by Ron Charach
a relic
Before sunrise Claire makes her way through the empty street, carryin’ the grams of BC bud that galloway had given her, a tiny hole in the crook of her arm still slowly weepin’ into the cotton ball he taped on it. —This is a cop-out, she’d pro-tested, but he jest smiled and even dared to stroke her cheek—she should mention that to henry—then told her —This helps all God’s children forget.
Is it some form of cocaine cocktail? henry once implied it was and that only he and galloway use the “nosey route,” or could it be that concoction called ecstasy or perhaps a psychiatric drug with an ever-so-slight-but-definite after-buzz? Whatever it is, no sooner is it in than you have your Perspective back; Vitamin P galloway called it ’cause somebody, many bodies, had Blown It All (no fault of galloway’s truth be told) and now what was left to do was, in galloway’s words, Play It Out—galloway was almost as fond of card game metaphors as he was of sports talk and Wild West lingo.
Play It Out. She has to admit, windin’ through the maze of alleyways that first unsettled but now bored her, that she does feel played out.
This morning as she unlocks her front door and sees the half-eaten croissant and crumbs on the kitchen table, she grows weary despite the lift of the meds—tired even of the treasure trove of frozen and dehydrated “gourmet rations” that galloway distributed so generously. True once the drug is on board she no longer wishes herself dead—as a matter of fact she’s inclined to feel agreeable, almost grateful towards harold that this particular batch of forty-fivers was worthy enough to inherit the last days of human life on earth, that not only had they headed for the right place at the worst of all possible times, but they had done the only thing and therefore the best thing that there was to do and were therefore blessed as Noah himself. In went the drug and This was It, This was All There Was and by cracky It Would HAVE to Do.
But this mornin’ she feels restless enough to snoop—with the help of the key she’d seen henry hide away after their last romp together. She’d pretended to be asleep as he was at the little desk he still kept for himself. Might he keep a journal? She doubts it. All she saw him put into the fireproof strong-box was a single scrap of paper. Was he still writin’ poems? She shudders at the thought. Poems about what? The joy of selling out?
Even as she fiddles with the key, tryin’ to get the heavy strong-box open, she feels strange—knowin’ she’s taking a risk, but unsure exactly what that risk is. Stumblin’ on truths that might make it even harder to pretend? What might such a dirty little truth be? That papa galloway had had some part in endin’ civilization as we knew it? Not too likely, mere champion of commerce that he was. That one of the many eggs that was removed from her years ago, to be mixed with her husband’s sperms inside some other woman’s womb—that one of them actually took, but no one bothered to tell her? That she really does have a child out there—how often she has turned to that little fantasy for sustenance. henry’s repetitive taunts seem to point that way too.
The whole infertility work-up had been her idea—henry criticized what he called the medicalization of the birth process, though he had never agreed to adopt, havin’ seen too many couples inherit “other people’s problems.” She’s glad she’d forced him to go through all the procedures with her. It meant that some life-giving part of her might still be out there somewhere. What would it be like to have a son or a daughter? Maybe a daughter like that lovely little hussy Carla, to whom she could teach the ways of the world?
Not exactly immortality, but it keeps hope alive.
If there is a risk it is tied up with Henry Morganstern, the young doctor she had married, and in a kind of way has stayed married to even though his soul—their souls are being eroded down to jokes about a lost profession, lost religion, lost values. What was lost rather than any quest for meaning is what draws Claire to snoop this morning. She has to risk it—though she can see through the window that the treeless street is already softly lit by dome light and it will soon be daytime. At the beginning of the day she told herself, Today I take a chance. It made her feel something like the old unpredictable excitement, the kind that wasn’t brought on by medication.
As she lifts the heavy lid of the box, she comes upon a relic. At the very top of all the papers, most of which are piled in folders, is the single sheet henry had locked away the other night. It is a poem, one of the few she actually remembers—he’d always been reluctant to read her his poems aloud. Not that she’s a fan of poetry—certainly not the modern stuff that didn’t even rhyme. The poem has a medical theme too, so he had either been a medical student when he wrote it or was just starting out in practice. It’s astonishin’ to come up with something in this cartoon republic that actually has a meaningful past. She lies down on the carpet and reads.
A Poem About the Pancreas
Even if you set up your practice
on Harley Street
no patient will come in with complaints
about his pancreas:
“I think it’s my pancreas, Doc!”
—unless he too is a fellow professional,
also educated
out of his natural mind; few patients
will even be alarmed by the word—how unlike
“the heart”
a word that means “the biscuit”
to the best of us.
Years from now
when you trundle in
thin and yellow, depressed,
for abdominal films,
you too will have forgotten
your pancreas, and the news “It’s cancer
of the pancreas.” will hit
like an old family secret you knew all along;
“I’m sorry, but it’s cancer
of the sweetbread.”
“Not the sweetbread.”—“Yes,
and, with proper medical management,
early surgery
and a very rigid diet,
you can look forward to
another six months”; when the pancreas goes,
it goes.
Those among us who are diabetic,
whom the pancreas torments
by degrees,
cannot describe this Familiar; even a poet
is at a loss for a metaphor.
Nothing short of a surgical exploration
will unearth
the thick spongy worm
buried deep in the viscera,
silent behind its curtain of peritoneum,
—with a head, a body
and a tail,
using the man’s face.
She puts the poem down and takes a deep breath. Here is her serious Henry again, a man who is above using tits-and-ass humor, the poet-turned-doctor she had known and loved. She too is feeling jaundiced and depressed—and pained by her own lack of body tone. She begins to shake as a terror creeps in—the drugs are no longer holding, no longer keeping terror at bay. Though it has been years now and there is a new policy—of alternating drug weeks with sleep weeks—to prevent tolerance from developing. She reminds herself that it is nothing but sentiment—that sentiment and nostalgia are the real enemies. Wasn’t it henry’s victory over his soft side that allowed him to adapt here?
Yet look at her. Even the words Harley Street make her ache. She remembers the Jeffrey Archer and Agatha Christie detective novels she once enjoyed. The idea that there might be nothing left of Europe is almost enough to kill her. She can only pray that maybe there is still something left on the other side of that ocean—if there still is an ocean—if only to keep sacred the places where she and Henry had gone on their honeymoon. But she can hear galloway’s wisecrack—that whoever still sings “There’ll Always Be an England” hasn’t kept up with nuclear physics. She can hear him joke that the only thing left of Western c
ivilization is its number one discontent—that he’ll show them Western civilization with a difference.
She recalls how Henry used to always worry about the enemy within—how he’d develop every symptom in the book whenever he studied a new organ system in medical school. —Claire, you wouldn’t believe it—there are a million ways the body can go wrong! Mine, yours—
While now, the only threats seem to be the ones that stalk you in the streets outside—the young ones, the undrugged ones, the ones who have no history, no loyalties, whose flimsy self-control depends on the improvizing of their coach and controller—their very own benevolent family friend—harold galloway.
To her surprise, she finds herself replacin’ the poem in its box, just the way she’d found it. She wants to turn it over in her mind some more over a hot coffee—wake herself up some and fight the party line on what now is reality. But as she lays the poem down, the top edge of a sheet peeps out from the thick folder just beneath it. In it most of henry’s dusty writings are stacked in a thick pile. The last word of what looks like a title is the word Elephants and it makes her choose the poem from the folder. It isn’t one she’s seen before. The full title is “A Cosmology for Captive Elephants.” She notices from its date that it was written just about the time the two of them were investigatin’ their infertility.
A Cosmology for Captive Elephants
Don’t count him in
on any herd activities;
he’s a solitaire, belongs inside
a cage of logs, chained to a diamond-shaped rock.
And when the slow cows saunter past
they don’t even look at him,
sashaying in their wrinkled house skins,
their young reaching for their teats,
each with the support of five other females
should he bash his way through
for a moment of freedom.
But what would such a moment
bring down on him?
Can he approach all six at once?
And what will the feeders and handlers think:
this bull no longer fears or respects man,
this bull has forgotten the sacred word, “Crush.”
Even the food pellets we feed him
make him restless
when he should be
content.
What kind of life is this, I ask,
watching the night pass,
my wife beside me, so deep in her pregnancy
that I am left worrying for two.
I try to wake back to the world,
to tell her that the new cosmology is Fear,
but she rolls over massively
with a drawling “Goodnight, Hon—”
supportive, if entirely asleep.
So I ease back into my pen
of silence and Valium,
my tusks going soft, losing air,
my trunk curled up
like a toy.
That sonofabitch! A “solitaire” indeed! So that’s how he felt about the prospect of her becomin’ pregnant! Even while accompanying her to the clinic to have air blown into her fallopian tubes and large-bore needles sunk into her belly.
Somethin’ more disturbs her about the poem: it feels like it was written by someone who already had the experience of raising children or at least of havin’ a pregnant wife. She begins to wonder about this—though the thought of it makes her sick. She knows after all that henry had been married once, before they tied the knot together—a loveless marriage that only lasted three years—to a very wealthy young woman who had never managed to free herself from her father and his millions. This woman had moved back to New York soon after they separated and never looked henry up again. Could this have been by mutual agreement? Might they have had a baby together, who went with the mother as part of some kind of separation agreement? What if henry had fathered and abandoned a child of his own? After all, he’d been pretty cavalier about making all those paid-by-the-shot sperm donations in medical school. What if he’d even got himself a vasectomy some time after his divorce? Is he that much of a psychopath? To have not told her yet subjected her to all those invasive tests? A vasectomy would explain why he never really insisted on birth control—even though he hadn’t been keen on having kids—and why there was no way he was going to “submit” to any kind of “male infertility work-up.” She can’t quite manage to put such knavery past him—he who now rides with the eight, albeit with all the right excuses.
She goes back to Pandora’s box, fumbling with the latch, and snatches a third poem, which is shorter.
A Marriage with Children
A marriage with children is worth
the endless procession
of meal after meal,
imperceptible segments
of the gigantic flesh-colored worm,
...the need to think about food,
to cut and slice and re-warm
then eat while you feed
and clean up while you supervise
the child’s play of others; and then
the need to plan the next meal...
makes the biggest meal yet
of your leisure time.
For that’s what family
feeds on.
Him and his “leisure time!” She’ll show him leisure time! She snatches a pile of other poems and squeezes them into a tight ball. In her other hand, she sweeps up a vial of pills and heads to the bathroom to pop them all. Well maybe half—no point killin’ herself and provin’ to him that only struttin’ cocks can cut it in the brave new world. Yes, why not plug into harold galloway’s virtual reality one more time, cooperate with the thick goo already movin’ through her veins—a potion to try and overcome this new bitterness seepin’ down from her heart clear on down to her toes. No point in becomin’ distraught about what is no more—even less point frettin’ about what might have been—this marriage with children that her good yuppie-doctor husband had so looked forward to.
She should be no more concerned about her lost marriage than she is about—her pancreas! But just then, she turns to find a stray page that had escaped her angry gesture. It landed face up. She remembers the lovely time she and Henry had enjoyed in Montreal, and their visit to this unlikely museum of living things.
At the Biodome
At the Montreal Biodome
a dozen codfish, each with three dorsal fins
and a homely barblet under the chin,
wind their way behind glass,
beneath the steely gaze
of a prehistoric sturgeon.
How fair a sight to a fisherman
should hordes of such grayish-brown fish
once again sluice from an opened net
onto the brine-slick deck of a ship.
On the fringe of the student ghetto,
on her birthday, my far-off daughter got “nudged” by a taxi cab
that nearly knocked her under, then sped away
—nothing like a friend’s son,
who, wearing headphones as he crossed a busy street,
was killed by an SUV
a block away from the Montreal Biodome.
Children are as plentiful as the cod were,
ubiquitous as bullets,
of which every minute 30,000 more
are manufactured, along with five new guns to fire them.
Every minute someone falls to armed conflict
in a dark-skinned land
lacking a single home-grown munitions plant.
Next decade at the Biodome,
strange visitors will arrive
wearing faux fur and scales
to view the new endangered
species:
a cautious optimist, perhaps a pair,
hiding out in the arboreal forest,
waiting for a sign that the age
of men hunting men has finally passed
and the world can be reclaimed
for the resolutely alive.
Is she still one of those? she wonders. Resolutely alive?
a chat in the larder
henry moseys in at midnight an’ picks up a set of towels that a serene if worn-out ma hands him sayin’ Evenin’ darlin’. He never looks her straight in the eye. An’ it ain’t the same as his hesitation to look di-rectly at Carla when the rest of the eight are around. In that situation he worries one or both of ’em might crack a smile at the outrageous lack o’manners o’ those he rides with these days.
He knows that even though ma’s surrendered to her brother harold, she is—in galloway’s own words—unbowed as ever. henry jest snaps up the towels, tips his Stetson and steps over some bodies dozin’ in the clogg’d hallway. As usual the place stinks all the way through the Lysol moppin’ it gets nightly, but cabana will be back in less than an hour, and so it’s best that he bed down where he ought to be—’specially in these days of per-vasive suspicion.
He thinks to remark on ma’s bein’ up so late—on the personalized care ’n all—but best not rub it in. So he goes for a sleepin’ bag, makin’ sure there’s no other body in it—livin’ or dead—no scorpions neither. He does his five minutes of general toiletryin’ before squirmin’ out of his buckskins and insinuatin’ himself into his bag like a wiener in a bun. His gun and holster hang next to the sleepin’ bag from a bent-wood chair, and it’s lucky he don’t jump for them when he feels a hand on his shoulder gently shake him.