10
* * *
Along an edge of the Gulf of Morbihan I walk through woods, on gravelly, rocky beaches, in sand, on a narrow walkway atop a mile-long stone seawall, then climb a bluff overlooking the wall where I can peer way, way out to dark clumps of island in the gulf’s glittering water, towards open sea invisible beyond the islands. I imagine an actor assigned to deliver the colored John Brown monologue in a film version of “JB & FD.” The actor asks me why I choose to make the nice lady in the script white, not colored. Asks why I invented a colored John Brown.
Powerful sea winds have shaped trees I stand next to on the bluff, winds that would shape me, too, no doubt, if I stood here very long. Trees with thick, ancient-looking gray trunks, bark deeply furrowed as old John Brown’s skin, multiple trunks entwined, branches big as trunks, twisted, tortured, though a few trees shoot more or less straight up to vast crowns that form a layered green canopy of feathery needles high overhead. A row of maybe seven, eight survivors of probably hundreds of years of battering wind, and spaced among them another four or five cut down to stumps a couple yards across you could sit on and stare out at endless water beyond the edge of land, beyond the seawall and Roman ruins below.
Next to trees, still standing and fallen, I forget who I am, who I’m supposed to be, and it is perfection. Doesn’t matter who I am or believed I was or all the shitty jobs performed to get to France—I listen for the voices of Frederick Douglass and John Brown sealed within the silence of those huge trees. Trees I don’t know a name for, thinking maybe pine or fir or conifer, and I never will need to look up the name because for a small instant I’m inside them, and it lasts forever.
DARK MATTER
* * *
We go out to dinner and discuss eating.
* * *
We go out to dinner and discuss the economy’s downswings and upswings.
* * *
We go out to dinner and discuss the importance of staying physically fit and the difficulties in busy, aging lives of maintaining a consistent, healthy program of exercise.
* * *
We go out to dinner and discuss Vladimir Putin’s rumored kleptomania, how the U.S. State Department allegedly advises a famous coach who just returned from conducting basketball clinics in Russia that maybe the best course of action would be not to lodge a complaint with the UN about his NBA championship ring which had gone missing under extremely suspicious circumstances, while the coach was a guest at Putin’s dacha, but to live and let live and they, the U.S. Government, would ante up for a replacement ring.
* * *
We go out to dinner and discuss choices after a waitress—long legs, minidress, coffee-au-lait-colored skin, intricately cornrowed hair—squatted in the darkness at the end of our table, peering over its edge as she articulated in her oddly precise diction subtleties we could anticipate, surprises far beyond anything words on the menu able to express. Wonderfully enticing items, she convinced us, not because we believed she’d peeked at the chef preparing them but because she was a tasty appetizer we were already sampling down there between our table and the next row of tables, her pretty legs folded under her, big eyes, pretty face popping up Kilroy-like where we had no reason to expect a face to be.
* * *
We go out to dinner and discuss public schools supposed to educate thirteen-year-old colored boys, public schools that taught them nothing, or schools anyway that did not teach them not to shoot each other inside school buses. Public schools where white cops learned it was okay to shoot down unarmed thirteen-year-old colored boys in the streets.
* * *
We go out to dinner and discuss growing up, the love-hate of family relationships, parents and parenting and learning to forgive mistakes, our parents’ mistakes, our children’s, our own, and why should anybody believe things might ever be different, people being people as far back in time as people remember, same ole, same ole selfishness, rivalries, cruelties unto death. A couple mornings after that night, I rode down in the elevator with my bagful of glass, plastic, cans, and miscellaneous other recyclables our building asks residents to sort out and deposit in slots in various colored containers in the basement, and on the way back up accidentally stopped one floor short of mine and risked knocking on 801’s door, though it was Sunday and barely 10:00 A.M., but thank goodness, L responded almost immediately, almost as if she’d been awaiting my knock, and that sort of relieved the pressure, because it meant I was not necessarily disturbing a neighbor’s sleep or privacy or worse. Without exchanging a single word with me, L went to fetch her husband, and suddenly there he was, beside her just outside the door, him puffy-faced, spiky hair askew, wearing a Peanuts pj top and sweatpants, me in cutoffs, T-shirt, standing in the hall, fresh from trash dumping, wondering why I’d knocked. Then L with a stoic smile moved a few steps backward into the apartment so we—two upper-middle-class, differently colored, orphaned males—could hug. As we separated, nothing to say. He knows I must know his father gone now like mine. Dead in Dublin from a stroke suffered the same night we had been out to dinner in a restaurant and he had discussed his father’s loneliness since losing his wife of fifty years, his father’s helplessness, speechlessness palpable while they spoke on the phone.
* * *
We go out to dinner and discuss relativity, dark matter, climate change, the origins and inevitable demise of the life-form we represented, our guilt collectively or individually, yea or nay, for circumstances in which we find ourselves.
* * *
We go out to dinner and discuss Breaking Bad, the nationwide epidemic of crystal meth, rural versus urban poverty, the former attorney general’s height, the INS, IRS, ISIS, bedbug-sniffing dogs.
* * *
We go out to dinner and discuss those missing.
* * *
We go out to dinner and discuss us, the ones present who weren’t so bad off, after all, if we looked at the options.
* * *
We go out to dinner and discuss retirement and my old buddy sitting across the table from me laughs loudly at himself laughing at me, grad students in Spain where some Spaniards called me El Moro, and one called me a big Chinaman, me laughing and splashing around once in a puddle of my vomit several feet deep according to my old buddy. His vomit, too, he boasted, him laughing and splashing in it, too, and why in the world, what in the world, what got into us, man, back in the day, what were we thinking, man, all that booze, booze, booze like no tomorrow.
* * *
We go out to dinner and discuss the Twin Towers, and they trundle through the restaurant door in blackface, huffing and puffing past a crowd of multicolored patrons to pull up chairs and sit at our table, cute lobster bibs tied round their necks, smoking cigars in a clearly marked no-smoking zone, two good ole boys just happy to be out and chilling in a trendy place, folks like us, though those guys being twins and quite large, something odd, different about them their bonhomie can’t disguise.
SHAPE THE WORLD IS IN
* * *
in the secret heart of every secret heart a secret heart lies broken
What is the shape of the unknown world surrounding me. Surrounding us. An empty question no doubt, as certain sets in logic are said to be empty. If a world is not known, how would anyone recognize its shape, even if they happened to catch a glimpse. Some people put faces on their gods or give their gods names and intelligible languages. I’m smart enough to know better, but ask my unanswerable question anyway. What surrounds me. How does it shape my beginning and end. The question worries me. I can’t help asking it.
* * *
Especially early in the morning—five, six A.M.—and I’m on the toilet and sounds drift up. Through the plumbing, I suppose. Distant, quiet sounds that are also eerily close and intimate. My ears magnify what they hear. Like telescopes produce close-ups of the moon, planets, stars. Like binoculars reveal secrets inside a neighbor’s window. Sounds shrinking distance. Empowering me. But if the sounds are far away, th
ey cannot be as close as they seem. Am I hearing sounds inside or outside. Is there any way to tell whether something’s truly out there or only here, inside me. Or both. Or nowhere. Listening, speculating doesn’t get me closer to knowing. Maybe I’m peering through a telescope’s wrong end or looking ass-backwards through binoculars I’ve reversed.
* * *
On mornings like this one, as I attempt to make sense of what I’m hearing, I feel myself getting smaller and smaller. As if I’m disappearing. Once I’m totally out of the way, perhaps sounds will clarify the world’s shape. Transform me the way sound’s magic turns noise to music. I’ll be transparent to myself. Present and absent as I listen. Hear answers to an unanswerable question. Wait and listen. Listen and wait. Abuse sounds the way some people abuse drugs and alcohol. You understand what I mean, don’t you. I use these early-morning sounds to forget who I am while I’m listening. Like the word race abused by a person who wants to forget another person’s a human being.
* * *
Bathroom sounds of bathing in a tub. Am I here or there. Or two places at once. Mother and son sounds. Her washing him. Is that what I’m hearing. Although son large enough now to bathe mother. If it’s them, they are two members of a family of three. Fellow tenants I’ve often observed going up and coming down in the elevator, though over all the years I’ve resided here, I’ve never seen the three of them together. Father a large, somewhat hulking retired cop. Dark-brown man, shy, with a limp. Maybe on a disability pension. Was he wounded on duty. Son visibly slow. Mother’s color makes them a mixed couple, and son resembles neither mom nor pop. Adopted maybe. Or child of previous marriage. A boy who’s the size of a smallish young man now. Old enough to grow a tribe of black hairs above his severely everted upper lip. He resembles mostly himself now. With hints of that genetic clan likeness that identifies Down syndrome kids.
* * *
Who is doing what to whom down below. And what is the shape of the universe that begins foreign and unknown just beneath my feet beyond the onionskin of floor required to separate stories of a New York City high-rise co-op. Phantom flushes in the quiet, then silence, a faint roar echoing in the pipes while a shower runs, then more silence, and once in a great while voices, a cough, sigh, grunt, an irritated exclamation, silence again until a mother hums a lullaby or do I hear soft, singsong crooning of a boy caressed, tickled, soothed as he sinks deeper into a tubful of warm water, head tilted backward till he’s almost submerged. Does she warn him, careful, careful, you’ll get soapsuds in your eyes, soap she rubs into a lather on short arms, short legs he pokes out of the water and wiggles for her and then again and again, silence again, quiet, nothing but guesses most mornings, silent like when it’s the father of the family’s turn to lifeguard, hunkered down on a toilet probably directly below mine while I sit and daydream a boy who’s almost near enough to touch and far away as a siren wailing in the city streets or earthquake in Guatemala or firestorms raging on a sun in another galaxy as it’s consumed by a black hole whose birth I had followed on an iPad video simulation and recalled one morning squatting, waiting for my bowels to let go.
* * *
Same questions about the shape of the world I used to ask when a teacher, Mrs. Cosa, stood behind her desk writing on the blackboard. Asked myself, not her. She was too far away to ask. Her world no less mysterious, no less confusing to me than mine. She was peculiarly detached. Disembodied is a word I could have used to describe Mrs. Cosa if I knew that word back then. My teacher at the board chalking words. Rules the class should copy into workbooks and memorize and be prepared to repeat on demand forever. Passing on these necessary words and rules happens to be her job, and she transmits them to us. Not responsible for words or rules any more than we are—they are not her, not hers—she probably learned them in a fashion similar to how we learn them, and wherever she lives when she leaves the classroom, she may obey or employ them or not, and there she may or may not pass them on to others, just as we are supposed to pass them on where we live, probably.
* * *
Words and rules here and she’s not here, is what I thought. She’s just up there—teacher not person—and we’re just kids, not people either, her captive audience, and we aren’t supposed to notice or be distracted by her body, history, identity, her personality in a classroom quiet as a grave except for taps and scratches of her writing on the blackboard. She’s nobody in particular. Anonymous as a cop with a bullhorn blasting orders to an unruly crowd.
* * *
Her back mostly turned to us, Mrs. Cosa speaks over her shoulder in a manner that conveys nothing about herself, about us, except her tone of voice makes it clear she is not herself, not anyone, nor are we. We understand we must not miss the information her words are imparting, because without it we would certainly be less than the little we are, and we are nothing really anyway, nor is she. No matter how she’s dressed, her age, size, years of teaching experience, it’s not about her. Or us. Only rules, words on the blackboard count, her voice informs us. They count and belong to a larger, more significant world, basically inaccessible to her or to us. The importance of that other world apparent as it materializes in words she recites and inscribes on the board. Even our small minds can grasp the difference between that other place and this makeshift classroom where we have turned up to be exposed to something greater than we are or anything we might imagine on our own.
* * *
American Histories Page 3