Essays from the Nick of Time

by Mark Slouka

  And yet who could deny that silence, though both the means and end of totalitarian repression, is also its natural enemy? That silence, the habitat of the imagination, not only allows us to grow the spore of identity but also, multiplied a millionfold, creates the rich loam in which a genuine democracy thrives. In the silence of our own minds, in the quiet margins of the text, we are made different from one another as well as able to understand others’ differences from us.

  In the famous John Cage composition 433, the pianist walks onstage, bows, flips the tail of his tuxedo, and seats himself at the piano. Taking a stopwatch out of his vest pocket, he presses the start button, then stares at the keys for precisely four minutes and thirty-three seconds. When the time is up, he closes the piano and leaves the stage.

  Nearly half a century after it was first performed, 433 rightly strikes us as hackneyed and worn, a postmodern cliché intent on blurring a line (between art and non-art, order and disorder, formal structure and random influence) that has long since been erased. As simple theater, however, it still has power. Cage’s portrait of the artist frozen before his medium, intensely aware of his allotted time, unable to draw a shape out of the universe of possibilities, carries a certain allegorical charge, because we recognize in its symbolism—so apparently childlike, so starkly Manichaean—a lesson worthy of Euripides: art, whatever its medium, attempts to pry beneath the closed lid of the world, and fails; the artist, in his or her minutes and seconds, attempts to say—to paint, to carve, in sum, to communicate—what ultimately cannot be communicated. In the end, the wedge breaks, the lid stays shut. The artist looks at his watch and leaves the stage, his “success” measurable only by the relative depth of his failure. Too bad. There are worse things.

  But if silence is the enemy of art, it is also its motivation and medium: the greatest works not only draw on silence for inspiration but use it, flirt with it, turn it, for a time, against itself. To succeed at all, in other words, art must partake of its opposite, suggest its own dissolution. Examples are legion: once attuned to the music of absence, the eloquence of omission or restraint, one hears it everywhere—in the sudden vertiginous stop of an Elizabeth Bishop poem; in the space between souls in an Edward Hopper painting; in Satchmo’s mastery of the wide margins when singing “I’m Just a Lucky So and So.” In the final paragraph of Frank O’Connor’s small masterpiece “Guests of the Nation,” an Irish soldier recalls looking over a patch of bog containing the graves of two British soldiers he’s just been forced to execute and observes, “And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.” Such a black hole of a line, dense with rejected possibilities, merciless in its willingness to sacrifice everything for a quick stab at truth.

  “Silence,” Melville wrote, only five years before withdrawing from writing more or less for good, “is the only Voice of our God.” The assertion, like its subject, cuts both ways, negating and affirming, implying both absence and presence, offering us a choice; it’s a line that the Society of American Atheists could put on its letterhead and the Society of Friends could silently endorse while waiting to be moved by the Spirit to speak. What makes the line particularly notable, however, is that it appears in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, a novel that, perhaps more than any other in American literature, calls attention to its own silences, its fragility. Offering us a hero who is both American Christ and Holy Fool, martyr and murderer, writer and subject, Melville propels him toward death with such abandon, with such a feel for what Thomas Mann would one day call “the voluptuousness of doom,” that even his language gets caught in the vortex: in one particularly eerie passage, we watch the same sentence, repeated four times, being pruned of adverbs, conjunctions, dependent clauses, until it very nearly disappears before our eyes.

  There’s nothing safe about this brinksmanship, nothing of the deconstructionists’ empty posturings. “He can neither believe,” Hawthorne wrote, “nor be comfortable in his unbelief.” Melville had simply allowed his doubts to bleed into his art. As they will. Having “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated,” he quite naturally took his writing with him.

  Reading Pierre is an uncomfortable business, akin to watching an artist painstakingly put the finishing touches on his own epitaph. One naturally hopes for a slightly more redemptive vision, a vision that shifts the stress from the inevitability of doom and the triumph of silence to the creative energy these release to the living. Within Melville’s own work, we don’t have far to look. In Moby-Dick, the book he wrote just before Pierre, Melville also engineered an apocalypse yet managed to remain far enough away to avoid its pull, to save something, to offer us a metaphor that captures perfectly the tensions essential to our work and our lives. Something survives the Pequod’s sinking; though silence may reign over the waters, the vortex eventually slows. The coffin bursts to the surface. And on that coffin are the hieroglyphics of our art.

  If one of the characteristics of capitalism is that it tends to shut down options, narrow the margins, then perhaps what we are seeing these days is one of the side effects of the so-called free market: most of the noises we hear are those of buying and selling. Even the communication between individuals has been harnessed to the technologies that make it possible: to be deprived of the fax machine, the cell phone, the TV, the laptop, etc., is to be relegated to silence. Communication, having been narrowed into whatever can be squeezed into binary code, has been redefined by the marketplace into a commodity itself.

  Yet capitalism, we know, always tries to feed the hungers it creates, to confect its own antidotes—so long as the price is right. As the vast silences of the republic are paved over by designer outlets and shopping malls, a kind of island ecosystem remains, self-conscious in its fragility, barely viable. The proof is detectable in any upscale travel magazine: there you will find exclusive spas advertising the promise of silence—no pagers, no cell phones, just the sound of lake water lapping—as though silence were a rare Chardonnay or an exclusive bit of scenery, which, of course, is precisely what it now is.

  That silence, like solitude, is now a commodity should not surprise us. Money buys space, and space buys silence: decibels and dollars are inversely proportional. Lacking money, I’ve lived with noise—with the sounds of fucking and feuding in the air shaft, MTV and Maury Povich coming through the walls, in apartments with ceilings so thin I could hear the click of a clothes hanger placed on a rod or the lusty stream of an upstairs neighbor urinating after a long night out. I’ve accepted this, if not gracefully at least with some measure of resignation. The great advantage money confers, I now realize, is not silence per se but the option of silence, the privilege of choosing one’s own music, of shutting out the seventeen-year-old whose boom box nightly rattles my panes.

  But if the ability to engineer one’s own silence has been one of the age-old prerogatives of wealth, it’s also true that the rapidly changing aural landscape of the late twentieth century has raised the status (and value) of silence enormously. As the world of the made, to recall e.e. cummings, replaces the world of the born, as the small sounds of fields at dusk or babies crying in the next apartment are erased by the noise of traffic and Oprah, as even our few remaining bits of wilderness are pressed thin and flat beneath satellite transmissions, Forest Service bulldozers, and airplane flight corridors, we grow sentimental for what little has escaped us and automatically reach for our wallets. Like a telltale lesion that appears only on those who are desperately ill, value—even outrageous value—often blossoms on things just before they leave us, and if the analogy is an ugly one, it is also appropriate; the sudden spasm of love for the thing we’re killing, after all, is as obscene as it is human. As we continue to pave the world with sound, we will continue to crave what little escapes us, a silence made audible by its disappearance.

  Blood on the Tracks

  2000

  I

  Now and again the parallel world of unspeakable things breaks through. A man walks into a schoolyar
d with a rifle, a taxi leaps a curb, an entire neighborhood folds into rubble. Those directly involved are devoured. The rest, like ruminants slowing to graze once the victim has been culled from the herd, step past the tangle of muscle and bone, the raised, incomprehensible muzzle, and move on. It’s been thus since hand in hand we wandered out of paradise.

  But if the stories haven’t changed, the method of their publication has. Tragedy carries farther in the charged air of the early twenty-first century; death speaks with a louder voice. In Ankara, Turkey, a father unable to get the heavy equipment to move the earthquake rubble listens to his daughter die for two days—and we listen with him. In a town near Albany a mother tortures her three-year-old to death for taking a piece of candy without asking first—and we read about it over our morning Danish. In Pereira, Colombia, a father digs his son out of an ocean of mud, then reburies him in a common grave, and the image of his grief—the mud caked in the hair on his chest, his face broken by weeping—stabs us quickly in the heart on the 7:43 and again halfway through the morning meeting. And so on and so on, ad nauseam, ad absurdum. Soft-shelled and transparent in our vulnerability, we press the button, turn the page, swaddle ourselves in layers of irony. Or try.

  Our connectedness, it seems, is engineering something new for us: a need, a hunger, that cannot be satisfied, an existential dilemma fully worthy of Kafka. Unable to ignore the daily parade of bodies left at our doors courtesy of the networks or the newspaper of record or the many offices of the dot-com world, we are being forced to ask the kind of questions—How could this happen? What does it mean?—that we in the West haven’t had to ask on such a regular basis since the seventeenth century.

  The cracking we hear now is the sound of a great metaphysical wedge being driven into a predominantly materialistic culture. Daily our media drag us to God, force us to inquire after His meaning, then rub our noses in His absence. No one is exempt; even those of us given to wine without metaphor and bread wholly unleavened by faith find ourselves forced back on our convictions, asking again the questions we’d long thought answered.

  You say I’m ignoring the multitudes for whom the words “It is God’s will” provide all the comfort and explanation necessary? Perhaps, but I am not the first to wonder at the efficacy of answers essentially unchanged since Augustine (“The ways of the Lord are unknowable to man”). The nights grow longer. Let the faithful, like partridge in the Dakota snows, fluff and preen their downy feathers; I wish them warmth and well. This is for the less insulated. We’re at aphelion, the farthest distance from the sun. The orbit has broken.

  II

  At 8:00 p.m. on Monday, May 24, 1999, twenty-three minutes after what would have been sundown had a hard rain not been falling that evening over much of New England, Amtrak’s ten-car Twilight Shoreliner, train number 67, departed Boston for Newport News, Virginia.

  At 12:35 a.m., after a two-hour delay due to violent weather, it left Providence for stops in Connecticut.

  At 2:20 a.m., the Shoreliner, traveling seventy-one miles an hour and carrying 209 passengers, struck five people walking on the tracks near the North Benson Road overpass in Fairfield. Julia Toledo, an Ecuadoran immigrant, and her sons—Angel, six, Carlos, eleven, and Pedro, three—died instantly. The fourth son, José, ten, survived another two days.

  By the time José Urgiles de Toledo died at Bridgeport Hospital, the chronology of events leading to the tragedy had been established. Sometime after 9:00 p.m. that Monday night, according to the Connecticut Post, Julia Toledo and her sons left the YMCA Families in Transition shelter on Clinton Avenue. The three older boys carried backpacks stuffed with clothes, coloring books, pencils, and Sesame Street dolls. Pedro, too young to walk the entire distance, was probably carried a good part of the way by his mother.

  After leaving the shelter unnoticed, the family most likely turned right down Railroad Avenue where it runs below the raised rail bed. No one noticed them; at night the area around Railroad Avenue is badly lit and silent. Several blocks farther down, where crumbling, weedy slopes replace the walls of the raised rail bed, the family climbed a short, steep trail to a break in the chain-link fence and entered the tracks.

  To avoid the tilting slope of the rail bed (even for adults, the traprock gravel makes for hard traveling), they must have walked along the tracks for nearly two miles, the older children jumping from tie to tie, until the Shoreliner, sprung from Providence, erased them from the earth.

  The facts, of course, were not enough—could never be enough. In truth, the amassing of details that began immediately following the tragedy was nothing more than a hastily constructed bridgework—desperate, instinctive—raised by a people with a long-held faith in the visible world, the world of measurable distances and discernible motivations. A people still accustomed to assuming that representation confers meaning. That meaning is there, somewhere, to be conferred.

  A map of the scene in the Connecticut Post, complete with a box showing a train with an arrow bearing down on a group of five black dots, suggested the full depth of the failure. Emergency workers arriving at the point on the map where the dots and the arrow met had been “sickened by the carnage,” according to New York’s Daily News. The train’s steel snout, with its red, white, and blue stripes, was splashed with blood. Scattered over a wide area were the children’s shoes, their torn backpacks, a bloody Bible, and the Sesame Street dolls the older boys had packed for the journey. No, no number of facts would suffice. The “what” was not enough. We wanted a “why.” Better still, a “who.”

  Blame for the tragedy circled the scene, then settled tentatively on the father. Carlos Urgiles had been abusive, Julia Justiliano, a crossing guard, told the Post. He had threatened to kill his wife, she said. A year earlier, just before abandoning his family, he had had to be forcibly removed from the property of Luis Muñoz Marin School after attempting to steal his own children. The conclusion was obvious, even welcome: Julia Toledo was on the tracks with her family that night because she was running from her husband. Because she was afraid.

  This narrative began to crumble when reporters in Ecuador located Urgiles himself—dark-haired, thin, with the boot-leather body and the premature stoop of a lifelong laborer—in the small Andean town of Cojitambo, penniless and three thousand miles from Bridgeport. Shattered by the news, he told reporters that his Catholicism had caused tensions with his in-laws (former Catholics converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) and that they had forced him to leave the country. They had hidden his children before he left. He had gone to Luis Muñoz Marin School out of desperation, he said, not to steal his sons but to try to say good-bye to them. “I have a great pain in my chest,” he sobbed during an interview with a TV station in Quito.

  The crosshairs now shifted to Toledo’s sister, Maria, who owned the Shelton Street house in which Julia and her sons had rented an apartment. Toledo’s family, growing tired of the burden Julia and her children imposed on them, reportedly had refused to help with the babysitting. From that point on, the angle of decline steepened. Unable to afford child care, Toledo was forced to quit her job cleaning rooms at Fairfield University. Relations between the sisters deteriorated. Forced to the wall, Julia Toledo moved her family into the shelter.

  But blaming Maria and her relations availed us nothing. Even if, as neighbors claimed, Maria had ordered her sister to leave her apartment, had forced Julia, in effect, into the homeless shelter, the fact remained that she had not forced her to leave that night or to climb with her children onto the tracks. We might not like Maria Toledo, might even accuse her, with some justification, of heartlessness, but to blame her would be absurd. Another narrative, straining for closure, ended in midsentence.

  As did all the others. Toxicology reports determined that drugs did not play a role. The train was traveling below the speed limit for the area. The engineer was sober, devastated, blameless. Suicide? Maria Toledo’s claim that her sister had been unstable was refuted by all who had known Ju
lia in the weeks before she died. The composite portrait that emerged from their descriptions showed a woman full of hope, a survivor, a devoted mother capable of bringing a sense of play and possibility into a life of considerable hardship. All at Caroline House remembered Toledo triumphantly marching in to the Christmas party with a turkey on a platter, her four boys behind her. “Despite her poverty and the problems she had,” Sister Maureen told reporters, “she would make a game out of it with her children.”

  Reconstructions of the event by the Connecticut Department of Transportation and the MTA police also spoke against suicide. Just before they were hit, Toledo and three of her sons were on the south side of Track 3. A fourth son was on the north side. He was crossing over to meet them when the Amtrak blew its horn. Julia Toledo, her three sons in tow, was lunging to save him when they died.

  The accident caused one-hour delays of westbound Metro-North commuter trains during rush hour that Tuesday morning and scattered delays that afternoon and evening. By Wednesday, Metro-North service had returned to normal. And yet, for a moment, the tragedy had touched a collective nerve, sent a quick spasm through the virtual community. There was no narrative here, no saving plot. We’d been given a deconstructed poem—all scattered nouns and slippery modifiers, meanings all provisional—held together by nothing more substantial than the fact of its existence and its claim on our attention. An effect without cause, in other words. An apocalypse, writ small. A nightmare of reason and faith alike. It didn’t sit well.