by Patti Smith
—I think I’ll pass, I said adamantly, and as swiftly as it all began, it abruptly ended.
I assessed the damage. Save for a bit of a mess all was as it was. Confronted with sudden calm, I inspected the length of the wall: not the slightest trace of an oval access, not a ripple, the plaster was completely smooth. I ran my hand across the finish, imaging frescoes, a bustling studio lined with vats of glittering pigments, a sky of Prussian blue, yellow ochre and crimson lake. I once yearned to exist in such times, a young girl with a muslin cap gazing at Goethe’s color wheel, bright and obscure, turning slowly beneath the surface of a mercury pool. Momentarily retracing its source, I noted that the narcissus of spring had budded too early, then watched as it shivered and recoiled.
Water dripped from the unsecured section of the skylight. Severed blooms everywhere, releasing an anesthetizing scent when crushed underfoot. Shrugging off any drowsing effect, I tossed the yellow heads into the dustbin, got out the mop and bucket and wiped down the wood floors. Afterwards I set about the task of separating several waterlogged pages of a scattered manuscript, dismayed to watch words dissolve into indecipherable smears.
—The pool is also a mirror, I said aloud, to whoever might be listening.
I sat on the edge of the bed, took some deep breaths and slipped on some dry socks. The coming days of March taunted me. The death of Artaud. Robert Mapplethorpe’s passing. The birth of Robin, and my mother’s birthday, on the same day the swallows are said to return to Capistrano, followed by the first day of spring. My mother. How I sometimes longed to hear her voice. I wondered if her swallows would return this year, a child’s query revisited.
March winds. March wedding. The Ides of March. Josephine March. Numinous March with its strong associations. And of course, there has always been the March Hare. I remember as a child being quite taken with the quirky Hare, sure that he and the Mad Hatter were one and the same, even sharing the same initials. I held to the idea that they were transposable and yet could remain themselves. Rational adults thought this improvable, yet I could not be argued down, not by a Tenniel illustration or Disney cartoon, not even by Lewis Carroll himself. My logic may have been full of holes but so was Wonderland. The Hare presided over an endless tea party, as calculable time had been slain long before the party began. It was the Hatter who did the slaying, spreading his arms and singing the immutable Wonderland theme, one that I listened for intently throughout my childhood. When Johnny Depp embraced the role of the Hatter he too was drawn into this multiplicity of being and ceased to be just Johnny. Without a doubt, he became the harbinger of this hallowed little song.
—Will we die a little? he sang, extending his arms as if to encompass all. I heard this with my own ears as each note plopped like a joyous tear, then dissipated. Since then I have often considered the bidding of Johnny’s Hatter—Will we die a little? What could he have meant? A blameless bit of topsy-turvy, no doubt, or a kind of homeopathic spell, a small death immunizing against the terrors of the greater one.
The first hours of March melted into the days that followed. I let myself be led, no more than a droplet sliding down the spiraled tail of the monkey. On my mother’s birthday, it was reported that the swallows had indeed found their way back to Capistrano. That night I dreamt that I was back in San Francisco at the Miyako Hotel. I was standing in the center of a Zen garden that was not much more than a glorified sandbox, and I heard my mother’s voice. Patricia, was all she said.
On the first day of spring I shook out the feather bed and opened the shutters. Virtual lockets were falling from the branches of young trees and the numbing fragrance of the narcissus returned. I commenced with my chores, whistling an oft-forgotten tune, certain that we, as the seasons, prevail and that ten thousand years is yet a blink in the eye of a ringed planet or that of an archangel armed with a sword of glass.
BIG RED
Sam’s Stetson
April Fool’s Day. A trickster grappled with the reins of action, as balls of confusion rolled toward us, scores of steely shooters, tripping us up, keeping us off-balance. The news pounded, and minds raced to make sense of the campaign of a candidate compounding lies at such a speed that one could not keep up, or break down. The world twisted at his liking, poured over with a metallic substance, fool’s gold, already peeling away. Rain and more rain, April showers, just like the nursery rhyme, it fell straight across America, to the west, over Marin County, a melancholy witness to Sandy’s struggles. I tried to shrug off unease, do my work, say my prayers, bide my time. More rain pelted the skylight, a thousand erratic hoofbeats, munificent energies racing toward earth.
I sat at my desk and opened my computer, slowly wading through a long chain of requests. There were plenty of them, mostly work-related, and I set about the task of considering each potential job, stopping excitedly somewhere in the middle. I was offered work in Australia, in a year’s time, concerts in Sydney, Melbourne and a festival in Brisbane. I closed my computer, pulled out an atlas and turned to a map of Australia. It was quite a trek and a long time away, but I knew exactly what I would do, perform nine concerts and then, with the band gone home, hop on a prop plane to Alice Springs and hire a driver to take me to Uluru. I answered immediately. Yes, I will do the work, and marked the days in the 2017 calendar, which was completely empty. Several As across the following March, Australia to Ayers.
The sign at the Dream Motel inexplicably gleaned that I longed to see Ayers Rock, as did Ernest. Decades ago my young son, inspired by a favored Australian cartoon series that we watched together, drew pictures of it with red crayon inside my notebooks, obscuring the writing beneath. The hopes of one day going with Sam were dashed, but I would make my way surely with his blessing. In the closet my boots were waiting, their soles curiously embedded with the red soil of a place I had never been.
I called Sam a few days later but didn’t yet mention the great red monolith. Instead we talked about red horses.
—It was Secretariat’s birthday a few days ago.
—Now, how would you know the birthday of a horse? Sam laughed.
—Because it’s a horse you love, I said.
—Come to Kentucky. I’ll tell you the story of Man o’ War, another big red. We can bet on the Derby and watch it on television.
—I will, Sam. I’ll take a look at the field before I do.
On May Day, I sat on my porch in Rockaway. There was nothing but blue wildflowers growing in my little patch, as if it had been seeded by sky. Out here, though only a long subway ride away, the worldview falls away. What remains is a smattering of butterflies, two ladybugs and one praying mantis. It is all about my desk with a cabinet portrait of the young Baudelaire and a photo-booth shot of a young Jane Bowles and an ivory Christ without arms and a small framed print of Alice conversing with the Dodo. It’s all about a slightly blurred Polaroid of me and Sam at Café ’Ino a few years ago when things were almost normal.
I studied The Morning Telegraph, as I had done as a young girl mimicking my father, a meditative handicapper. Maybe it was in my blood, for I was usually pretty good at picking horses, especially to place. I couldn’t muster a feel for this particular field, though, but finally settled on Gun Runner. Two days later I bought a ticket to Cincinnati, paid a driver to take me over the state line to a gas station near Midland where I would be picked up. I spotted the white truck approaching. Sam and his sister Roxanne. I noted with a pang that Sam wasn’t driving.
Last Thanksgiving, Sam had picked me up at the airport in his truck, with some effort, using his elbows to guide the steering wheel. He did the things he could, and when he couldn’t he adjusted. At that time, he was editing The One Inside. We’d wake early, work for several hours, then take a break, sitting outside on his Adirondack chairs mostly talking literature. Nabokov and Tabucchi and Bruno Schulz. I slept on the leather couch. The sound of his breathing machine had a soft, enveloping hum. O
nce he had prepared for bed, pulled up his cover and folded his hands, I knew it was time to sleep and something within me acquiesced.
—Everybody dies, he had said, looking down at the hands that were slowly losing their strength, though I never saw this coming. But I’m alright with it. I’ve lived my life the way I wanted.
Now, as always, we fell right into work mode. He was in the homestretch, bent on finishing The One Inside. Physically, writing had become increasingly tiresome, so I would read the manuscript to him and he’d consider what was needed. His last edits required more thinking than writing, searching for the desired combination of words. As the book unfolded, I was dazzled by the bravado of his language, a narrative mix of cinematic poetry, pictures of the Southwest, surreal dreams and his singular dark humor. Inklings of his present challenges emerged here and there, vague yet undeniable. The title was gleaned from a Bruno Schulz quote, and when the question of a cover came up, it was right there, a photograph by the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide that Sam had tucked in the corner of the kitchen window. A Seri woman with loose, dark hair and flowing skirts in the Sonoma desert carrying a boom box. We looked at it over our coffee, nodding complicity. From the window, we could see his horses coming up by the fence. Horses that he could no longer ride. He never said a word about it.
On the morning of the Derby we placed our bets. It was going to be a fast track and none of us had a feel for a winner. Sam told me to box Gun Runner, guaranteeing a payout if it came in third, so I did. The race was set to go off at 6:51 Eastern Daylight Time, the 142nd running at Churchill Downs. As we gathered around the TV, it occurred to me that it was my late father-in-law Dewey Smith’s birthday. When my husband was alive we also would gather around the TV at his parents’ house to watch the Derby, and I wondered what horse Dewey might have favored. He was born in eastern Kentucky and his father was a sheriff who patrolled his county on horseback, with a notched rifle by his side. Three years in a row to Dewey’s astonishment I had picked the horse to come in second, but today my horse Gun Runner came in third.
After dinner, I went out and sat on the front steps to look at the sky. The moon was a waning crescent, like the tattoo between Sam’s thumb and forefinger. Some kind of magic, I whispered, more a plea than anything else.
* * *
—
A FEW DAYS AFTER I got home I received a small parcel and a note from Sam’s sister. Sam had sent his pocketknife along with my winnings, wrapped in newspaper. I placed the knife in a glass cabinet next to my father’s coffee cup. In the days that followed I felt tired and uncertain, not my usual way at all. I reasoned I was just at a low point, maybe fighting off a cold, and decided to do nothing.
The thirtieth of May was Joan of Arc’s feast day, traditionally a day of enforced optimism. I was still feeling low and my cough escalated, yet I had the impression that something was bubbling underneath, that something was going to happen, like the birth of a poem or a small volcano erupting. That night I had the dream, one that seemed more gift than dream, medicinal and pure like an untainted arctic stream.
In the dream, we were alone in the kitchen and Sam was telling me of the heat in the center of Australia, and the ruby glow of Ayers Rock and how back then—in the day, as he called it—before they had resorts, he went there alone without a guide, by jeep, and saw it for himself. A spool of memory, like a grainy home movie, unwound and we watched as he got out of the jeep and commenced the forbidden climb. He gathered the tears of the Aborigines. They were black, not red, and he slid them into a small, worn leather pouch, like the gris-gris pouch that fell from the pocket of Tom Horn when they hanged him for God knows what.
I looked at Sam sitting motionless in his mechanized wheelchair that was parked before the kitchen table. His head had become a massive diamond slowly turning, emitting rays from crusted eyes. There was still hope then, even as messed up as it was. The room contracted and expanded like a lung or the bellows of a bagpipe. I swiftly followed his orders, disengaging the oxygen.
—Are you ready? he said.
—But how can you possibly breathe?
—I am no longer in need of it, he answered.
We journeyed until Sam found the spot he was looking for, then we sat on wooden crates, just waiting. A woman came and set to work, placing a low wooden table before us. Another brought two bowls but no utensils and a third carried a cauldron of steaming soup. The fetus of a black chicken floated in a broth of eighteen medicinal herbs, with nine yolks, forming a corona about its tiny head. A solar system of yolks, a perfect arc from shoulder to tiny shoulder.
—It’s an ancient recipe, he explained, this broth comes from the sun. Drink up, it’s a gift. I was handed a ladle and the women withdrew. I was dismayed that I was obliged to be the one to destroy the floating image that had already taken on the aspect of an embroidered holy card.
—You’ll have to do it, he said, looking down at his hands.
I was sure it would make me sick, but he winked at me, so I drank, and in an instant a path appeared, a stardust path. We rose but I turned away, feeling confused. Then Sam started talking, he told me the story of Man o’ War, the greatest racehorse that ever lived. And he told me it was possible to love a horse as much as a human being.
—I dream of horses, he whispered. I’ve been dreaming of them all my life.
We traveled on and I did get sick just as I feared. After three days I was still sweating and vomiting. I was drained and dehydrated and we had to stop at every imaginable stream so I could drink. On the fourth day, I saw that Sam was scooping up the water with his own hands.
—How could it be? I was thinking.
—The broth is working, he said, reading my thoughts.
Yet he was not really speaking. He was standing at the edge of an enormous gorge, greater than the Grand Canyon, greater than the diamond crater of Siberia, chewing on the dead end of a piece of straw. I sat very still. He was listening to a lone stampede, as if from the breath of a deadly dream. And then I saw, through his mind’s eye, the greatest racehorse that ever lived, a white star on his forehead and his back red and glowing like an ember in the dark.
INTERMISSION
My father’s cup
Nothing is ever solved. Solving is an illusion. There are moments of spontaneous brightness, when the mind appears emancipated, but that is mere epiphany.
These were the words kinetically trailing, as if that damn sign had followed me all the way back to New York City. I sat up with a start. I guess I had nodded off briefly at my desk working on my computer, for a redundant train of errant vowels ended an unfinished sentence.
—Needed are proofs. Only proofs grant the mathematician true distinction.
—To say nothing of the poet detective, I reply grumpily.
I rise and go into the bathroom, stopping to wipe the toilet seat as the ghost of a paw print can be detected. Proofs, I muse, washing my hands. Euclid knew it. Gauss and Galileo. Proofs, I say aloud, scanning the space around me. In a moment of decisive action, I open the window, strip the bed and nail the top sheet to the wall, scrutinizing its whiteness. From a carton of old supplies, I unearth a black illustrator pen, the kind artists used in the twentieth century. After standing motionless for several minutes I trace the known bends and curves of the stratosphere on the surface of the sheet.
In the days to come the notations on the sheet multiply. Bits of Greek, algebraic expressions, morphing Möbius strips, and the rusting coil of a spring streaking the sheet with traces of an indecipherable equation.
—Nothing is solved, chides the sign.
—Nothing solved, cries justice and the listing scales.
Following their voices, I enter the library of a great hall with massive volumes containing images tipped and preserved, as in a scrapbook, with penciled captions. The ship approaching the harbor of Brundisium as Virgil breathed his last
. Ghost ships frozen in the arctic sea, hung with veils of ice glistening like African diamonds. Floating bones of prehistoric giants that were once proud icebergs. Migrant vessels overturning and the blue faces of children and collapsing hives and a dead giraffe.
Nothing is solved, whispers a curl of dust as I replace the heavy volume on an equally dusty shelf. Not a damn thing, cosmically or comically. I can feel the sign tracking me. In retaliation I track right back, though sorry to see it somewhat enervated, not itself at all.
—Nothing is solved, repeats the sign.
— Nothing solved, echoes nature.
I seek solace in the clouds rapidly changing shape—one fish, one hummingbird, one snorkeling boy, pictures of gone afternoons.
It is the unprecedented heat and the dying reef and the arctic shelf breaking apart that haunts me. It is Sandy slipping in and out of consciousness, battling a run of bacterial infections, while mapping his own apocalyptic scenarios straight from the bowels of the Heart o’ the City Hotel. I can hear him thinking, I can hear the walls breathing. Perhaps a break is needed, an intermission of sorts, withdrawing from one scenario, allowing something else to unfold. Something negligible, light and entirely unexpected.
Some time ago during an intermission of Tristan and Isolde at La Scala, seeking a bathroom I inadvertently entered an unlocked chamber where costumes of Maria Callas were being prepared for display. There before me was the distinctive black caftan she wore as Medea in the film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. There was also her robe, headdress with veil, several strings of weighty amber beads and the heavily embroidered chasuble she was obliged to wear while racing through the desert in heat so intense that Pasolini was said to have directed in swim shorts. His Medea, though played by the world’s most expressive soprano, did not sing, which Sandy and I found to be exquisitely irreverent, adding a dissenting tension to her magnificent performance. I lifted the amber and ran my hand down the length of her robe, the same that had transformed her as the witch of Colchis. The warning rang and I hurried back to my seat, my companions sensing nothing unusual whatsoever. They had no idea that in the space of an intermission I had touched the sacred vestments of Medea, whose threads contained the sweat of the great Callas and the invisible handprint of Pasolini.