path: root/ch2/ch2.txt

Blinking fire flies -- twenty four frames per second -- do da do dada -- roosting -- hear we go again --  charred steel drooping -- sniffing -- bagpipes wheezing -- stuttering the future -- glistens and sparkles by design -- can you hear -- the morning line -- the polyphony -- new everyday -- falling off your tongue -- was it good for you?

It's huge and it looks like nothing. Just tiny flecks of color dissected into purposefully nonlinear shapes. It's maddening. It looks like nothing and it's everywhere. All over the porch, scattered on the kitchen table, and some still in the box. There are baggies with tape and cyptic markings indicating things about what will go into the baggies. There is a taxonomy of chaos at work here, a kind of organization forming out of the primordial color -- flecked soup of cardboard. It will still look like nothing when it's fully assembled, when the taxonomy has made the inevitable trudge from system to working explanation, and this of course delights Chloe to no end. Even when it's done we will have to sit back and stare at it with out -- of -- focus eyes to see what it is. 

We are sitting on the edge of the porch and it is behind us. Looking at it was giving me a headache. We haven't said a word. She gets up and goes to the fridge for beer. 

"What did you do today?" Chloe gives me a beer and sits back down. She straightens the hem of dress across her knees and rubs at some unaccounted for redness on her elbow.

"Nothing. Played myself in backgammon."

"Did you win?"

"I'm not sure. It's hard to tell."

Annie is running circles around the tree with her characteristic antelope bounding. Dogalope. She seems to believe she has treed a squirrel. Chloe twists the cap off her beer and throws it at Annie. She swallows and leans back away from me studying the phrenology of my close -- cropped scalp. "Don't you get lonely dating someone in New York?"

"I guess so. I mean it wasn't always that way."

I drift off watching Annie huffing and digging at some sort of rodent hole.

"Yeah I know. But you could move there."

Whatever is down the hole has become a quest. Perhaps a rabbit. Maybe a gopher. Or some other burrowing type animal I've never heard of.

"No. I can't afford it. Besides, I like the woods." a moment later I change my mind. Actually it was always this way. Or was it? If it was then is it? If it is then was it? If the gopher is down the hole, was the gopher ever not down the hole? If the gopher is not down the hole, was he ever down the hole? Can I say for sure whether one or the other is true? Or is it simply that the gopher changes of its own volition and I can only guess at it's secrets?

When I snap to for a cigarette Chloe is clearly expecting an answer.

"What?" With nervous guilt.

"Have you listened to anything I've been saying?"

"No." Less nervous, increased guilt.

"See?"

"What?"

"Exactly." She leans her head on my shoulder. "Sil I was trying to explain that I know I'm deliberately avoiding intimacy by only going out with men that repulse me, but I can't bring myself to risk anything anymore."

"Oh."

A cascading silence ebbs in. Crickets. June Bugs. Cardinals. Squirrels. Mosquitoes.

"Risk. Is that what it is?"

"Of course. And its silly, but I fear it. I really do. It's not even that I fear it, well, I don't know. In my mid twenties I went through that cynical phase, you know, where I just wanted to get laid and stay single and have my freedom or whatever. And sure I went to my friend's weddings and I acted happy and everything, but inside it hurt me to see them give up. To settle into the same suburbia we tried to get out of, or at least I thought we we're trying to get out of." Chloe purses her lips, juts out the lower one and half blows half spits a stray clump of hair back up toward its brethren which are pulled back in a loose, and apparently somewhat ineffectual, ponytail.

"I lived like a 60's astronaut." She laughs. "And now that nearly everyone I know has gotten married or at the very least is so obsessed with their career -- whatever the fuck that word means -- I find myself alone. Don't take that the wrong way Sil, you know I love you. And James. And Scratch. And everybody else too. But I feel like the last woman on the moon. I feel like there was supposed to be more. I feel like saying, 'I feel like there was supposed to be more' shouldn't be such a cliché. Kinda reinforces the original sentiment."

"Maybe there really did use to be more."

"You believe that?" Her skeptic eyes are measuring.

"Does it matter?"

"Maybe. But all this is just abstraction, what I started out to say was that I don't fear intimacy, I fear lack of independence. But I'm thirty now and I already know I'm not going to do anything with my life. I don't think I'm going home. I think I'm the last woman on the moon and I'm waving off the lander. Go home. I'm staying. I like it here. You know what the first thing an astronaut said the first time the orbited the moon? He said 'well, it's pretty gray.' It's pretty gray, Sil. It's pretty fucking gray. I'm trying to come to terms with the world not living up to my ideals and this asshole orbiting the moon says it's pretty fucking gray. Fuck him." Chloe wraps her hands around her legs pulling them tight to her chest and rests her cheek on her knees.

"He had an impoverished imagination."

Her head snaps up. "Life is a collision of imagination and observation Sil. He fucking failed."

"Maybe."

"No Sil. He failed. He was one of about thirty people that have seen the moon up close and all he got out of it was that it's gray. He fucking failed."

"You're assuming that gray meant nothing to him, but what if his grandmother had gray eyes and that was the one memory that came back to him when he was overwhelmed by being that close to the moon."

She rests her cheek on her knee again and rocks back and forth for a minute before speaking. "You're sweet Sil. You always defend people and want to think the best about them. I love you for that. In spite of the fact that deep down you're cynical too. But you try and that's what I love about you." Chloe stands and turns to go inside and fix lunch. She looks down at me with eyes I don't remember. "You know I once cried so hard I swallowed a moth." And she walks inside without another word.

After a while I follow her into the kitchen. Annie trots behind sniffing invasively at my butt. "Need help?"

Chloe shakes her head. I sit down at the table and try to ignore the puzzle pieces screaming at me in tinny squeals: we all fit together. We all fit together. We all fit together.

Chloe is chopping shallots with more force than is necessary, I can see her tricep flexing as her arm rapidly minces the shallots. "I was supposed to go out with this guy. This was junior high. Maybe high school. No junior high. Anyway we were supposed to ride our bikes to the park in the evening and he never showed up and I waited and waited. I was so in love with this guy. So at about 10 o'clock I'm out on the porch -- sobbing now." She stops cutting and turns toward me. "You know those huffing snorting kind of sobs that women have when they're really upset? Hyperventilating sobs." She briefly demonstrates and ends up snorting like a warthog with emphysema. It's tragic and not a little bit funny. "And I was chewing gum. I always used to chew gum. So I'm in the rocking chair sobbing, arms around my knees... this is so pathetic... I inhaled a moth somehow and before I realized it I chewed him right into my gum. It was crackly at first, but then more like chewing feathers."

Her attention returns to the shallots. "I had a lot of disturbing, uh, incidents in childhood. I used to kidnap cats when I was little."

"Kidnap cats?"

"My parents wouldn't let me have a cat so I would go out and steal them from neighbors. At first I just petted them you know. Then I got one to follow me home. I felt like he loved me more than his owners and I cried when my parents took him home. I was probably seven or eight when this happened. After that I went farther from home, several blocks away where I knew my parents wouldn't know whose cat it was and they would have to post signs, found: cat. That sort of thing so, you know, I would have the cat for longer."

"Right."

"But these cats wouldn't follow me home. Too far I guess. So I would save my lunch money and on the way home from school I'd stop at Circle K and buy myself a slushy and Moon Pie and can of cat food. Then I'd ride my bike past my house, way back into the subdivision and lure cats home by dragging the cat food on a string behind my bike. One time I pulled into my driveway with three cats running behind me."

"You were a cat rustler."

"Yeah you know maybe that was the Texan coming out. Got to steal animals... I don't know. But one time after my parents had posted found cat signs and stuff this old lady came to our house to pick up her cat and she was so excited that I had found her cat she gave me twenty dollars, which, when we were kids was a lot of money. And bells went off in my head. So then I started kidnapping the cats for profit. I mean when I could. I tried to pick cats that looked pampered or that were sitting in front of old lady houses. You know lots of papers collecting on the porch. Beat up seventies sedans. I was pretty good at casing the block and finding the old lady cats. When they would come over I'd put on a cute little dress and smile and play dumb and they would give me a reward. One month I made $200. That's when my parents caught on."

"What'd they do?"

"Bought me a cat."

"Smart."

"Yeah, but by then I didn't want one."

Chloe has made a variation of a salad Scratch taught her how to make. Chloe can take an already good idea and transform it into something even better than it was. She is a shallot among onions. We eat spoonfuls of tuna tartar on toasted bread crusts and sip now warm beer. We sit under the tree away from the screaming puzzle, on what passes for a lawn. Here and there are tufts of grass, but mainly it's dirt, good digging dirt. Later we take the dishes inside and head off to the river. After a few cookie -- cutter suburbs and a quick duck along the side of a house, sneaking over the back fence, heaving the dog and all, a shortcut Jimmy found a few months back, we join the river trail. Annie is fifty yards ahead darting about sniffing, endless sniffing, there must be a whole universe of smell that we never experience owing to evolutionary prioritizing, specialization, some such idea, certainly there seems enough to drive her insane with smell lust. We stick to the trail along the river's edge, walking absently, single file, paying little attention to each other. About half a mile's walk from the bridge where the road crosses the river, there is a rocky outcropping that juts out to the middle of the Oconee. Ever since the first warm days of spring we have been walking down here and lying on this rock, shirtless, basking in the sun like pink fleshy lizards. It's beautiful here, trees in bloom, sun warm and bright, air thick with river humidity, birds chattering in the bushes. Dragonflies flit in the middle of the sun -- drenched stream; water striders dart about in pockets of glassy water stagnant from the sheltering rocks and fallen tree limbs. It is nothing but beautiful here, except that it's ugly. The old growth forests are gone, the river polluted with old tires, plastic baggies, and pesticides, and the sky choked with dirty brown haze and crisscrossed by streaking jet contrails. Still if you lie down and close your eyes, listen to the water and the insects and the birds and carefully edit out the cars back on the bridge, it sounds Mesozoic. It sounds inviting and warm. Careful editing. It's something you learn from film or television, you know just when to turn, just when to cut, just when to fade out, when the sunset imperceptible begins to wan, when the moment has reached apex, when the crescendo is tapering, and you turn away, spin the dial, change the channel. The couple is standing on the bluff with the setting sun behind them, maybe it's a tight shot, their faces two stories high and her moist lips backlit by a heart attack red in the sky, gentle purple clouds between their lips. The circle swooping pelicans and power lines and passing cars have been excluded from our view, or maybe it's a medium shot, from the waist up, them leaning on the black iron railing, the tops of the bluff in the distance keep your eyes from drifting off into the curtains, they draw you in, and the heart attack and the purple, she purses her lips so you know they are wet, inviting, soft. Maybe it's a long shot, they are smaller yet, only shadows now, happening against a background of pelicans and power lines and foreshortened cars passing in front; they are background now, noise around the edges of the scene, and yet they pull you forward, you demand the camera move in, you want it so badly, you want to be closer, you want to move in microscopic close -- ups, the pores of her skin, the follicles of his stubble, the cracks of lipstick, the oil in their glands, the beautiful flaws they must have. Maybe they are shot from a boom, from above because you are better than them, you know their isolation is illusory, you sense them as you sense a computer is on the instant you step into a room, and you never forget that light is projected, your imagination drifts to dust in the beam, floating particles, they are part of the story too, because it is the same story, it is the only story, the only story there will ever be, the only story there is, forcing you to take it all in, to see everything -- polluted and pure in one breath without looking. And Maya, where are you breathing? I am coming to you in a sweeping pan. In a long, low -- flying, forward -- looking shot that sweeps in, skimming over the Bronx, tenement bricks and children playing in empty lots, a bottle rocket shoots up and away, and across the river in a blink, the coughing brownstones of Harlem, then straight over the park, panning down with no foresight now, blindly buildings pass faster and faster and then sweeping up, screaming higher up and slowly falling over, a barnstorming backward loop and then diving down in jerky frames of cloud, distant skyscrapers, and a close up falling, down the bricks of a building fourteen stories high to the window on the north side of the third floor. And she is backlit by the evening sun reflected in the mirror, and it is too bright to see clearly, she is a shadow and then we move up again, gliding now like a bird, a falcon, a peregrine falcon roosting among the high rises of Wall Street, setting off hunting, skimming the wires and cables of the Manhattan Bridge, down Flatbush Avenue over the fire escapes of Seventh and First where one day, years from now, it might all make sense, dipping down to see the soft caressing bars of the railing where we will play games in the hot sun and laugh and not know what has become of ourselves but like where we come from, from these long running memories that look beautiful in the dark velvet draped room where no one is looking as the camera sweeps out now, over Coney Island, the lapping waves, and then finally the mouth of the river and only the endless rippling of sea, skimming closer, swells merging into one continuous mass that screams the same story again. We all fit together. We all fit together. We all fit together.