital. I’m ashamed to say I was afraid of my mother’s bad temper. She was angry with her mother-in-law for bringing the washerwoman around when she was there as the official wife. But this time, after she told me all she knew, which was about as much as I knew, she said, “That was the past. It doesn’t have anything to do with me. So what else is new?” She sounds as blasé as if talking about the weather.