path: root/tomorrow/ch2/ch2.txt

This morning the world is farm-fresh. The faceless men from a Twilight Zone episode I remember have assembled reality to perfection -- thank you Rod, it meant so much. They work feverishly all night long hauling in raw materials from the Future and building the Now. They have no identity save the ability to create. 

A new manicure from early morning thundershowers adorns the streets and houses, everything is freshly washed. Athens lies in the hilly, forested region of north central Georgia, and on days like today, after a morning thundershower, the heat steams the rain back up into the air. Everywhere is a soft fog like an overgrown patch of Argentinean real estate. Everything feels tropical and sweltering.

The door bursts open, no pounding at all, a streaking out-of-focus but still recognizably human shape rockets across the room with such speed that a second or two elapses before it cools and condenses into the recognizable form of Jimmy. He flops down on the low-rent chair to a cloud of feathers screaming out the side of the velveteen pillow. They waft in the still air and slowly swan dive through the thermal of nicotine that hovers near the floor.

"You should open a door, Sil. It's smoky in here."

"Someone was knocking."

"Knocking?"

"Yeah. About an hour ago. When I first got up. There was a pounding on the door."

"Huh."

"I couldn't open it."

"What if it was me?"

"I wasn't ready yet. I had to load."

He snickers, or maybe its more a giggle it's hard to tell. It involves an index finger brought to the lips, luxuriantly hovering over them and a downward stare as if perhaps sharing a private joke with his feet. Sometimes the whole ritual is accompanied by a slow shaking of head, but not just now. Jimmy's eyes are focused at some point beyond the floor, as if he can see right through the plaent and is admiring the Pleiades rising up over the southern hemisphere right about now. He is nodding and repeating yeah with Buddhist intent. 

"Do you remember anything about last night?"

"It was noisy. And glittering."

He practically doubles over shaking his head and laughing, "as long as I'm not the only one having some blank spots."

Blank spots are normal, or so I tell him, but really there is nothing blank, colors, rolling colors. Sounds.

I pour myself a pint glass of water and flop down on the couch. 

Chloe strolls in a few moments later, dog in tow, right in the middle of the silence that follows Jimmy's restoration of sense in the universe. Chloe has thin lips like 1965 white walled radial TA's fresh off the showroom floor, painted red to match a rising coronary sun. She suffers from arthritis at the tender age of -- too many cigarette years spent clutching darts and nervously twirling hair around her naked ring finger. She's wearing jeans and cowboy boots. 

I am very popular in this compound because I have the only shade. I am several measurable degrees cooler until about three in the afternoon when, trees or no trees, the air is on the edge of barking flames. So mornings happen here. Not that I mind the heat. The heat is tolerable, it's the oil that bothers me. The humidity expels a continuous slick of grease from the pores, as if cellular oil tankers were constantly wrecking all over your body.

Chloe throws my legs down on the floor and sits down on the couch and proceeds to tell us about the rest of her date night before. Chloe loves bad dates. She prefers to go out with men she finds both visually disgusting and mentally challenged. This one had a tattoo of a chicken on his calf that jiggles when he flexed it, which of course he showed her in the middle of dinner by standing up and putting his leg on the table. This leads to lengthy discourse in the lack of shame among our species, which Jimmy rejects. After a while he leaves to work on the Falcon.

I close the door behind Jimmy and pour myself another glass of water.

"What should we do today?" Chloe lights a Camel.

"Try to take over the world."

"What would we do once we took over?"

"I don't know."

Chloe's head collapses back when she laughs, and it's a guttural laugh, but high pitched and her left arm twitches a little when she really gets rolling, but right now it doesn't because she only chuckles and then her head snaps back forward. "What we should do, is get a jigsaw puzzle."

"Frustrating. Very very frustrating."

"But fun because you're struggling."

"Maybe."

"Well I'm going to go to get a jigsaw puzzle and you're going to help me with it."

										* * *

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? 

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

Chloe is talking about the first astronaut to orbit the moon. The first person to escape. Before the war started.

"You know what the first thing the 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. 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."

"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."

After a while she adds, "I'm thirty now and I already know I'm not going to do anything with my life. 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. It's comfortable. It's fucking gray."

After a while I follow her into the kitchen. Annie trots behind sniffing invasively at my butt. She looks down at me with eyes I don't remember. "You know I once cried so hard I swallowed a moth." 

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 strange childhood I think."

"How do you know?"

"I've never seen an '80's movie I related to? I don't know really I just get the sense that I was bit off. Or I am a bit off."

"For instance..."

"My childhood?"

"Yeah" 

"Well, let's see. I used to kidnap cats."

"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. 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."

It's then that I decide Chloe is a shallot among onions. We head back outside whhere there is a rare breeze in the afternoon. 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. 

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.

										* * *

Jimmy is sweeping his porch as I stroll up. He is freshly shaven; he looks like a Unix cultist. He has close shaven hair and thick framed, black, sixties style glasses, but he's more gearhead and really he's neither geek nor gearhead. He's wearing a greasy, oil-stained jumpsuit, but it's hard to make out amid the cloud of dirt and dust surrounding his thin frame. He stops sweeping and coughs. The haze settles a bit. He takes off his glasses and wipes them on the inside of his shirt. He is covered in dust with eyes ringed lemur white. Jimmy is a carpenter. A post-graduate carpenter because sawdust is more complex than the simple stuff of library shelves. Sawdust is soft tallow, a malleable tonic, and open to further disintegration, wood chips from rough planing, smaller particles expelled from whirling blades, the sugary whisper of dust expelled from sandpaper. Libraries have only one flavor of dust. Human debris. Tiny flecks of shedding skin accumulating around the glacial increase of perfect -- bound knowledge, the decay of people, slowly falling apart in alphabetic lives. Sawdust is the evolution of form. Termites eat sawdust. Destruction digested reborn. Jimmy builds things with his hands. Sometimes pocked, slapshod things, framing and roofing to restore dilapidated houses. Once he spent two weeks digging in the crawlspace of a cinderblock shotgun house, thinking the whole time it was going to fall and squash him with the cockroaches and rats that scurried over his legs. His more exciting projects are the highly skilled woodworking ones -- the gorgeous black walnut wine cellar he built last fall. He took me over to see it when it was done, sanded down to 220 grit, satin and specular, obsidian. It lives in the basement of a restaurant owner. It harbors vintage grapes from around the world behind its temperature-controlled, walnut-framed, glass doorway. There is a vacuum fan to suck out the dust and a once-a-week maid to free those particles too stubborn for wind.

The evening is turning slowly turning to an Octavio Paz night, where the sky speaks Spanish and covered with surly stormclouds, doubly purple and floating in front of a Navaho sand painting stretched across the ceiling of the world. 

Lightening strikes somewhere to the north and Jimmy suggests we take a drive in the Falcon to try out the new four-barrel carburetor.

On the walk back from the river I was trying to reconstruct Jimmy's descriptions of Williamsburg and Brooklyn in my head, trying to assimilate a whole city from them, trying to put Maya in them, but she won't fit. Unfortunately, Up There will have nothing to do with Down Here, they dance and dance, but Up There can never get her hands into Down Here's pants. Even Jimmy says he can't remember what living in New York was like and he's only been back a year. 

The Falcon roars. The custom headers he installed last week make it roar like a primordial beast-something slinky and covered with scales that crawled out of the Ford plant back when great steel dinosaurs ruled the land. 

The Falcon howls from a standstill to breakneck speed, the force neatly ashing my cigarette in the process. The impenetrable jungle across the road steams like a freshly washed beggar, thick kudzu itches at elms and maples. The Japanese revenge on the Americans who chased them around the South Pacific jungles. War stories are always set in jungles this century-New Guinea, Cambodia, Guatemala, Columbia; soldiers march in jungles, hacking vines, contracting microbes unknown. Sultry jungles that should have steamed up history with lovers, sweaty and exhausted, but instead turned to horror and death, and still stink of centipede nibbled bones. Rot. Blurs of grass waving in the wind of cars ahead, shopping centers, mini malls, open fields, bovine genetic research centers next to botanical gardens followed by apartment complexes. 

I long for the desert, the candyland Gaudi imitated, to roar across the dinosaur bones of Utah, the sandstone caverns harboring the remains of a drip sandcastle youth.

I see you standing in front of the bay window that looks out from the bedroom into the courtyard of your building on Minetta. I watch you from the bed languishing on stained white sheets. You are wearing nothing, leg propped up on the sill, standing and swaying slightly to the beat of a thick base drum. Your flesh is soft milk froth; you walk back to the stove and light a cigarette off the burner. Do not worry Maya. I am not so far away as memory, I will come to the city soon, but it must be the right moment. Be on edge; be aware. I am letting you grow inside me Maya.

Jimmy is heading out of town, down farther, we pass signs for the interstate, and he turns in the opposite direction. Neither of us speaks, the stereo does not work. There is only the rush of humid air. The wind carving in violent eddies around the side mirrors, a primitive whistling tune, wind blasting down ancient conifers and cycads, dusty meteor backdrafts carving fresh sandstone into parabolic arches that begin far below the surface. My oldest memory is of walking down a trail in Canyonlands National Park. I am singing a song as I walk, but I'm not really walking, I'm on my father's shoulders. He is walking and I am singing a song with him and my mother. We are hiking down from the mesa tops to the Green River, I can see the clumped fringes of the junipers, smell fecund woodrot and fresh desert air, feel the bruised and sullen thunderheads in the sky above me as I bounce and sway with my father's lurching downhill gait, but I can't make out the words or identify of the song. I just have the fuzzy outlines of it all. Memories shrouded in gauze and muslin, filters that color and tone the past with the palate of the present. 

There was a woman, stone still, shell-shocked, and stuck in the middle of an enormous red rock arch in Canyonlands. She was paralyzed on a narrow strip of sandstone, a fragile bridge hundreds of feet in the air. The digging hooks of unbridled terror had burned into her brain and created a spellbinding feedback loop that forbade her to move. It's a fear that anchors your mind back in the primate body because you feel, you cannot rationalize it away. It rips you out of the very fabric of collective reality and propels you into strange space where there is only you. I watched her stuck there, unable to help herself, no doubt staring at the four-hundred foot drop-off on both sides of her and the meager four-foot wide sandstone arch that held her frail existence in place. Suspended in mid-air.

Tall buildings are raised. Then razed. You go on. You don't want to. You want it to be painful, you want it to be so fucking gloriously painful it makes you cry. But it doesn't. And even if it did, what then? Space changes. Time fluctuates. But it plods on, the purr and growl of cylinders roaring, then settling, then roaring. In the intermittent silence of shifting gears the questions loom, perhaps it is all a lie and you are alone, perhaps the questions are only slow, insidious dribbles trickling from your oil filter, leaving thick meaningless splotches on the asphalt, a slow drain needing only a new filter. Perhaps you are sitting in the machine, on the machine, perhaps the machine is you, the acceleration an extension of femur to tibia, to talus, to phalanges and fading slowly from flesh and bone to leather and rubber, and then metal rods, a cable snaking through the firewall, an exposed and surprisingly flimsy extension from mind to throttle in one unbroken line, room for silence only in the space between sole and accelerator.

It's near dark and another lazy thunderstorm drifts in from the southwest. The twinkling light shining above and then the dirt driveway. Shifting to park. The keys slide from the ignition.