M Train
Page 16
I asked if anyone had seen Zak.
—He made the coffee, they told me.
—Is he here? I asked.
—He’s somewhere around.
Clouds drifted overhead. Memorial clouds. Passenger jets were taking off from JFK. Winch finished his tasks and we got back into the pickup truck and headed back across the channel, past the airport, over the bridge, and into the city. My dungarees were still damp from skirting the sea, and bits of sand shook out onto the floor that had been caught in the rolled-up folds. When I finished the coffee I couldn’t part with the empty container. It occurred to me I could preserve the history of ’Ino, the lost boardwalk, and whatever came to mind in microscript upon the Styrofoam cup, like an engraver etching the Twenty-third Psalm on the head of a pin.
—
WHEN FRED DIED, we held his memorial in the Detroit Mariners’ Church where we were married. Every November Father Ingalls, who wed us, held a service in memory of the twenty-nine crewmembers who went down in Lake Superior on the Edmund Fitzgerald, ending with ringing the heavy brotherhood bell twenty-nine times. Fred was deeply moved by this ritual, and as his memorial coincided with theirs, the father allowed the flowers and the model of the ship to be left on the stage. Father Ingalls presided over the service and wore an anchor around his neck in lieu of a cross.
The evening of the service, my brother, Todd, came upstairs for me, but I was still in bed.
—I can’t do it, I told him.
—You have to, he said adamantly, and he shook me from my torpor, helped me to dress, and drove me to the church. I thought about what I would say, and the song “What a Wonderful World” came on the radio. Whenever we heard it Fred would say, Trisha, it’s your song. Why does it have to be my song? I’d protest. I don’t even like Louis Armstrong. But he would insist the song was mine. It felt like a sign from Fred, so I decided to sing “Wonderful World” a cappella at the service. As I sang I felt the simplistic beauty of the song, but I still didn’t understand why he connected it with me, a question I had waited too long to ask. Now it’s your song, I said, addressing a lingering void. The world seemed drained of wonder. I did not write poems in a fever. I did not see the spirit of Fred before me or feel the spinning trajectory of his journey.
My brother stayed with me through the days that followed. He promised the children he would be there for them always and would return after the holidays. But exactly a month later he had a massive stroke while wrapping Christmas presents for his daughter. The sudden death of Todd, so soon after Fred’s passing, seemed unbearable. The shock left me numb. I spent hours sitting in Fred’s favorite chair, dreading my own imagination. I rose and performed small tasks with the mute concentration of one imprisoned in ice.
Eventually I left Michigan and returned to New York with our children. One afternoon while crossing the street I noticed I was crying. But I could not identify the source of my tears. I felt a heat containing the colors of autumn. The dark stone in my heart pulsed quietly, igniting like a coal in a hearth. Who is in my heart? I wondered.
I soon recognized Todd’s humorous spirit, and as I continued my walk I slowly reclaimed an aspect of him that was also myself—a natural optimism. And slowly the leaves of my life turned, and I saw myself pointing out simple things to Fred, skies of blue, clouds of white, hoping to penetrate the veil of a congenital sorrow. I saw his pale eyes looking intently into mine, trying to trap my walleye in his unfaltering gaze. That alone took up several pages that filled me with such painful longing that I fed them into the fire in my heart, like Gogol burning page by page the manuscript of Dead Souls Two. I burned them all, one by one; they did not form ash, did not go cold, but radiated the warmth of human compassion.
How Linden Kills the Thing She Loves
LINDEN IS RUNNING light-footed, swift. She stops, drawn to a perfectly formed tree in the center of a meadow. She is impermeable save for her Achilles’ heel—Detective James Skinner, head of her unit, and a suppressed desire for his love. They once partnered in the field and clandestinely in bed, but that is seemingly behind them. Still, a pale shadow moves across her face when she is in his presence. As she approaches her front door she is surprised to find him waiting for her once more. Distances dissolve. Skinner comes to her human. Linden moves closer. In the hands of Skinner she is home.
A coin spins on its edge. How it falls is of little consequence. Heads you lose, tails you lose. Linden ignores the signs, believing she’s in luck, striking a perfect balance of love and work, Skinner and her badge. The morning light illumines her rosegold hair pulled back with a rubber band. Silhouettes of victims in an unfolding paper-doll stream momentarily dispel in the flame they have reignited.
The sun shifts. One more body burning, evidence uncovered, a ring tightening around her throat. Surrendering to love, Skinner and Linden are mutually exposed. In his eyes she suddenly sees other eyes, the horror of lurid depths. Forensic traces. Soiled slips. Hair ribbons soaked in shame.
The rain falls from the blue-eyed skies of Sarah Linden. She is washed with murderous clarity. Using all her God-given skills, she identifies Skinner, her mentor and her lover, as the serial killer.
Holder, her true confidant, pieces things together a beat behind her. With instinctive grace Holder traces her movements. Racing through the oppressive rain, he tracks them to Skinner’s concealed lake house. The promise of a lovers’ tryst now becomes the setting of an inexorable justice. Linden feels the vestiges of her joy floating among the dead. She will compassionately execute Skinner, ignoring Holder’s pleas. He is cautious, protective; she is reckless. He watches in horror as Linden pulls the trigger, putting Skinner out of his misery, like a dying calf on the side of a road.
Stunned, I can only bow my head. I meld with the racing mind of Holder desperately trying to interpret her actions, foresee her future. My empty thermos remains by the bed wrapped in the ominous atmosphere of episode number 38. It is not long before I am confronted with the cruelest of all spoilers: there will be no episode 39.
The Killing season is over.
Linden has lost everything and now I am losing her. A television network has snuffed The Killing. There is the promise of a new show, yet another detective. But I am not ready to let her go and I do not want to move on. I want to watch as Linden plumbs the depths of the lake searching for feminine bones. What do we do with those that can be accessed and dismissed by a channel changer, that we love no less than a nineteenth-century poet or an admired stranger or a character from the pen of Emily Brontë? What do we do when one of them commingles with our own sense of self, only to be transferred into a finite space within an on-demand portal?
—
All is in limbo. An anguished moan rises from the black water. Swathed in pink industrial plastic, the dead await their champion—Linden of the Lake. But she has been relegated to no more than a statue in the rain with a gun. Having done the unpardonable, she will virtually lay her badge on the table.
A television series has its own moral reality. Pacing, I envision a spin-off: Linden in the Valley of the Lost. On the screen the black water surrounds the lake house. The lake takes on the shape of a diseased kidney.
Linden stares into the abyss where their sad remains lie.
It’s the loneliest thing in the world, waiting to be found, she says.
Holder, numb with grief and insomnia, waits in that same car drinking the same cold coffee. Sitting vigil until she signals and he is again by her side as they tramp purgatory together.
Week by week a victim’s story unfolds. Holder will connect the spatter of blood dots; she will root out the healing spring. The Linden tree will spread the scent of lime, purifying each girl shedding her plastic shroud and the linen strips of hell. But who will purify Linden? What dark maid will cleanse the chambers of her adulterated heart?
Linden is running. She abruptly stops and faces the camera. A Flemish Madonna with the eyes of a woman from the backwoods who has slept with the devil.
Valley of the Lost
FRED HAD a cowboy, the only cowboy among his cavalry.
He was molded from red plastic, slightly bowlegged, and poised to shoot. Fred called him Reddy. At night Reddy was not returned into a cardboard box with the rest of the components of Fred’s small fortress but set on a low bookcase next to his bed where he could see him. One day as his mother was cleaning his room she dusted the bookcase and Reddy fell unnoticed and just disappeared. Fred searched for him for weeks but he was nowhere to be found. He silently called to Reddy as he lay in bed. When he set up his fort and arranged his men on the floor of his room, he felt Reddy near, calling to him. It was not his own voice but Reddy who called. Fred believed that, and Reddy became part of our common treasure, occupying a special place in the Valley of the Lost Things.
Several years later Fred’s mother cleared out his old room. The floor was in such bad condition that several boards needed replacing. As the old boards were removed, all sorts of things emerged. And there, among the cobwebs and coins and bits of petrified gum, was Reddy, who had somehow fallen into a wide crack and slid out of sight, out of the reach of a boy’s small hand. His mother returned Reddy, and Fred placed him on the bookcase in our bedroom where he could see him.
Some things are called back from the Valley. I believe Reddy called out to Fred. I believe Fred heard. I believe in their mutual jubilance. Some things are not lost but sacrificed. I saw my black coat in the Valley of the Lost on a random mound being picked over by desperate urchins. Someone good will get it, I told myself, the Billy Pilgrim of the lot.
Do our lost possessions mourn us? Do electric sheep dream of Roy Batty? Will my coat, riddled with holes, remember the rich hours of our companionship? Asleep on buses from Vienna to Prague, nights at the opera, walks by the sea, the grave of Swinburne in the Isle of Wight, the arcades of Paris, the caverns of Luray, the cafés of Buenos Aires. Human experience bound in its threads. How many poems bleeding from its ragged sleeves? I averted my eyes just for a moment, drawn by another coat that was warmer and softer, but that I did not love. Why is it that we lose the things we love, and things cavalier cling to us and will be the measure of our worth after we’re gone?
Then it occurred to me. Perhaps I absorbed my coat. I suppose I should be grateful, considering its power, that my coat did not absorb me. Then I would seem to be among the missing though merely tossed over a chair, vibrating, holey.
Our lost things returning to the places from where they came, to their absolute origins: a crucifix to its living tree or rubies to their home in the Indian Ocean. The genesis of my coat, made from fine wool, spinning backwards through the looms, onto the body of a lamb, a black sheep a bit apart from the flock, grazing on the side of a hill. A lamb opening its eyes to the clouds that resemble for a moment the woolly backs of his own kind.
—
The moon was full and low like a wagon wheel, no doubt flanked by the two identical towers on Lafayette Street where the head of Picasso’s girl with a ponytail dominates a small square. I washed and braided my hair and removed the coffee containers lining my bed, placed the scattered books and pages of notes in neat piles against the wall, removed my Irish linen from a wooden chest, and changed my bedding. I lifted the muslin veil that protects my Brancusi photographs from fading in the sun. A night shot of an endless column in the garden of Steichen and an immense marble teardrop. I wanted to look at them for a while before I turned out the light.
I dreamed I was somewhere that was also nowhere. It looked like a thoroughfare in Raleigh, with small highways crossing each other. No one was around, and then I saw Fred running, though he seldom ran. He didn’t like to hurry. At the same moment something whizzed past him, a wheel on its side, racing as if alive across the highway. And then I saw the object’s face—a clock with no hands.
I awoke and it was still dark. I lay there for a time reliving the dream, feeling other dreams stacked behind it. I slowly began to recall the entire body, telescoping backwards, letting my mind stitch the fleeting pieces together. I was high in the mountains. I trustingly followed my guide along a narrow, winding path. I noticed he was slightly bowlegged and he stopped abruptly.
—Look, he said.
We were on a high, straight drop. I froze, gripped by an irrational fear of the emptiness before me. He stood with confidence but I had trouble getting a true footing. I tried to reach for him but he turned and left.
—How can you leave me here? I cried. How shall I get back?
I called to him but he didn’t answer. When I tried to move, loose earth and stone broke away. I could not see any way out except for falling or flying.
And then the physical terror lifted and I was on the ground, before a low, whitewashed structure with a blue door. A youth in a billowing white shirt approached me.
—How did I get here? I asked him.
—We called to Fred, he said.
I saw two men lingering by an old caravan with one wheel missing.
—Would you like some tea?
—Yes, I said. He motioned to the others. One of them went inside to prepare it. He heated the water on a brazier and stuffed a pot with mint and brought it to me.
—Would you like a saffron cake?
—Yes, I said, suddenly hungry.
—We saw you were in danger. We intervened and called to Fred. He swept you up and carried you here.
He is dead, I thought. How is it possible?
—There is a matter of a fee, said the youth. One hundred thousand dirhams.
—I’m not sure I have that much money, but I will get it.
I reached into my pocket and it was filled with money, exactly what he asked for, but the scene had shifted. I was alone on a stony path surrounded by chalky hills. I paused to reflect on what had happened. Fred had rescued me in a dream. And then suddenly I was back on the highway and I saw him in the distance trailing after the wheel with the face of a clock with no hands.
—Get it, Fred! I cried.
And the wheel collided with a massive cornucopia of lost things. It fell on its side, and Fred knelt and placed his hand on it. He flashed a huge smile, one of absolute joy, from a place with no beginning or end.
Credit 19.1
The Hour of Noon
MY FATHER WAS BORN in the shadows of the Bethlehem Steel Mill as the noon whistle blew. Thus he was born, in accordance with Nietzsche, at the appointed hour when certain individuals are granted the ability to grasp the mystery of the eternal recurrence of all things. My father’s mind was beautiful. He seemed to see all philosophies with equal weight and wonder. If one could perceive an entire universe, the possibility of its existence seemed quite tangible. As real as the Riemann hypothesis, as belief itself, unfaltering and divine.
We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away. Our father manning the loom of eternal return. Our mother wandering toward paradise, releasing the thread. In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all. We imagine a house, a rectangle of hope. A room with a single bed with a pale coverlet, a few precious books, a stamp album. Walls papered in faded floral fall away and burst as a newborn meadow speckled with sun and a stream emptying into a greater stream where a small boat awaits with two glowing oars and one blue sail.
Credit 19.2
Hermann Hesse’s typewriter, Montagnola, Switzerland
When my children were young I contrived such vessels. I set them to sail, though I didn’t board them. I rarely left the perimeter of our home. I said my prayers in the night by the canal draped by ancient longhaired willows. The things I touched were living. My husband’s fingers, a dandelion, a skinned knee. I didn’t seek to fra
me these moments. They passed without souvenir. But now I cross the sea with the sole aim to possess within a single image the straw hat of Robert Graves, typewriter of Hesse, spectacles of Beckett, sickbed of Keats. What I have lost and cannot find I remember. What I cannot see I attempt to call. Working on a string of impulses, bordering illumination.
I photographed the grave of Rimbaud when I was twenty-six. The pictures were not exceptional but contained the mission itself, which I had long forgotten. Rimbaud died in a Marseille hospital in 1891 at the age of thirty-seven. His last wish was to return to Abyssinia where he had been a coffee trader. He was dying and it was not possible for him to be carried aboard ship for the long journey. In his delirium he imagined himself on horseback in the high Abyssinian plains. I had a string of nineteenth-century blue glass trade beads from Harar and I got it in mind to take them to him. In 1973 I went to his gravesite in Charleville, near the bank of the Meuse River, and pressed the beads deep into the soil of a large urn that stood before his tombstone. Something of his beloved country near to him. I hadn’t connected the beads with the stones I’d gathered for Genet, but I supposed they originated from the same romantic impulse. Presumptuous, perhaps, though not erring. I have since returned and the urn is no longer there, but I believe I am still the same person; no amount of change in the world can change that.
I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won’t, that we are different. As a child I thought I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old? I say to my joints, my iron-colored hair. Now I am older than my love, my departed friends. Perhaps I will live so long that the New York Public Library will be obliged to hand over the walking stick of Virginia Woolf. I would cherish it for her, and the stones in her pocket. But I would also keep on living, refusing to surrender my pen.