by Patti Smith
I spread my few possessions on the bed: my camera with crushed bellows, identity card, notebook, pen, dead phone and some money. I decided to go home soon but not just yet. I used the hotel phone and called the poet who’d given me a black coat, a beloved coat that I had lost.
—Can I visit for a while, Ray?
—Sure, he said without hesitation, you can sleep in my café. I’m making green coffee.
I had a Japanese-style breakfast in an oblong lacquer box, then checked out. The old valet who had been stationed there for years asked me when I was coming back.
—Soon, I guess, when I have another job.
—It’s going to be different, he said mournfully. No more Japanese rooms.
—But this has always been a Japanese-style hotel, I protested.
—Things change, he was saying as I slid into the cab.
The flight to Tucson was two hours and eleven minutes. Ray was waiting when I disembarked.
—Where have you been? he said.
—Oh, around. Santa Cruz. San Diego. Where were you?
—Buying coffee in Guatemala. Then in the desert. I tried calling you, he said, narrowing his eyes.
—I didn’t get the message, I said somewhat apologetically. My phone’s been dead for quite a while, actually.
—Not that kind of message, he said.
—Oh yeah, I laughed. Well, I’m here, so I guess I got it.
He closed up the café, made us soup with corn and yucca, then unrolled a mat and made a bed for me. We had known each other a long time, had together traveled to hard places and could easily adapt to each other’s routines. He provided me with a work table and a child’s lamp with a waterfall painted on the skin of the shade that seemed to flow when you turned on the light. Late at night we listened to Maria Callas and Alan Hovhaness and Pavement. He played chess on his computer as I scanned the books lining his shelves, among them the Cantos of Pound, the collected works of Rudolf Steiner and a thick volume on Euclidean geometry, which I removed. It was a heavily illustrated book that I couldn’t begin to understand, but attempted to absorb.
—I lost your coat, I told him. The black one you gave me on my birthday.
—It will come back, he said.
—What if it doesn’t?
—Then it will greet you in the afterlife.
I smiled, feeling strangely reassured. I didn’t mention the candy wrappers or the missing kids or Ernest. It seemed as if I had already shed the skin of those days. We did talk of Sandy, though, and of many friends gone yet animated through mutual sentiment. After a few days, he had to leave. I don’t know when I’ll be back, he said, but stay as long as you like. He charged my phone and showed me how to use his shortwave radio. I messed with it for a while and tuned in the Grateful Dead channel.
It was still dark and Jerry was singing Palm Sunday. I was cold and searched the closet for a blanket. I found an off-white Pendleton, and when I shook it out something fell from a fold. As I bent down to pick it up, a shaft of moonlight shot through the window. It was a crumpled wrapper, Peanut Chewz, the wrong color, chews misspelled, no chocolate residue. Curious, I searched the closet for another and found a cardboard box loosely sealed with packing tape. An entire carton of pristine wrappers, hundreds of them. I pocketed a few, retaped the box and went outside to look at the moon, a large bright pie in the sky.
I went over our conversation. I tried to call you. I knew that he had. It was the psychic nature of our way. I thought back to the places we had traveled to: Havana, Kingston, Cambodia, Christmas Island, Vietnam. We had found Lenin Stream, where Ho Chi Minh washed. In Phnom Penh, leeches covered me when we were trapped in the flooding streets. I stood by the sink in the hotel bathroom and shuddered while Ray calmly picked them off. I remembered a baby elephant decorated with flowers emerging from the dense jungle in Angkor Wat. I had my camera and slipped away to follow it on my own. When I returned I found him sitting on the wide veranda of a temple, surrounded by children. He was singing to them, the sun a halo around his long hair. I could not help but think of the scripture—Suffer the little children to come unto me. He looked up at me and smiled. I heard laughter, tinkling bells, bare feet on the temple stairs. It was all so close, the rays of the sun, the sweetness, a sense of time lost forever.
* * *
—
IN THE MORNING, I drank two glasses of mineral water, scrambled some eggs with green onions and ate standing up. I counted my money, pocketed a map, filled a water bottle and wrapped some buns in a cloth. It was the Year of the Monkey and I had beamed down into a new territory, on a road without shadow beneath the molecular sun. I kept walking, figuring I’d eventually hitch a ride. I shaded my eyes and saw him coming. He rolled down the window of a beat blue Ford pickup, a chunk of old sky transfigured. He had a different shirt on, with all buttons intact, and in a way seemed like someone else, someone I once knew.
—You’re not a hologram, are you? I asked.
—Get in, said Ernest. We’ll drive through the desert. There’s a place I know that has the best huevos rancheros, and coffee that you can actually drink with pleasure. Then you can judge whether I’m a hologram or not.
There was a rosary wrapped around the rearview mirror. It felt familiar driving with Ernest in the middle of the unexplained; dream or no dream, we had already crisscrossed some curious territory. I trusted his hands on the wheel. They evoked other hands, those of good men.
—Ever hear of a muffler? I said.
—It’s an old truck, he replied.
Ernest did most of the talking. Metaphysical geometry, in his low, meditative style, as if he was drawing words from a secret compartment. I rolled down the window. Endless scrub dotted with supplicating cacti.
—There’s no hierarchy. That’s the miracle of a triangle. No top, no bottom, no taking sides. Take away the tags of the Trinity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—and replace each with love. See what I mean? Love. Love. Love. Equal weight encompassing the whole of our so-called spiritual existence.
We were heading west. Ernest pulled into a small outpost with a gas pump, some souvenirs and a small eatery. A woman came out and greeted him like an old friend, then served us coffee and two plates of huevos rancheros with refried beans and a silky mash of avocado. A paint-by-numbers oil of Our Lady of Guadalupe was tacked to the wall next to a faded photograph of Frida Kahlo and Trotsky in a tin frame.
—My granddaughter painted it, she said, wiping her hands on her apron.
It was pretty bad but who could fault a child?
—It’s very nice, I told her.
Ernest looked at me from across the table.
—Well? he said expectantly.
—Well what?
—You weren’t listening. You were somewhere else.
—Oh, sorry.
— So, he continued, moving the last of his beans around with his fork, are they the best huevos you’ve ever had?
Love. Love. Love.
Outpost, Salton Sea
—They’re really good, I said, but I may have had better.
—I’m listening, he said, vaguely irritated.
—In Acapulco in 1972. I was a guest in a villa overlooking the sea. I don’t know how to swim and there was a big pool, quite deep. Another guest taught me how to float on my back, which seemed quite an accomplishment at the time.
—Swimming is overrated, he said.
—One morning I got up before breakfast, stepped down into the pool and floated. I closed my eyes for the sun was already quite bright, and I felt free and content, but when I opened my eyes, there were hawks circling above me.
—How many?
—I don’t know. Maybe three, maybe five, but it seems to me they had red tails. They were beautiful, but too close, and I wondered if they thought I was dead and I panicked. The cl
ouds moved and the sun illuminated their wings, and I was flailing and I really thought I was going to drown. Suddenly there was a huge splash. The cook jumped in and grabbed me around the waist, lifted me above the water, pulled me out and pushed the water out of my lungs. Then he dried me off and made me huevos rancheros, the best I ever had.
—Did that really happen?
—Yes, I said, with absolutely no embellishment, I still dream of it. But it was not a dream.
—What was his name?
—He was the cook. I don’t remember his name but I’ve never forgotten him. I can see his face in many faces. He was the cook and wore white and he saved my life.
—Where do you actually come from?
—Why, I laughed, are you going to drive me home?
—Anything is possible, he said. After all, it’s the Year of the Monkey.
He laid some money down and we walked outside. I finished my coffee, then got back in the truck while he checked a tire. I was about to ask him what his take was on the new lunar year when I noticed the sun had shifted. We drove awhile in silence as the sky turned a brilliant rose with streaks of ruby and violet.
—The trouble with dreaming, he was saying, but I was a world away tramping the red earth in the heart of the Northern Territory.
—You need to go there, he said adamantly.
—Actually, I said, somewhat startled, what I really need is a bathroom.
There were no facilities around. I should have gone before but I seemed to remember an out-of-order sign on the restroom door. We were in the middle of a rock-and-scruff-covered plain. Somewhat arid, somewhat like the moon. Ernest pulled off the road and we just sat there. The pressure was on. Grabbing my sack, I walked well out of range and squatted behind a cluster of silvery cacti. A long trail of urine slid across the baked earth. I was mulling over the fact that Ernest somehow knew I was thinking about Ayers Rock. I thought of Sam and how years back we often dreamed the same dream, and how he seems, even now, to know what I’m thinking. The trail completely dried up and a tiny lizard scurried across my boot. Shaking myself back into the immediate, I rose and zipped up, then headed back to the truck. Strewn across the dead terrain were carcasses of small fish, hundreds of them, thousands maybe, curling in on themselves, like salt-encrusted candy wrappers. Approaching, I saw nothing but exit dust. Ernest had left. I stood very still, surveying the situation, thinking that’s all right, it’s as good a place as any to get lost in, the surrounds of the Salton Sea, that is no sea at all.
It seemed as if I walked for miles, yet everything stayed the same. I was sure that I had covered a lot of ground, but wasn’t getting anywhere. I tried speeding up, then slowing down, figuring I’d collide with myself and break the loop, but no such luck, the long desert panorama kept readjusting itself, until any new routine became a loop in itself. I pulled a stale bun wrapped in a napkin out of my pocket. It was dusted in sugar and tasted faintly of oranges, like one of those Day of the Dead cakes. I got to thinking about the boys in the diner, wondering if their conversation was mere coincidence and if my assessment of candy wrapper as a noun was actually correct. I also wondered if the mundanity of my train of thought was hindering my progress.
I switched to a mental dart game, a revolving target of time-altering possibilities that Sandy and I would play on long drives. I released a dart that lit all the way to Flanders at the close of the Middle Ages, prompting me to assault the air with new queries, such as why the gilded phrase of the young Virgin, swathed in robes, reads from right to left and also downwards on the Annunciation panel of the Ghent Altarpiece. Might it be that the painter was merely toying with us? Or was the imperceptible balloon encasing her words upside down and backwards simply to accommodate the eye of the Holy Spirit, translucent and winged, positioned above her?
This preoccupation gradually eclipsed any concerns of nouns and verbs or my whereabouts as I fluidly revisited the historical past. I saw the hand of the master painter closing the outer wings of the panels. I saw other hands reverently opening the same panels. Their wooden frames were dark from the deepening of time. I saw thieves carrying the panels away to a ship that sailed into treacherous seas. I saw the battered hull and the broken mast. The sky was pale blue without a single cloud and I kept walking, drinking slowly, carefully measuring my water supply. I walked until I was where I wanted to be, before the dove and the maiden, the fat of the lamb melting away.
WHAT MARCUS SAID
St. Jerome’s study, Albrecht Dürer
Traveling west to east across time zones is harder to negotiate than when reversed. Something about pacemaker cells. Not a reference to an artificial device but the portion of the mind that keeps us bodily in sync. Some weeks on the West Coast had definitely toyed with my P-cells. Groggy at dinner, then nodding, and waking at 2 a.m. I took to night walking, bundled in silence. With an absence of traffic, there was a relatable deadness in the air. Back home, in the center of February, the forgotten month.
Valentine’s Day was the coldest on record in New York City’s history. A complex mantle of frost covered everything, bare branches strung with a symphony of frozen hearts. Pendants of ice, lethal enough to wound, cracked and plummeted from the edges of the overhangs and scaffolding onto the sidewalks, left to lie like discarded weapons of a primitive age.
I wrote very little, nor did I commune within the dreamer’s dream. Across America one light after another seemed to burn out. The oil lamps of another age flickered and died. The sign was silent, but the books on my night table beckoned. The Children’s Crusade. The Colossus. Marcus Aurelius. I opened his Meditations: Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to live…This made terrible sense to me, climbing the chronological ladder, approaching my seventieth year. Get a grip, I told myself, just revel in the last seasons of being sixty-nine, the sacred Jimi Hendrix number, with his answer to such a caution: I’m going to live my life the way I want to. I imagined Marcus and Jimi clashing, each choosing a massive icicle that would melt in their hands long before they acquiesced to spar.
The cat was rubbing against my knee. I opened a can of sardines, chopped up her share, then cut some onions, toasted two slices of oat bread and made myself a sandwich. Staring at my image on the mercurial surface of the toaster, I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously. I ate hastily, failing to clean up, actually craving some small sign of life, an army of ants dragging crumbs dislodged from the cracks of the kitchen tiles. I longed for buds sprouting, doves cooing, darkness lifting, spring returning.
Marcus Aurelius asks us to note the passing of time with open eyes. Ten thousand years or ten thousand days, nothing can stop time, or change the fact that I would be turning seventy in the Year of the Monkey. Seventy. Merely a number but one indicating the passing of a significant percentage of the allotted sand in an egg timer, with oneself the darn egg. The grains pour and I find myself missing the dead more than usual. I notice that I cry more when watching television, triggered by romance, a retiring detective shot in the back while staring into the sea, a weary father lifting his infant from a crib. I notice that my own tears burn my eyes, that I am no longer a fast runner and that my sense of time seems to be accelerating.
I do what I can to augment this recurring image in my favor, even replacing the egg timer with a crystal hourglass passing the dust of ground marble, such as the type found in the small wooden study of St. Jerome or the workshop of Albrecht Dürer. Even as there is most likely some finite principle concerning the rate that sand passes through an hourglass, no advantage in having a stately glass or more perfect grains.
Since contemplating Marcus, I try to be more aware of the passing hours, that I might see it happen, that cosmic shift from one digit to another. Despite all efforts February just slips away, though being a leap year there is one extra day to observe. I stare at the number 29 on the daily calendar, then reluctantly tear off the page. March first. My
wedding anniversary, twenty years without him, which prompts me to pull an oblong box from under the bed, opening the lid long enough to smooth the folds of a Victorian dress partially obscured by a fragile veil. Sliding the box back into its place I feel strangely off-center, a moment of sorrow’s vertigo.
In the outer world, the sky had fast darkened, high winds moved in from four directions, churning in concert with a rapid onset of torrential rains, and just like that, everything broke. It happened so quickly that I had no time to retrieve clothes and books from the floor or seal up my compromised skylight, water rushing everywhere, surging above the ankles, then up to my knees. The door seemingly disappeared and I was trapped in the center of my room when an elliptical blackness, a widening aperture, taking up much of the plaster wall, opened onto a lengthy path strewn with dark toys. Wading toward it I saw errant tops zigzagging through a narrow lea of daffodils, mowing them down, tossing their trumpet shapes into the unstable air. I reached out, blindly seeking a way out or way into the void, when a chorus of birdlike cries startled me.
—Just a game, a playful voice twittered.
There was no mistaking the supercilious tones of the sign. I backed away, marshalling my courage.
—Very well, I retorted, but which game?
—The Game of Havoc, of course.
I knew something of this so-called game. Havoc, an uppercase game with a lowercase deity, spelling nothing but trouble for the unwary participant. One finds himself assailed with components of a dreadful equation. One evil eye, two spinning stars, perpetually winding gears. Unequivocal havoc instigated by the current lunar god and his band of winged monkeys, a pervasive lot who once preyed upon the unsuspecting Dorothy in the hypnotic fields of Oz.