American Histories

by John Edgar Wideman

  * * *

  For over twenty-five years now we have constructed a dream—my wife’s, mine, ours—of sharing a living space, a social space. Sharing the broken peace, broken pieces of our construction. We decide to take a trip and wind up thrown from our Volvo, bodies sprawled, unable to move or speak at the edge of a highway. Cars and trucks whizzing past and nobody notices our accident, peril, pain. Maimed, probably lying there in shock, but the traffic pays us no attention. If you are her or me you imagine dying. Or imagine yourself cured and attempt to stagger up. Or imagine an emergency vehicle brimful of miraculous lifesaving technology and kind, exquisitely trained technicians who will listen to your silence, heads bowed, ears close to your shuddering chest, flopping heart.

  * * *

  Title of a novel shivers irretrievable as most of my past as I try to recall it, then title appears—Preparation for the Next Life, exactly as printed on the paper cover. A book I’m recommending to you because—but not only because—I detect a trace of Asian ancestry in your features. An observation, miss, I hope you will accept as a compliment, especially in this small room with its lack of color, lack of history, its loneliness and intentional suppression of sociability so as not to disturb you or me or the doctor during the business of an examination. Anyway, the novel’s two main characters—a young Chinese woman who’s an illegal immigrant and a young American vet just back from Iraq—suffer a love affair in New York City. Love haunted by anger and madness, a love doomed as the Twin Towers. I was touched by their suffering, their determination to survive for each other despite brutal, anonymous energies of a vast city driving them together, thrusting them apart. A reader is immersed in violent, claustrophobic details of lives headed nowhere as the two lovers prepare for a next life. One that will never arrive, the book lets us know in no uncertain terms.

  * * *

  I, too, am an author of sorts. Fortunately, there are lots of people far smarter than I am who are not taken in, not deceived by what I do or call myself—by my fiction, my career, my words—yet they are deceived by what they do—math, physics, watching TV, taking photos, making families, money, minstrelsy, making love. Should that general failure serve me as any consolation. A reason to feel better about my limits, my edges, my failures to achieve, succeed, deceive.

  * * *

  Recently, on one of the long walks I don’t really enjoy until it begins to feel interminable, I caught up with an ancient truck dumping stones to shore up the bed of a dirt path I’d followed five kilometers or so through woods and fields. A man in the truck’s cab, girl on foot beside it, maybe the driver’s young wife or his daughter, leveling with a shovel each new pile of white, chunky stones. Good day, I said smiling, and thanked them for their hard work, letting them know for aging warriors like me whose job is to keep the countryside free of demons and dragons, reliable roads a necessity, particularly back roads wending through thick forest, fields of tall grain, high weeds, and grass where ogres hide alongside the path or drop from overhanging trees to ambush passersby. Winter snow, spring rains will mock the couple’s efforts as demons mock mine, but grizzled man, young woman whose arms and wrists seemed very slim for such heavy labor returned my smile, then waved after I overtook them and looked back over my shoulder.

  * * *

  Perhaps doctors listen in a reserved manner to conceal how appalled they are each time by the spectacle of a patient attempting with the immateriality of words to speak for the body’s blunt, mute materiality.

  * * *

  Atticus, the given name of the author whose novel I recommended. Atticus also the name a Roman writer had assumed to celebrate being a citizen of Athens. During its golden age, Athens a cradle of democracy and civilization until it expanded its edges to become a state, an empire, then toppled as all empires and persons must. Oh, how the mighty have fallen, ancient Egyptians carved on their monuments, Greeks inscribed on their stelae, Yoruba expressed with imperturbable gazes of bronze masks, all looming brow curved like a full sail, designer lips thick, enigmatic as a Buddha’s. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Oh . . . Oh, how beautiful the fallen.

  * * *

  I understand there’s nothing personal about this procedure, miss. Results must be objective, the social strictly in abeyance. You and I cease to exist during an examination. We are ghosts. Offstage, hovering in the wings. Irrelevant as far as data is concerned, data gathered, rendered into more data, more trustworthy than any person’s opinion. Numbers that do not require us while they crunch out conclusions, predictions, solutions, results verifiable whether or not we’re around. I’ve been here before. Inured to inconveniences—long waits, exorbitant fees, needles, knives. Still. Let me put it this way. Or rather, let me ask you a question, please. Do you share about any portion of your anatomy my secret squeamishness about navels. Gown pulled up, naked parts exposed to a stranger’s eyes—no problem unless my silliness about navels kicks in. I squirm inside at the thought anyone may touch the site, the scar where once I was joined with another. A part of me severed. Cord cut, twisted, stuffed back into me. An edge of me never quite safe. Drastically vulnerable in fact. An ugly hole not filled completely. A pit sunken in fleshy lips through which things that belong inside may spill out, get lost again.

  * * *

  They say drowning’s the easiest death. Somebody says it. Mermaids the only witnesses, maybe. Only a few moments of thrashing, flopping around, too busy to pay attention to that dreadful, instantaneous last review of your life they say you always receive, then water’s over your head and your edges flow into water, water flows into your edges. The rest is drift. Peace.

  * * *

  Oddly enough, miss, though you may find it hard to believe today, I was not always an old man. No prostheses, prescriptions, wrinkles, no humiliating dependencies on professionals to keep me alive. Women—some—attracted to me. One exceptional one in particular who happened to be too good to be true. By that I mean not simply that she possessed unusually good looks and smarts. She confessed to being enormously enthralled by me, so much so that she was happy to do anything I asked with no expectations on her side of something from me in return. Too good to be true. She asked no questions about times we weren’t together. No obligations, plans, excuses, explanations required. Please, she said, just be yourself and let yourself be pleased by me.

  * * *

  Circumstances (including my wife, kids—I’m endeavoring to be completely honest with you, miss) did not allow us to meet often and each rendezvous tended to be brief, though quite intense. Too intense to last, a reasonable voice inside me warned. Too good to be true.

  * * *

  Of course I anticipated disaster. Sooner or later my worries, guilt, and selfishness, her unselfishness and generosity would be punished. I couldn’t conceal my anxieties and they hurt her. Afterwards and sometimes even during, Why do I sense you running off, she asked. Why do you doubt what we share. Why express dissatisfaction about a situation you obviously enjoy. Do you want what we have to continue or not.

  * * *

  I guess my answer no. Couldn’t say this then, but I will admit it to you now, miss. My fear she was too good to be true the reason the affair ended. I spoiled it. A glorious gift turned into a threat, an omen, and I lost track, lost touch with our moments together not because they were too good to be true but because I wasn’t prepared to treat them as true. Did I step back because I thought I saw the edge. Did I believe true possessed only a single edge. A self-fulfilling prophecy, wasn’t it. Surely as night follows day, miss, I fucked up. Pardon my French, please.

  * * *

  You’re getting very busy with papers, with opening and shutting drawers of your metal desk. Is the examination approaching a conclusion. Maybe not, since the voice telling this story doesn’t require an audience, doesn’t need your assistance, doesn’t need you. It can rattle on and on whether you listen or not, whether I speak to you or only to myself. In its humble fashion narrative is too good to be true.

  *
* *

  I’m not going to embarrass either of us by asking you for a date. I know all too well what time it is. How long it took to arrive at this facility, this moment it’s your turn and mine to occupy.

  * * *

  Oh. Oh my, my. We all fall down. In spite of what we learn the hard way or what we overhear people say, hope does spring eternal. A woman twenty, thirty years my junior eager to do whatever I ask. An unlikely truth once. More than unlikely twice. A young woman eager to do my bidding, as people used to say. No. Not bidding. I retract that word. It’s too old-fashioned. Reminiscent of emperors, masters, servants, slaves. No. Not about power, miss. Power not the point. It’s the creeping seduction, the exhilarating experience of thinking, even in a field hospital grim as this one where wounded are transported to die, even here, anything’s possible.

  * * *

  What notes have you jotted in my file, miss. Will I receive copies of pages you are tucking into folders of various colors spread like an oversize deck of Tarot cards on your desktop. Do you perform happy endings in this institution. What opinion do you have of my chin. My left leg. Ear. How much do I owe.

  WAIL

  * * *

  Wail of sirens continuous. A woman coming from the direction towards which I hurry, her clothes sooty, in disarray, shouts at no one in particular. People are jumping out windows. Beneath the East River a subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan carrying my daughter to work may be trapped under burning buildings. My stepson’s grade school only blocks from where war or the end of the world beginning. A man has rolled his black, shiny sedan up over the curb, turned off the motor, and sits, legs hanging out the passenger side door—nice shoes—radio behind him broadcasting full blast live updates from the site where planes are smashing into the Twin Towers. Driver wears an expression I’d seen in a movie once, on the face of a blue-coated trooper huddled behind the rump of a dead horse shot out from under him by waves of Sioux arrows. Sirens wail nonstop that day and I still hear them.

  * * *

  Of course one can always say afterwards, after the shock of death passes, that we knew it was coming. But still we remain stunned. Still we must admit we were unprepared. Not prepared to survive. Better at preparing the dead. Ancient rules, rituals, techniques in place to prepare the dead for separation. Release them from obligations to the living, from consorting with the living. These practices we’ve organized to free the dead from the burdens of those who survive are generally satisfactory. Or at least seem to be since the dead don’t complain. No equally reliable protocols prepare the living. Whether a death long anticipated or sudden, ask any person who survives the loss of a loved one if measures taken to prepare for separation were satisfactory.

  * * *

  The living left behind unprotected. Not sealed underground in wooden boxes or marble or cremated or interred in catacombs. For the living, the dead’s absence confuses time. Confuses our sense of who’s present and not. Absence of the dead true and false. A theft of time. We lose track of before and after. Does someone missing today remain gone or return tomorrow. Or both. Is it yesterday when the missing one returns. Disappearance of the dead a fact and not a fact. Line drawn in the sand by the living that the dead may choose to honor or ignore.

  * * *

  The dead’s removal provokes silent exchange. Silence the first rule, first word, next word, every word of conversations with the dead no one living is prepared to undertake. Until it’s too late. You’re in the middle of one and it never ends. Except, of course, you understand that sooner or later it must. And know how.

  * * *

  You will never not be astounded by how quickly, how far the dead are able to travel. How instantly and adeptly the missing one navigates vast space utterly alien to you, and how again and again you must accept the truth that the lost one, or rather the one who is not lost but found elsewhere, belongs there, belongs elsewhere, so seamlessly, totally, that you begin to wonder how you could have believed this place, this here exists. This place you and the one lost to you once seemed to share.

  * * *

  You can’t get used to it. That distance. That speed that separates. That unexpected terrain the dead reach. Where they fit. Where you don’t fit and fit. A place which seems as impossibly far away for the lost one as it is for you. Though there you both are.

  * * *

  Do you remember me

  * * *

  I think so

  * * *

  Who has broken through. Who is finally speaking.

  * * *

  Better not kiss me, she says. Not there, anyway. A sore on my lip, she says. Here, she says and offers a pale cheek.

  LINES

  * * *

  In spring the leaves turned red, nobody remembered anyone else’s name, executions were scheduled, a line formed outside the prison’s wall. Lines form, said the lady famous for her book about lines, lines form, she wrote, when/because something’s lost or something found or someone wants something or someone doesn’t want something—and although all reasons lines form are analytically classifiable into these four basic categories, any particular line, whether at Lourdes, Bank of America, or outside a prison, is likely the product of mixed motives, she argues quite convincingly, with examples of lines she’s stood in, seen, heard of, imagined, or researched in archives. Her line schema unchallenged finally, referenced inevitably in any serious discussion of lines, as lines themselves are inevitable in a world where people find and lose, desire and don’t, wait for executions to begin or end inside the walls of a prison they stand outside, no recourse but to form orderly lines as directed by uniformed guards and troopers who seem to outnumber those in line, until a line grows too long to see the end.

  * * *

  We were on our way to join the line outside a prison’s towering stone walls. Decided after driving all day to stop at a motel near our destination. A good night’s sleep to refresh and fortify us. We’d be in line early next morning. Soon enough, we both agreed. Stopped. Made love before dinner as if the next day had already dawned, and we had secured a place in line, and had to hurry back in line before our absence was noticed.

  * * *

  I did not share with my companion of the moment a feeling I had stayed once before in this motel where we have stopped. Stayed here on a trip with my former wife. Neither the coincidence of a previous visit nor my unhappy memories of my wife should spark anyone’s jealousy. Except the woman I am with plagued, like me, by fierce competitiveness, vanity, and insecurity that empowered her some days and on others struck her impotent, cowering in dark entanglements she weaves about herself. No matter how disturbing an ancient trip and recollections were for me, the woman I’m with would be angry, desolated, probably stay awake fretting all night, if she learns I had stopped here with my wife or learns that while I lay beside her dreaming tonight in one of this motel’s beds, my ex might appear.

  * * *

  Nothing about the motel’s reception area particularly familiar when we arrived, but I recognized immediately the manager at the desk as the same one who checked us in many years before. Was it his face that triggered my recollection of a previous stay. Or had I remembered the motel earlier that day on the road and decided to return. No way to be sure whether my decision to return conscious or unconscious. Either way, a guilty choice I couldn’t deny as soon as the manager’s eyes met mine.

  * * *

  He knew. But aside from that fact, his expression unreadable. How much could he know. He must be a local, nailed down here. I wondered why he hadn’t closed the motel and joined the line. Would I see him over there outside the prison tomorrow, busy registering names. Would he ask for my name again.

  * * *

  While the woman accompanying me showers before she comes down for dinner, same man serves me a drink in the motel’s tiny bar/restaurant—three stools, brief counter, a few tables and chairs—crowded under a staircase to Level 2. Once I’m planted on a stool I keep reminding myself not to stand up too abru
ptly and to stoop slightly when I move from under the alcove’s overhang to greet my lady.

  * * *

  Like quiet rain falling in a city never visited before can transform that city’s foreignness into intimacy, the man’s bluntly African features, deep color, his accent remind me in spite of the passage of many years, he’s familiar. I had not forgotten him. He putters, chatters as he pours me a drink, pours one for himself, raises his glass in the direction of mine for an imaginary bump. What does he remember of our last meeting decades ago. Not my diluted color, diluted features. My eyes, hair, lips, nose betraying my origins as a medley of a little bit of this, a little bit of that. A guy who appears at this motel on a second occasion and displays unchanged his taste for a white woman. Or two. Same woman or different. Would the man notice.

  * * *

  Cheers, I say. Ask if he remembers me.

  * * *

  I believe so, he says. Yes. Of course. As you recall me. But sorry, not your name, though you just said it to me a few moments ago checking in. My name, by the way, Simon. Simon-Kimbanga-Mpoyi-Kitawala-Feruzi-Kudjabo-Ndjoli-Mobuto-Kelenge-Katadi-Tshibamba-Kasavubu-Lumumba . . .

  * * *

  All that.

  * * *

  More. More. Names are strands of cloth wrapped round us, round the earth so everything doesn’t shiver and die of cold. Names wrap round and round and round.

  * * *

  He refills both stubby shot glasses. My ancient uncle, he says, who claimed to be over two hundred years old, told me stories about names when he was in a certain mood, almost a kind of trance you could say or better call it a twilight zone between way back then and now. Way back then meaning, I assume, years when the uncle was a boy and his country still a colony, and even further back when old men of his village were boys before his country a colony, before it was anything in stories told to village boys who became elders and told them to the uncle, anything other than the sole place in the universe where gods saw fit to teach humans how to suckle at the tit of life, where gods whispered instructions that became more people, birds, trees, animals of the forest, became wind, water, clouds, mountains, words, stories, news his old, old uncle passed on to him he passes to me.