Through a Glass Darkly

by Hugh Fox

  “Adieu, adieu, thy plaintive anthem faces, past the near meadows, over the still stream,” said Dan to the fading sky as he slowly walked down the front steps.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Oh, just a little Keats,” he smirked benignly, with just a smidgen of superiority. After all, she was supposed to be a writer too, wasn’t she, although little by little her literariness had petered out, the kid, her job at the furniture company, so much to learn about finances and products...

  His left heel hurt and he felt dizzy. He hadn’t slept the night before. Some asshole a couple of blocks away had been playing with firecrackers, and he’d been too tired to even get up and call the police, so he just lay there and listened and even after the maniac had stopped, he’d stayed waiting for the next bang that never came, almost until dawn, then felt compelled to get up in the morning, his books calling to him, as if explaining one last Olmec bas relief were his salvation, the reason for his ever having been born, as if no one else could ever figure out what the three marked figures attacking the bound, bearded man meant, the Lord of the Underworld (Maya Xibalba) attacking the about-to-become New Sun, still Morning Star...at nine to work, come Hell of high water, but just to go out and WALK, his heel agonizing and his head off kilter like a drunken (ivre) boat (bateau).....

  “Are you OK?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” he answered, limping, trying to keep his balance, thinking for a few months now that it must be high blood pressure, little ischemic attacks, pre-strokes, or the pains in his groin, prostate cancer, just waiting for it to move from pre-clinical to clinical so you could put a name-tag on it, and then once it was tagged and there was a definite time-tag on it too, two months to live, five...maximum a year...then what he’d like to really do would be to go down to Colombia, a tribe like the Desana, take all the shaman drugs and see the gods in everything, lights and presences, jaguar familiar on his chest killing the Old Self, then the New Self emerging from the bloody (psychic) shreds of the Old, Yayé instead of liquid Morphine...see god/the gods..and then dissolve....

  “Maybe you ought to just wait here,” she said finally, fatalistically.

  He could practically read her thoughts: You’re not that old, really, not even seventy, the whole degeneration process is going too fast, his answering I’ve known thirty year olds dead from brain cancer, there’s no time tables, just actuarial tables, percentages, likelihoods... What was the word she was reaching for? Possibilities...

  “See you later,” Cecily said intensely.

  “OK, honey,” This ‘plasma’ inside him reaching out like the bright cloud-wings of an angel, engulfing the little girl with love; it wasn’t too fair to have saddled her with him, but at least he’d given her his bricoleur’s[*] genes.

  3.

  At 72 he had his first stroke. Of course his own father had died at 75. Seventy-five was ancient, ancient, ancient in his family. He hadn’t told her that either, had he?!?

  Couldn’t really walk any more.

  It wasn’t a “walk,” that wasn’t the word for it, more like a shuffle, crawl, pre-, post-walk, most of the time didn’t even try....and his speech was the same way, shuffle-shuffle, snag, shuffle-shuffle,snag, “W...w...w...what’s f...f...for (pause) di...di...di...(pause) nner...?”

  Spending the days looking for sun, especially in the winter, a window with sun, a patch of sun like being surrounded by the luminosity of GOD...

  Slowly got to the point when he couldn’t tell how old the girl was, as if he’d sink into Deeps of timeless forgetfulness, and surface now and then into sequential, ticking sunlight, sequential-less silence and then the flash of faces and the Bach (how did he remember that, German for “brook”?) of voices, slippery pebble voices, was it her or her mother and who was the aging woman that looked like her mother had looked, must have been her, but he’d never expected her to have aged in this way, not a haggard, blonde witch, but “interesting” around the eyes, huge forehead, lots of mascara, maybe that was it...and her skin filled with a sense of crumpling simpatia, that was the word. compassionate, La Magdalena, la Llorona.[*]

  Always, when he fastened on to The Moment, trying to stay fastened, like a mosquito sucking blood, The Swat would come, dislocation, frying in oblivion like French fries in deep fat at McDonald’s or more like a door closing, then the long, echoing backvault blackness, and he never could be sure how long it had lasted, felt himself worsening, didn’t even know how, the Death Barometer inside him, systemic entropy, he imagined the way animals felt listening to the voices of their fur and paws saying Now it’s time to find a quiet spot and GO, somehow when Susan came in to kiss him goodnight (or was it good morning?) managing to stammer out, “D...d...do you believe in me...me....me....”

  It would come so she filled in the blank.

  “Medicine?”

  “N..n...no...me...me...metempsychosis. D...d...do you believe in it?”

  “Metem-what?”

  “Reincarnation!” Suddenly (momentarily) fluid.

  “Goodnight, honey,” she said, bent down, clicking her mouth reprovingly, tucking him in, wiping his drooling mouth. His salivary glands were his most (only) over-functioning organs.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, amazing himself with his continuing perfect fluency, turned over, and, unbeknown to her, by the time she reached the front door downstairs, he was dead.

  4.

  It was their second assignment -- poems about dreams.

  After he had died Susan hadn’t had to work, the house was paid, she didn’t feel like she was competing with him any more, and she ended up getting a Ph.D., teaching a course in creative writing.

  She’d had two books of poetry published, one the winner in a Slipstream contest, poems about her life with him, called Relativity, and another volume from Ghost Dance Press called Vagaries, which was just that, fragmented, wandering half-starts, musings on her navel...again TIME...he had done that for her, made her a Time Mariner with an albatross of bittersweet, tragicomic memories tied around her neck, had never been able to take another man seriously, he had been that big, liked to re-re-re-re-read his essays and poems :

  voyager

  voyeur

  loving what we

  can’t (shouldn’t) see,

  IN THE BEGINNING WAS

  OPACITY

  slowly

  forming itself into

  a black

  whole and swallowing

  us....

  She had written a book of critical essays about writing poetry and it was making the rounds. Tensed Spring: The Kinetics of Poetic Creativity. It wasn’t exactly “smug” (still without tenure, although on the tenure track) but was benignly “resigned,” like a pressed, dried rose in a whopper of a family bible.

  Just had finished reading/”correcting” two dumb dream poems by one of her current students..... and then the third down:

  Metampsychosis

  Jamais,

  le premier fois

  and then again

  Troy, Carthage, only

  Helen/Dido

  keeps retreating

  through time-

  warps of desolation,

  do you remember

  who I was,

  my name,

  and how I was

  when you first

  met me?

  Which totally freaked her out, like some sort of mad, senseless Friday the Thirteenth, Nightmare on Elm Street flick, the reference to Helen of Troy, Dido of Carthage, Troy and Carthage two places that he had always talked about....while he could still talk.

  Looked at the student’s name -- Doug Moore. Didn’t remember who he was, was about to call him and ask what the name of the game was, what kind of goofy research had he been up to, when the downstairs doorbell rang, she walked down (Cecily in London, working at the British Museum, took after her father, collaborating on some sort of book on Herakles legends on Greek pots)....

  All by herself in the pitter-pattering leaf-
fall of late September, prematurely chilly, herself prematurely grey and brittle-boned, prematurely everything, one of her students outside. She opened the door just as she remembered, she was one week away from her 62nd birthday,and the class he was in was a senior seminar....

  ST. JULIE AND THE BULLET

  The bullet came from, cut across through, the boney woman in the faded wrap-around house dress and the step-into slippers, nervous habit of brushing her hand back away from her forehead, the well-washed bone-woman who always looked like she needed a bath, who titrated her life out in little slips of the cheapest whiskeys she could find, that you could smell on her breath when she leaned down to kiss you goodnight...but you’d never see her nipping away in the kitchen, although you knew where the bottle always was behind the Campbell’s soup and Comet cleanser, through the father-body “presence” there, across the years of flannel pajamas and flannel robes, fuzzy-around-your-ankles slippers, lying down next to you, the hand always almost “there,” but never there, balding, paunchy, yoke-neck sleeveless underwear, and always smelling of shaving creams and colognes, “there,” but never there, through the years of night with a dim-away nightlight on, cribs and crying, watching green wallpaper get grey, listening to the hiss of steam radiators, hearing it happen through the too-thin wall, not knowing what was happening and even now not sure whether or not it happened enough, hardly at all, hand on her legs, lips on her neck, always moving “toward” but never getting there, not knowing what “where” meant, but knowing, being told, inched along toward, knowing that a where existed, and that it was important, even tough (because of the fact) it was “dirty”...unmentionable.... through the corridors of mirrors, through Topeka and Denver and Genoa (Nevada) to San Francisco, watching the bones elongate and the breasts pinken up and begin to swell (a little), watching the hair get long and trying to find a “face” to fit the “face,” a juice to inject into the frame, a color to color the plaster-flesh cheeks with, a look to set in those eyes, knowing that the green walls were all wrong, and the time between the happenings in the next room too long, and that the mute hand and lips shouldn’t have been mute, that it didn’t all come out of tubes and jars and that there had to be an alternative.... through the typewriter and the high school mimeo, the standing back and watching words on the page, feeling the walls and the faces filter and wash through her, as the hand in the back seat touched where she’d touched, and activated but never the same as this, hands bringing her hands to touch them, and touching and learning how to touch, to activate and want and why not, finding the eye-slits in the thin mirror becoming “some-thing”....real.... through all the causes and the lost, found, re-lost, re-found “movements,” getting rid of the guilt and the staying out later, longer, finally not coming home at all, taking the next-day hard-hand, the soft-hand turned hard, the worried and worn-out hysterical alcoholic wailings, getting rid of the guilt by acquiring the CAUSE, excusing the guilt by shutting out, classifying, condemning the guilt-makers, shredded the jeans and uncovered the face, bare, fair, and the hair, long, long....wanting to rip the covers off everything, back to all first causes, understand all ideas, become all things.... through the books, through the ideas, through the theories about oneness and socio-psychological unity mystique, and the power of the class-struggle...defining sanity-sanctity as rejection of totalpast, acceptance of totalfuture, allchange, detachment, no holds barred, no ties tied, doing, making herself do...all things.... through the black faces pensive in the dusk, the black hands touching across her as if she were a weathered board, a brick wall, a sidewalk, wondering hands, eye-hands, seeing into through her through... through the black faces pensive in the dusk, the black hands touching across her as if she were a weathered board, a brick wall, a sidewalk, wondering hands, eye-hands, seeing into through her through.... through the possible faces, the possible smiles, the possible throw of her purse across her shoulder across a possible green-sun-breath-day, possible children, possible swings and Sundays, breasts and milk and books read, books written, the possible coming of a new (for her) new-world, through the possible peace and breast-sag and grey hair and the possible words, having come through, survived, witnessed it all, the possible plateau, the possible mind, having gone through all the revolutions inside, inside her own self, the possible WORD, the possible prophet,

  perforated,

  all the compartments out,

  the bullets,

  one in the shoulder, deep in,

  the other in the head, through the left

  cheek, up through the brain.

  AUNT FERN’S DIARY

  September 29, 1931 -- Sean married yesterday, but I guess they were ashamed to invite me. Afraid I’d have an attack and embarrass them all. So I stayed home, walked over to the lake for a while. It’s so bushily Fallish. I love it. Like Pissaro and Sisley, really, heavy brush/palette knife strokes. What I don’t love is what comes next.

  October 3, 1931 -- So expected for Sean and his wife to go to Niagara Falls. I almost wrote “vulgar,” but what I really am is totally jealous at being so (permanently) outside, as if epilepsy were catching, The Plague or Smallpox or something. I guess I’m permanently outside everything I ever wanted. But hath not epileptic eyes, mouth, organs... when you prick him does he/she not bleed, when you squash him/her (with isolation), does he/she not die (spiritually)?

  December 10, 1931 -- Sean’s wife, Miriam, is pregnant. Must have gotten pregnant during the honeymoon, although (nasty, nasty!) who’s counting (months)?

  December 11, 1931 -- Mrs. Goerke, my “employer” (because I am the maid, although the arrangement was supposed to be that if my sister, Rose, got all of our father’s money, she was supposed to take care of me, not farm me out as a servant) invited me for Christmas dinner today. God knows I wouldn’t want to embarrass my family. But I ought to concentrate on The Good instead of its absence. Reading Keats again. Book of the English Romantics, those last poems when he reaches out his hand from beyond the grave...and everything he wrote filled with a sense of impermanence, the way I see things, as if it were all speeded up. Like Marta coming to visit yesterday, called me Irish twice. Of course I’m her twin but she’s had two children, is chunky and full of “blood” (what’s the word I’m reaching for...? “Ruddy.”) and I’m as white as vanilla ice cream.

  May 1 -- Had totally forgotten that I’d even started a diary until today. Frozen solid all winter and now it’s Hopkins-ish, nothing is so wonderful as Spring when weeds in wheels shoot long and lush...however it goes. Above all I love the “innocence” of Hopkins.

  Probably would have left Dear Diary in my drawer with old buttons, rubber bands, and torn stockings, if I hadn’t gotten a call from mama today: “It’s a boy! Miriam’s had a boy!”

  My first thought: “Count the months! She was pregnant when they got married, wasn’t she!,” and then I was filled with an irresistible urge/need/necessity to see the boy, so I went over to Saint Bernard’s Hospital (asked my “boss,” Mrs. Goerke, if it was OK, no problem), found the room and walked in, functioned...no, I don’t have three heads and/or an eye in the middle of my forehead. And Miriam seemed happy to see me, was nursing the baby, my only brother’s son...I know it’s a silly thing, primogeniture, family-name and all that, the “masculine blood line,” something so English, almost prehistoric...but I do have only one brother and Josh (which is what they named the baby) is the whole future of the Eagen name -- if it is even going to have a future.

  May 15 -- Had a Grande Mal (which I supposed fittingly translates out as Great Evil) on the way downtown today. They stopped the train at 55th and called an ambulance, screwed up a bunch of peoples’ mornings. And I’m taking my medicine so it’s not my fault....

  Sean comes over but I guess I’ll never see the boy...

  Looking at myself in the mirror this morning. Naked. nice body. Sometimes (Lord forgive me!) I feel like giving myself to someone just to get pregnant. Everyone in the world has someone, creates someone out of themselves to accompa
ny them on the train-ride through Time to Death. That’s what motherhood is really all about.

  But no one for me.

  Nephews, my sister’s boys, I see them, which makes me even more curious about Sean’s Josh. The country you never visit, the Mahler symphony you’ve never heard.

  Have decided to write in this diary only once a year.

  Christmas Eve. No incentive to do more than that. Maybe I’ll just give up altogether. A scrawl in eternity.

  If there is a god (God forgive me!) and if everything is teleological, what is my purpose in the scheme of things, or is there a scheme of things or do we merely impose our own imagined order on what is essentially CHAOS?

  July 5, 1938 -- Josh is 6 today. Hot as hell but I like it. Otherwise feeling old and “fragmentary.” What do I want, really? To have Sean bring the boy over? I see all my other nephews and nieces, even if the spacing is wildly separated. Bernie, Moss’ son, is so big, he looks more like an insect than a person. A Praying Mantis. Imagine a praying mantis in shorts and tennis shoes playing basketball, and you have Bernie.

  Josh, from the pictures that his mother shows me, is small, artistic and intense. Of course his mother is so....

  October 31, 1939 -- I forget where I am. Epilepsy may be part of it, but the years roll over me like waves. I don’t know how long I’ll even be able to stay here. As a “servant” I’m pretty worthless...worth less than a doorknob or a brass door-knocker. I think I’m kept on here more as a favor than anything practical.

  I see myself in the mirror. No man will look at me, especially now that the flat, unblemished surface of my skin is like a crinkled-up and then unfolded-and-spread-out piece of paper...although, from time to time I see this man in Jackson Park, over by the Japanese bridge. Retired violinist with the Chicago Symphony. He says he was a good friend of Theodore Thomas, the 19th century Chicago symphony conductor-legend. We talk a little.