Found Things

Part ONE

 In the beginning, congealed out of Nothingness, Becoming gathered itself together and grew into a Cosmic Egg., half silver and gold, half shit and dust. The later was Heaven, the former, the late great planet Earth (though some held it to be the other way around). For countless ages, the Egg of the World sat on the mantle over the decorative electric fireplace (complete with simulated chimney flue), of the Hendricks family of Wheaton, Illinois. One day, when Queeny Hendricks was weeding the garden, she discovered a cat... or, as she liked to tell her neighbors, the cat discovered her. Falling under its spell, she let it follow her into the house. That very night, the cat leapt onto the mantelpiece, and, brushing against the Egg, knocked it to the floor where it shattered on the artificial marble hearthstone below, scattering shards like stars﷓﷓particles of Heaven and Earth rising into everlasting confusion. 
 Never fall under spell of Found Things. 
 

Ikebena
Our Protagonist Has a Conversation in Reading Terminal Market with an Old Heartthrob  
 
 Something had come undone, he told Sorrell, *1 and she agreed, explaining to him in her practical Woman-of-Experience manner, that a person can't just walk away from the world and not suffer a certain... let's call it what it is, she said (reminding him more than a little of Mrs. Erickson)... a loss of reality. He was nonplused. Wasn't that precisely what he'd left behind--the unreality of the world, the future that was waiting to swallow him whole, a life of diminished mindfulness? Wasn't that why he'd gone to work for Luke? Wasn't that... Yes yes yes... she remembered all his arguments. Listed them in order: the endless war, corporate slavery, Simone-Weil-in-the-factories... and what kind of example was that anyway, this Simone Weil? A Jewish girl who turns a blind eye to her own people-- shipped to their deaths like cattle? It's all about connections, she said, all the things that you despised. Forty years, she said, and you still haven't a clue. Idealism is excusable when you're young, but if you really care about other people you take on responsibilities, you learn to respect reality... 
 She was wrong, of course. This person she was talking about, sitting here with her by the Bronze Pig in the Reading Terminal Market--maybe once, but not anymore... someone he'd pretended to be just long enough to lose his way--years ago, a shed skin, a memory empty as the shell of a cicada clinging to a dry twig. A sadder but wiser man these days. But he listened to her. Listened to her defend her own life, as though it needed defense in his eyes. No way. She was amazing. After all these years, Never mind the gray hairs. Never mind this was far from the willowy Sorrell he remembered. Amazing, he thought, plotting how he might finagle an invitation to her hotel room before she flew back to Tucson. 
 I thought I'd lost you, he said.
 Sorrell smiled (at least, he imagined she did ). Yes, I know, she said, ignoring him (she was telling about her run for state representative). I know I lost, but I gave it my best shot. And I have a studio where I teach what I've learned--how to take what is even more ephemeral than our own lives: flowers. Fragile beauty, gone in a few hours, a few days at most. (flower-of-an-hour, he thought) She was folding her napkin into a paper rose as she spoke. I arrange them in patterns, she went on, according to ancient rules. The flowers wilt and die, but the pattern is more than the flowers. Her face had held up well, but the skin on her throat had begun to take on that dry parchment look. Nevermind. They would make love in the dark.
  It's all very Zen, she said. About life, the flowering of life. Other generations will come to fill our place--as flowers do and trees and stars, but life goes on in all its fragility and beauty.. 
 Through the revolving door ... 
 What's that?
 He listened, looked at his feet--thought of the yellowing nails, the network of fine blue varicose veins around his ankles. No question. They would have to do it in the dark. He thought of Sorrell, wondered why he wasn't ashamed. Ashamed of what he was thinking. But he wasn't. Not the least. Amazing. She could still do that for him. 
 He held an image of the Sorrell he remembered over the woman across the table from him--like two transparencies.. Hadn't he at times while making love, even in those first heady weeks, imagined himself with someone else? If now he were to imagine Sorrell as she had been--what was that? Like seeing her more truly, timeless, flowers rearranged in their eternal patterns, as she would say? Or would it be nothing more than an old man fucking a girl in his imagination? Why had she phoned him--to scold him about his lost life? Or had he called her? How to broach the subject? Why had he thought of Sorrell when what he wanted was to talk about Wren--not Wren exactly, but why he could not get her off his mind, a broken record, around and around (what would Wren know of broken records? the Penn Relays? Olympic gymnasts? ) A wheel A steering wheel--a dream the night before; he was driving a car and weaving dangerously from one side of the road to the other when he realized the wheel in his hands wasn't attached to the steering column. But it was okay. The car could be controlled by his thoughts. If he leaned this way, the car would turn accordingly. Leaning in his mind, free fall downhill--like those dreams of levitation where he would will himself off the ground, never more than a few feet, but leaving the weighted part of himself behind. It was Wren who had thrown him off track. It was her fault. But how? Why? How could he explain to Sorrell, to anyone? Too dangerous. They would misunderstand--especially Sorrell. Think it had to be about sex when sex was the furthest thing from his mind. Really it was. Certainly not sex with Wren, god forbid. Wasn't that what Ari Figue was for? To satisfy the need without him?



 

Cicadas

Journal Entry
Frankford El
Summer, 1994

Standing in the isle--a girl--brown sleeveless dance top, coat about her waist tied by the sleeves. What caught my eye--a suppurating sore on her upper arm. She's intent on ministering to it... peels the band aid off, biting her lip. Squeezes it, blots the drainage with a piece of brown paper towel. 
Painful to watch--can't take my eyes off her.
I know this girl. Lives in the apartment complex across the parking lot. Have often watched her from my bedroom window walking across the lot, ducking through a hole in the fence.
 Leans her head on her companion's shoulder, a young man with sparse mustache and beard, long hair, gray sweat shirt.  
Scars on her arms. Cigarette burns? She stares at her hands while the boy talks to her, watches his gestures, not his eyes.
 She wrinkles her nose. A hint of a smile. He leans to kiss her. Lips just touch, brush... she pushes the end of her nose with her finger--where his nose pressed against hers. Same quick smile, a mere twitch at the corners of her mouth--lips never part Their bodies press together as the train sways and rocks. Now and then the boy opens his eyes and stares out the window at the passing rooftops, then leans close to say something into her ear. She acknowledges him with quick little nods, lips pursed. As though intent on something far away. She whispers in his ear. Her eyes grow dark again. 
When I look up from the page where I'm writing... they've vanished. Like a mirage.
 
 
 When he was a child it would come to him, a sort of a voice--sometimes out of common white noise: the sound of passing cars, a ceiling fan, a radio playing in another room. Sometimes in his own head, like the one he would hear when he was reading. Remember this moment, it seemed to say, as though he were being held accountable for what he had seen and heard--for everything experienced in that moment. Not seldom, it would take on the voice of a real person: Mrs. Erickson in the third grade, who, catching him daydreaming, would grab him by the ear: Pay attention! she would hiss, pointing to figures on the blackboard, demanding an answer to a question he could no longer remember. 
 Somewhere in adolescence, the voice faded, but the feeling that had accompanied it, this sense of accountability, did not. If anything, it grew stronger. It would come over him like a seizure--any little thing: a squirrel running up a tree, a bubblegum wrapper floating in a puddle on the sidewalk, a snatch of conversation overheard--the most trivial event would suddenly be transformed into an enigma--as though something momentous hung in the balance--a problem he felt compelled to solve. 
On the way home from the el, on the day he saw the girl who would become the Snow Angel, it happened again. A chorus of cicadas was making a great ruckus in the trees. A sharpening of his vision. The leaves, no longer a dark undifferentiated mass, but each one distinct, some yellowing around the edges, a few already brown. The sun, low in the sky, filtered through the latticework of branch and foliage--an ever moving play of light and shadow--as though some meaning were to be divined in this, in the flush of late afternoon heat, in the sound of passing cars, leaves underfoot; in the smell of mown grass, exhaust, the smoke from someone cooking in their yard, the weight of his own body, the hardness of the pavement beneath his feet. He wouldn't have remembered coming to a stop or how long he'd remained still. Likely﷓﷓a few minutes at most, but it felt like hours. Years, it had been, since the last time this happened.  
In the basement--the box of notebooks he'd dragged down there the week before. The daily entries he'd kept off and on since high school. Some he'd lost moving from place to place. Most, still there. His journals. In his hand, the notebook with the entry he'd written on the el. The girl with the cigarette burns. He couldn't do it anymore. Not if they were coming back. Time to be rid of them.  
On the way up from the basement, the box had split open and they tumbled back down the stairs, shedding pressed leaves, ticket stubs, notes and letters, photos and newspaper clippings--bits and pieces collected over the years. The artifacts of memory spilled at random at his feet.  
He packed them in two new boxes and carried them to the street, left them on the curb to be picked up with the trash. But the trash trucks didn't come the next morning, and on his way home the following day, the dry rasping song of the cicadas still ringing in his ears--there they were on the walk where he left them. It was her. No question in his mind. The girl he saw on the el.
Later, after a supper of bread and soup, after washing and putting away the dishes, after a cool shower, after sitting on the back steps with a glass of iced tea watching the sky fade from molten yellow to red to mauve, the street lights blinking on over the parking lot, he will tip the glass to take what's left of the last ice cube in his mouth, get up, go through the kitchen and out the front door. When he returned to his room﷓﷓the boxes of journals were in his arms. 
He spends the rest of the day and all of that night reading the old entries, reads until he falls into a sleep that overtakes him like a coma. When he wakes, for a moment he doesn't know where he is. Scattered about him, on the bed, on the floor, the notebooks he's been reading. He paces the floor, reciting page after page from memory. Closing his eyes, he can see the scribbling in the margins, the punctuation, the stains on the paper, but of the events they recorded, it is as though nothing remains. A second childhood, he thought. What goes round, comes round.  
 
Sorrell
 "Not a straight line but like the logic of chess, each move (each word) opens entire sequences, other shut forever (train plunges into the tunnel) and reversing your steps can never take you back." 
Ron Silliman, The Alphabet, Jones 

Sorrel, he whispers ...the edges of the snow angel had been sharp to the lee, softened by drifting snow to the windward. A sorrel of snow, her name, a malaprop of remembrance.
Go on, I say, holding up my empty glass to signal the bartender.
An impression on a tumble of sheets. The scent of her body the last time we made love. And yet-- he can't for the life of him summon her face. A woman who has become Everywoman in the eyes of a man, has no face she can call her own.
1969-1970. Tell me where you are. 
Temple University. Broad and Columbia.
And what are you doing?
I'm climbing the stairs from the Broad Street subway. The Southbound train, coming from the Northeast.
Do you see her now?
Yes! She's just come up from the northbound train--crossing Broad Street. Jeans, sleeveless dance top. Oh, such lovely breasts! How when she walks they moved in rhythms counterpoint! I stand there blinking in the sun, watching her approach, waiting for her.
And her face. Can you see her face now?
No. Almost.. but it keeps changing. 
You know her from before? 
  We'd talked once or twice in the student lounge, the beginning of the term--both us readers of voracious appetite. 
 She'd been on your mind, evidently. 
 Ever since the first time. Yes.
 But you'd not seen her again.
 No. But not for lack of trying.
 Visualize. Go back. Make it happen again. Bring it into the present. 
 I've told you all this before.
 Tell me again.
 In the first person?
 Yes. 
 But I don't exist... once more? Like a movie? 
 If you have to. 
 Can you get me started?
 You were students. 
Yes.
... commuters, like most of the students at Temple in those days.  
Yes.. We... they would drive into the city, ride the el, the Broad Street Subway--riding from Olney, the river wards, from Frankford and Tacony, Kensington and Fishtown, the far Northeast and Jersey suburbs. Predominately white, like the others, you shipped in and out, embarked and disembarked; the North Philadelphia campus an island floating above an invisible black sea. 
You were no different. She: a junior majoring in social work, shares a house in West Philadelphia; 
And me?
Still captive in your parents' house in the Northeast. She's getting close--don't miss your chance! 
A lowly freshman--I don't know how I'm going to pull this off. I take a great breath, I'll just fake it. Tuck my apprehensions into my pocket, run to catch up as she passes.
  Scene shifts: conversations over coffee in the student lounge, free concerts at the Curtis Institute, a long bus ride to and from a demonstration in Washington, a room in a rambling Victorian twin in Powelton Village, a mattress on the floor where we are initiated into the rites and rituals of sex, teach one another the vocabulary of touch, taste, scent. It's a commune: a revolving cast of students, dropouts, political organizers, would-be artists, a group of self-professed Sufis. They invited me to join... the commune, not the Sufis. Holding the group together: three Quaker activists and a Catholic Worker who organize the shopping and cooking, make cleaning and repair lists, schedule weekly meetings, where--Quaker style, by consensus, decisions are made.  
My life till then: elementary school in West Oak Lane, parents, nominally tolerant, but apolitical. When the colored began buying houses in the neighborhood, my father held out for a time, but we soon joined the general exodus to de facto segregated neighborhoods and suburbs. We moved to Bustleton in the Northeast. 
Life in the commune--a parallel universe. A complete revelation. At the common dining room table, I remember so well now. Discussions, impassioned arguments. Black against white, rich against poor, men against women, sons against fathers We were to be the vanguard of a revolution in a society at war. There were protests to organize, demonstrations to plan. 
In the news: assassinations, cities in flames; looters, church bombings, images of bloodied marchers, fire hoses clubs and snarling dogs. Silhouettes of tanks against a crimson sky rumbling through the streets of Prague, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Detroit. Flashing across the TV screen night after night: the war. Every day, the body counts, day after day after day, like stock market reports, like the weather: five hundred Viet Cong Standard and Poors holds steady 1200 North Vietnamese regulars the Dow up 98 points 23 Americans with a chance of rain and falling petrodollars. 
I walked on picket lines in front of Girard College, joined sit-ins, hitch-hiked to demonstrations. 
You neglected your studies. 
There were meetings, teach-ins, debates; I was in demand as a writer of manifestos, declarations. 
You skipped classes, owed papers, failed to show up for exams. Wasn't that about the time Herbert Marcuse visited the campus? 
How could I forget! This small, imperious figure on the stage of [ get name of church ]. I hear him dismiss with barely disguised contempt the professor who has just introduced him. What good an education that turns you into well remunerated slaves? he asks, digested by a closed system you are condemned to reproduce? One must learn to live as though the revolution had already occurred, else become a tool of the oppressors. We must adopt the morality of the apocalypse! 
I had been living in Dream-America. The morality of the apocalypse. The intensity of a religious awakening. What is a degree but a ticket to servitude, a way to prolong the old order, delay the revolution, increase the sufferings of the poor? 
The end of the Spring term... Kent State. When the children of the privileged become targets, I shout at my father...
...your gentle father--whose ship had been torpedoed in the Pacific--twice; from whom you learned whatever sense of justice you possessed. 
Reform is an illusion of the weak, of those who cannot bear to face reality, I scream! Seized by a power greater than myself, the decision is out of my hands. 
One of the Catholic Workers introduced you to his uncle,
  Luke Pachelli... ...a contractor with union connections. 
I imagine myself Eric Hoffer; Simone Weil demonstrating her solidarity with workers in the factory; a proletarian intellectual sowing the seeds of the new revolution. 
Baby Bolshevik, your wounded father whispers, closing the door in shame.
Luke signs me up with the I.B.E.W: an electricians helper, the promise of an apprenticeship. 
Work imagined and work performed--incommensurate realities. 
I have no physical skills to speak of--know nothing about tools...
You had to prove yourself, a new beginning, three dimensional man in the making.  
The uncle who got you into the union owned a shell he planed to renovate. 
I rent a room there. I cook on a hotplate... 
No Sorrell to share your mattress on the floor. 
What goes round comes round , he tells himself. 
As a new apprentice helper, you spend your working hours holding ladders, handing tools to the master electricians. 
A lot of time to think. Too much time to think...  
Luke: third generation South Philly, wore a jacket with a dragon embroidered on the back.
 I know I'm going to heaven cause
 I've already been to Hell. 
 Korea, 1951 

Swears that a tough cop named Frank Rizzo's gonna be the next mayor of Philadelphia.
On weekends, you help rehab the house where Luke lets you crash. 
Not like weekdays--no standing around holding ladders when I'm with Luke. No time for my mind to run around in circles. We work mostly in silence. Days of talking politics are over. Luke makes me sweat, berates me, swears at me, scolds, threatens to throw me out on the street--but he makes me learn, teaches me the skills I'll use the rest of my life. 
Luke is a mystery. 
I watch him, observe the way he applies himself to whatever he's doing. The way he loses himself in the work. 
Work--his deepest pleasure. There's a power there--you could see it in the satisfaction, the sense of accomplishment he took from each day's labor.
The problem, I think, is how I was raised. Maybe if I'd grown up working class... 
But then, Luke's sons--they weren't like Luke either. 
No... and the other men I work with--men who grew up in the neighborhood; for them, it's just a job
They have their ways of dealing with it.
Drinking, the Mummers, paneling the basement, building kitchen cabinets, planning how they're gonna to get that place down the shore.
Five-thirty, quitting time. You were coming through a revolving door...
After working on an upper floor of a high rise in Center City--carrying buckets of soap scum we use to lubricate the cable we've been pulling
Suddenly the door jammed. The buckets banged into the door panels; 
My reflection in the glass vibrates from the impact, moving and motionless, frozen in time...
It's only for a second, but in that moment I feel pass through me in a rush thousands of anonymous bodies: lawyers and accountants, window washers, receptionists, claims adjusters and cleaning women, executive vice presidents and secretaries; in the morning they come in through the door, in the evening they go out, coming out, going in, the door going round...and I see how it will be the same tomorrow and the next day and the next, how generations come and go, and we who are passing through now will vanish in turn and others will take our place--the same, year after year--in and out of the revolving door, their images in the glass as identical as the leaves that grow and fall from year to year and grow again, indistinguishable, season to season, generation to generation... A state undifferentiated from nature--science, art and learning, all the paraphernalia of civilization, changes nothing: all come and disappear in turn as though they never existed. 
The door springs loose--releases me into the open air.  
What goes round comes round. 
* * *
 No longer welcome in your parents' house 
...my father hangs up when he hears my voice on the phone
No money to go back to school. 
I learn to survive, learn in order to be able to survive, carpentry, plumbing, masonry
And as you learned, you retreated into yourself, into your books. Through the revolving door, day by day, you vanished into your own reflection.
From those years a few isolated memories, like those of childhood, spring up sharp and cold, hard enough to touch, like consecrated icons, but the connections are blurred or lost and the years have merged into a fog, a narrative, the bare outlines of which, if pressed, I am able to recite, as though it were something I'd been told about someone I'd never met, a mere sequence of events without affect, plot or meaning  
Once upon a time, it might begin, there was a man who left his parents house. He bought a trinity in South Philly, got married, split up, moved from job to job. There was a second marriage; that too, failed. Other women came and went. The parents died. He moved to Chicago, to Kansas City, back to Philadelphia. Every few years he would play with the idea of going back to school, getting his degree. Once, he took a few courses, then ran out of money and dropped out. With no family, no children, most of all--no calling in the world, no work to call his own, a man falls altogether out of place and time. 
It makes me dizzy, as though I'd stepped off the edge of the earth into a river that's carried me on the crest of its flood and left me without history, without a name I can recognize as my own. As though there were no story, no time. Yesterday I was young. This morning, an old man looked back at me from the mirror.
In Sorrel is preserved, in my mind, one of those phantoms, who, proportionate to our desire to draw them back into the common world, become the more intensely real, until, by comparison, the immediate, accessible and sensate reality grows pale, and the impressions of what unfolds there slip from the chambers of memory like forgotten dreams. In consequence, those two or three months we had together have come to seem, even as they have been transformed through thirty years of natural alteration, more real than anything that has come after--everything since, a mere playing of roles in a succession of fictitious lives.
What are you thinking?
Nothing.
Whatever became of her? She who had broken me like a branch from my family tree, from the life I'd expected to live--a branch, thrust into strange soil, that had borne no fruit, grown no roots. Sorrel, whose body had been for a time--my wilderness, my Eden--Eve to his Adam, a garden of delights day and night, night after night... her face to me now, as blank as that figure in the snow, as strange as the face that stares back at me from the mirror, infused with the smell of honeysuckle and death. 
   
  
Snow Angel

Late Winter
19.....
I'd been lying in bed for hours, half asleep, half awake when I heard, as distinct and real as the rattling of the windows in the wind, as the knocking of the heating pipes in the walls, a woman's voice calling out the name, Jacob, as though it were my own.
Was that the first time? 
For the name? Yes.
I did you feel?
Like it was my name.... but I was someone else.
What did you see. 
Lights from passing cars. The windows were white with frost. Like a shadow puppet show. Leftovers from what I'd been dreaming. Branches of the dying willow at the edge of the parking lot fall in tangled silhouettes across the walls. A girl asleep beneath the snow gazes up past the clouds at invisible stars.
Was that in your dream?
I'm not sure. Snowplows were passing on the street below. Hadit finally let up? It had been snowing for three days and nights and the wind has piled drifts across the streets. I felt like Noah--alone in my winter ark. 
You went outside.
Not yet.
But you got up, out of bed?
Reluctantly. I pulled the blankets aside, slides round to the edge of the bed. My feet on the bare floor, frozen in place. All I wanted to do was crawl back under the covers and wait for morning light.
But you didn't.
I couldn't. It was already too late. I felt for my shoes, slipped them on, made my way to the window. 
It was covered with frost.
Yes.
How did you see?
I pressed my finger to the glass, melted a single spot. Then I began to move my finger across the pane, to trace a path, a kind of cursive mark over the frosted surface. Like writing on a frozen page.
 A letter to begin a story, perhaps?  
I tried to make a circle but couldn't make the ends meet, so I kept moving my finger, melting a path, a spiral. A trail winding around itself, endless. Rivulets trickled down from the lines I traced linking the segments. A web, a net, a nautaloid hung with algae, spirals unwinding to infinity. 
Before the snow began it had rained. When a cold front moved through (a blast from the Canadian arctic). The rain turned to ice. Everything covered with ice. Ice everywhere. Sidewalks and streets, trees, blades of grass like little glass knives. I remember sitting before the window watching the late afternoon sun break through a rift in the clouds. The trailing branches of the willow, sheathed in ice, burst into light--countless prisms radiating the colors of the spectrum: blue, violet, electric green, vermilion a moment before the clouds closed over the sun and it began to snow. 
Someone is standing on the far side of the parking lot: 
Yes.
Even before my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I knew what I would see.
The girl from the el. 
As though remembered from another life: a figure on the far side of the parking lot. The same wide tentative stance I remembered from the el. 
Tell me what you see.
She's turning around. Her back toward me. Carefully positioning her feet at the edge of the unbroken sweep of white on the lot and suddenly--her hands braced to catch herself--she sinks backwards into the snow. Spreading her legs, closing them again like a scissors while her arms sweep up and down at her side in easy movements as though she were flying. 
Careful not to disturb the pattern, she pushes herself forward to her knees, stands up, turns to view the impression she's left in the snow. For a long while, she stands there like that--arms suspended at her sides, dark hair clung with white snowflakes, motionless--watching her winged image fill slowly with new fallen snow. 
The street lights sheath her in a crimson glow. A moment later she's gone, but there are footprints. I felt a chill, a trembling in my chest, through by body to the soles of my feet. I am the medium, he thought to myself, a conduit. Into this little room at the top of the stairs I could feel the cold from the depths of space flow through my body even as my old life was rushing out into the winter night. I stared at the dead willow on the edge of the lot, its bare branches black against the low clouds.  
I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep. I opened the closet for a clean towel, thinking to shower, to make a cup of tea, but something fell to the floor. I stared at it, not recognizing at first what it was--this dark mass at my feet. A coat has slipped off a hanger. 
And?
It was a sign, I told myself.  
Like in your dream.
Only it wasn't. I was wide awake. I dressed, picked up the coat, put it on, tuged a black watch cap over my ears, shoved my bare feet into a pair of boots and made my way over the crusted snow of the empty parking lot.
In places, the lot has been swept almost clean by the wind, but as I approaches the tall fence on the far side there were drifts. Stepping through them, I could feel the sharp chill around my ankles and feet as snow seeps over the tops of my boots. My breath came in little puffs--snatched away by the wind. It was so cold. All I could think of was that steaming kettle I'd meant to put on the stove for tea. I wanted to turn around. To go back to bed.
But you didn't.
No. I held the collar of my coat closed against the chill, step over one last drift and stopped.
And there it was?
At my feet, the snow angel--so fresh I could make out the impressions left by the belt and buttons from the back of her coat. I can see it now. There are the prints of her hands. She had lifted herself with care when she stepped free from the image left by her body. The footprints I'd seen from the window lead to a hole in the fence. A reflection from a passing car falls across the snow at my feet, a particle of light, a faint shimmering presence, as though fallen from the darkness and come to rest over the snowy heart of the missing girl.
And what was it that you found?
A snapshot--a faded print mounted on construction paper or light poster board.. The corners bent back like tabs pressed into the snow in the center of the figure. Like an offering.  
What did you do?
 I picked it up, of course. A photograph and a snow angle. What would anyone do? 
And then?
I slipped it into my pocket and went back to my room. 
In the heated house, suddenly starved, for sleep, I crawled into bed, pulled the blankets over my shoulders. The clouds outside the window were already beginning to glow with the milky light of dawn. 
What do you see when you close your eyes. 
Snow falling outside the window. 
What else?
A man on a train. Flakes swirl around passengers on the platform; wet footprints mark the walks on the streets below. I watch him leave the train, pass the still locked carts in The Gallery. A girl with a black head scarf is spreading dough on a marble counter behind the window of the Cinnamon Bun kiosk. She watches him as though she knows him, knows what he has done. He climbs the stairs to the street, passes three men veiled in steam and falling snow huddled around a vent, their blankets and plastic bags piled near-by. Each image is succeeded by another, drawing him on like the opening scenes of a film. There is a feeling that it should lead somewhere, to some revelation around the next corner waiting to happen, someone ahead of us, just out of sight, leading him on. But it is a film where the camera men have forgotten to show up, and around every corner there is only another corner, an endless succession of disconnected scenes, each vanishing in turn beyond recall, and then he is on the train where he first saw her but this time it is winter. He turns to where she was standing--but there is nothing there! As though looking through a frosted glass, the passengers are frozen, like drawings etched in ice and at their center a space, neither white nor black, neither dark nor light.  

 

Dream Work
Over time, he discovered he was able, now and then, by writing an account of the occasion of the episode, to free himself from these seizures, which would paralyze him for days, leave him no peace from their insistent demands--an account, not precisely of what had happened, mind you, rather, by fastening on to some fragment of memory far enough removed from the provocation and putting that into words--by writing around it, as it were, he found he could replace it, and (at least until the next occasion) still the voice. That was the beginning of the journals, of these boxes filled with prophylactic scribblings.
On the morning of the third day after the Snow Angel, after three days of rain, a shaft of sun falls across the wall over his bed when he wakes. He stands under the shower until the bathroom is thick with steam. 
Look, I haven't left the house in days. Like solitary confinement when I don't have work. After a while you get a little nuts, you know what I mean? I could blame it on the weather but I’d be fooling myself. For months now I've been living like this, a near recluse. I've got one suit decent enough to wear out of the house, and it's frayed collar and cuff; my only tie, stained. The temp agencies have stopped calling. Behind in rent, phone disconnected weeks ago... but the rain finally letting up. For the first time in weeks the tightness in my chest is gone. 
He lifts one arm, as though to check whether it still obeys his command. Stretches one hand, wiggles his fingers one at a time, clenches his fist, stretches again--then repeats the exercise with the other hand. 
I have this odd impression the image in the mirror doesn’t move. Fixed in place. Like it’s making fun of me. I dreamt I was struck by a car. 
He rubs his eyes and yawns. The dog next door begins to bark. There’s the clank of the brass mail slot. 
* * *
At the checkout of the Shop Rite, he takes out his wallet to pay for the coffee, eggs and milk he's placed on the counter. Searching his pocket for change, he feels the snapshot. Since the morning he found it in the lot he's avoided looking at it. He stares at it﷓﷓transfixed. Two figures, their arms around each other's waist--one of them a girl, her face familiar, the other scribbled out with ballpoint pen, wild loops and zigzags﷓﷓not a trace left uncovered﷓﷓written over in a kind of frenzy and with such force he can trace with one finger the form raised in relief on the reverse: body, head, legs. The photo has been fixed to piece of white cardboard only slightly larger than the photo, the edge, lighter where the frame had protected it from the sun.  
 Two names written below: Lisa and Wren. On the back--in a tiny, fastidious hand, ink of a different color--a note. He puts on his reading glasses to make it out.
Clean the toilet and anything else you did not clean in the bath room you have my work number and I don't understand why you could not call me at work to find out where the toilet brush is. Even still I don't understand why you did not clean the out side of the toilet. You live here just like I do and since I don't have a problem with cleaning up and doing other things pertaining to the apt. I should hope you would not either. You were home all day (as usual) and I don't understand why the bathroom is not completely clean if you can not work with me one bird is going to fly the nest and if it is me do not look for me I will be gone for good this time 
Will that be cash or card?
He looks up blankly at the checkout clerk.
That's $5.62, sir. Cash or card?
On the border above the picture. A phone number.
Sir?
He slips the snapshot in his shirt pocket. Right, he says, opening his wallet, pulling out three one-dollar bills, laying them on the belt, fishes for enough change to cover the difference.
Right, he hears himself say, an echo, as though someone else were speaking. He takes the plastic bag with his purchases and turns to go. An airliner is trailing a long white double plume through a sky of shimmering blue--a touch of spring, late winter. He hasn't seen the sun since the evening of the ice storm. Plastic bag in hand, eyes closed, sunlight warm on his face, he lets his fingers trace the impressions on the photo--like Braille. An idea begins to play, like someone singing, a voice--soft at first, but insistent. 

 


The Call
Journal Entry

In recent years the intensity and frequency of my seizures had diminished. Finding that when they did return, I was better able to tolerate them, I grew complacent--to the point of believing that my writing, rather than protecting me from these episodes, may have served to kindle them, to make me both more sensitive and susceptible to them. Foolishly, I gave it up--the way absence of symptoms will tempt one who suffers from a chronic disease, in the belief he has been cured, to give up the medications that have alleviated them, when all along the malady has been biding its time, waiting for him to drop his defenses, gathering strength for a still more deadly assault. When a man's life has become a cage of his own making, he will perceive any gathering storm as deliverance--a wind that will sweep away the clutter and debris that traps him. 

I'm standing on the corner of Castor and Algon, both playing with and resisting the impulse. A motorcycle passes, several trucks, a procession of cars. Max, a neighbor from down the street, waves as he drives past. I glare at the payphone. Like an actor on opening night waiting in the wings for my cue. A phone call. I mean what's the big deal? A simple phone call. Finally, there's a lull in the traffic: I hold the receiver to my ear, listen for the chime as the coins fall. My hand is trembling. I can barely make out the writing on the margin of the photo. The first few times I punch in the wrong number, have to begin again. 
The second I saw the phone number on the back of that photo, standing in line at the Shop Rite, I knew. No accident, waking that night, seeing her in the storm. No accident, finding her message. She had left it for him.  
Nacht, here. Who is calling please?  
A truck rumbles past. I wait for the noise to ebb. The voice of an older woman... her mother? An aunt? Grandmother? Not her... even so, my heart is pounding. 
Jacob, I say—pulling the name out of the dream.
She thinks I'm answering an ad she placed in the Inquirer, an ad for an apartment. Okay. It just so happens it's true; I'm looking for a new place to live. Desperate, as a matter of fact. 

The photograph, the phone number, the timing of the call. Too many coincidences.
You think so? That's not the half of it. Her father's name was Jacob! 
The girl’s?
No, Nacht—the women who answered the phone. She went on and on about it. An old Quaker family, she says. I think that’s the only reason she was willing to give me her address. 
And you agreed to meet her?. 
* * *
Dark blots begin to appear on the pavement, Rorschachian enigmas. Gone before the mind can comprehend. Early quiet, the air heavy and still while above blue-black clouds race across the sky promising a downpour--another hint of spring in February. 
He quickens his pace. Storms unsettle him, as though he were waking into a dream--a lucid dream﷓-a dream of the world made over, uncanny, newly dangerous, purged of boredom. His eyes wander as he walks. 
There's a juniper tree up against the front of the house. He looks up as he approaches. The wind is beginning to stir the branches. A sudden blast brings down a shower of dead needles. Things disintegrate before our eyes. 
One thought gives birth to myriads. He brushes them from his shoulders and hair, ducks inside as the clouds open up and a curtain of rain sweeps up the street and over the yard, washing the brown needles from the walk and steps. Every drop, a mirror of the world.

 
 

Interim Arrangements

You never know what seemingly insignificant action, word or gesture will mark a turning point, lead you out of the old, into the new. 
Boredom. 
The relentlessly reduplicated row houses, their identical brick and stone faces, their flat roofs and postage stamp lawns, the ubiquitous borders of English ivy, pachysandra, dusty miller. Dusty miller... the very emblem of boredom. White with boredom.
Look at these houses. Built mid-century, the first owners, second and third generation sons and daughters of immigrants. Urban laborers moving up. Their parents and grandparents sacrificed their dreams for their children. They accepted a life of boredom as their lot, and for what? For their children. So their children could spend their lives in wars and work, and their children in turn could do the same for theirs. They called it a better life. The question is, for how many generations can the question be postponed before sacrifice becomes accommodation, before a better life degenerates into a strictly limited mindfulness, the curse of somnambulance? 
The better life. Freedom from want.
 Stuff. 
The car. The house. The lawn. The steady job. The week at the shore. Trouble is, somewhere along the way, want gives way to wanting, and of wanting there is no end. I thought I'd found a way out, what have I got but accommodation in another form? No, it's not boredom, Can't be. I've been living in a dream, and nobody's ever bored in a dream: frightened, anxious, aroused, elated... but never bored. So what the fuck is it? 

Water on for tea, he watches the rain stream across the window, waits for the kettle to whistle. The kitchen, the bath, and the upstairs room that have served as study and bedroom are the only rooms he uses in that house. The others are left dark. The living and dining rooms are filled with old furniture, not his. A massive, polished walnut table, an upright and buffet dimly reflected in gilded mirrors, upholstered chairs and sofa with thick plastic covers, a baby grand, hopelessly out of tune, and on a gilded pedestal by the entrance to the kitchen, a plaster Venus de Milo that seems to glow in the dark when he walks in at night. All laden with dust: remnants of the old woman who lived... and died here.  
The closets are still full of her clothes, drawers, with old family photographs, papers, prescription medicines, bottles of pills and poultices, bundles of plastic forks and spoons wrapped in napkins. She had been cremated, he was told. Why had they not burned all this with her? A fitting pyre. A savor pleasing to the Lord.  
Why are living there?
I told you—desperation. What was I going to do? Out of work, bad credit. The old woman's son, the owner and landlord, lives in Montreal. An arrangement meant to be of mutual benefit. I'd serve as caretaker: keep the spit of a lawn mowed in summer, shovel the walks in winter and by keeping the house occupied, discourage prowlers and vandals; the benefit to me being the nominal rent. 
It didn't quite worked out as planned, did it?
You're telling me!. For one, I was responsible for utilities, which meant paying the gas bill for the whole fucking house. By February of the first year I was already falling behind. 
Then there's the rent, which wasn't fixed. The landlord's decision to exercise his proprietary right to raise the rate at the end of each year's lease (a verbal agreement): fifty dollars a month. That meant, three years later, it's one-hundred-fifty dollars more than I can manage.

The lights dim briefly as he stands looking into the open refrigerator. At the window, winter lightning. For a few seconds, the house goes dark. Like a sign. Where is the map of the mind? One has to begin by moving the furniture in the house. It's time to leave. A chapter's end.

It's true. I've got to thinking of my life that way, you know? Made up of episodes, chapters. Volumes of a large book whose last word I'll never read. 
Makes sense. A way to break the passage of time into manageable units.
You could put it that way. As though by intimation--that by uncovering that force governing the inner movement of the part we might come to see the whole, have some idea how it'll all turn out. 
The fault in this view being? 
That it leaves each lived moment dependent on and something less than the imagined whole--which can never be more than a hovering figment, a vaporous angel of mind one is not able to engage. 
So it was already clear to you by this time that this... this chapter, was about to come to an end. 
Unendurable, is the word... 

A volume as decisively closed as the clap of thunder that quickly follows the flickering restoration of the lights.


 

What does it mean? the voice demands. Tell me what it means? How can we answer if we don't even understand the question? When the meaning of what we do lies hidden in the unpredictable consequences of the choices we make? How can we hope to use the past to guide us, when looking back, there are no straight lines, but only a multitude of branching forks, each leading--or rising out of an alternative life. What if... impossible to know No matter which fork we trace, which branch we follow, we never get beyond that first--the primal, unremembered choice, the first spoken word.


Raptor
This morning I woke in a panic. In a dream, the landlord's sister had showed up at the door. She'd come for some money order her brother had given him with instructions that I should keep it safe until she could pick it up. I had no idea what he was talking about and told her I hadn't seen her brother. Had never laid eyes on him, as a matter of fact. But he sent it in the mail, she said--and showed me a receipt with his signature. In the dream, I was seized by this desire to confess--to tell her I'd cashed it myself, spent it all. Not a penny left. I had to fight to hold it back. I knew if I so much as opened my mouth it would all come out. I wanted to tell her I meant no harm, that I planned to replace it when I got my next paycheck, that everything would be okay. But he was paralyzed and was sure she took this as an admission of guilt. 
I only remembered this dream later that morning when I went for the mail. I found a letter shoved under the door. Talk about your coincidences... you're not going to believe this. I didn't believe it. It was addressed, not to me, but to Mina Horsht, the landlord's sister. The dream came back in a rush. We're talking full panic mode here. I tore it open. On a sheet of paper, a single telegraphic command: 
HAVE BUYER. USE CHECK SENT LAST MONTH TO SELL SHIP STORE TRASH FURNITURE. EMPTY AND CLEAN HOUSE. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? URGENT--CALL ME! 
Only a dream, I tell myself. A coincidence, nothing more, right? Still, my heart is going. I can't stop the feeling. This can't be happening. Something has gone deeply wrong with the basic order of things. .
 You say the sister lived in Elkin's Park? That you expected her to stop by hereone of her periodic inspections? They'd said nothing about putting the house up for sale, but then, he'd ignored the landlord's letters for months, had no phone. Maybe they thought he'd moved out. If she was coming by to check, why had he asked where she'd been? 
There was a stack of unopened mail behind the door. A few bills, most of it junk. Curious now, he scooped up the whole pile and carried it to the dining room table. He found not one, but three notices to vacate the premises, the first dated from October.
* * *
This afternoon as he leaves the house, his attention is arrested by the calling of crows, an unusually large number of crows in a state of high excitement. A few of them are flapping overhead, looping around to the back of the house where most of the racket is coming from. Curious, he goes inside to leave from the rear door (this is a row house in the middle of the block). The back door open, he looks up to see where the ruckus is coming from--what could be upsetting all those crows circling and swooping. 
It appears to be something on the other side of the tree, over the parking lot where the snow angel had left her mark and flown. He crosses the yard, ducks through a hole in the fence and stands on the edge of the lot. There, perched on the top of a utility pole is a large raptor, a hawk--or perhaps a falcon (he'd read that they've recently returned to the city. Nests have been spotted on City Hall.) This one holds a pigeon in its claws, making a feast of it while above the crows circle and scold. Swooping down, now and then one will almost brush the hawk's crown with its wings, ruffling feathers on its shoulders. The hawk pays them no mind. Doesn't so much as look up. It tears a shred of flesh from the pigeon and a little cloud of feathers flutters down like snow.
He stands and watches the hawk take its meal--the angry, powerless crows. Watches till his back aches and his neck grows stiff.

 
 

Naomi Nacht at Home


He's kept this record for more than forty years. Filled one-hundred-eighteen composition books. Two, three, sometimes four a year. More than nine-thousand pages. The continuous erasure of a life: a record in lieu of memory, that in the end nothing will be left but words. Then came the girl on the el, filling in the blanks. Not words from a notebook, but a presence like a knife in the heart!  

The blackbirds of debt, he thinks, ringing the night bell, shivering in the late winter cold--a second front having blown in even as he was leaving the house. Already, puddles from the recent rain have begun to freeze over. Excited, nervous with his newfound resolve, standing on a stranger's doorstep this February afternoon, his seasonal predisposition to gloom easing, lifting, rising in and through and out of him. Yes, out , like a soul released! He can feel it, this new body forming around him, the old one peeling away. Skinned. Raw. Set for transport! Some part of him still soaring with that graceful predator, above it all. A point-of-view a flight removed. Falcon... or flock of crows. Keeping watch. Observing the observer within. 
* * *
What happened when she opened the door?
What do you mean, what happened?
What did you see? 
.A woman is standing in the doorway. 
What was your first impression?
A woman of a certain age. That was the phrase that came to mind. 
A distinctly literary experience, you said.
Yes, as though I were about to be introduced to a character in a book.
It wasn't her, then?
No. My heart sank. I was just short of turning on his heels to flee when I realized--that this was better. I wasn't ready yet. Better that it wasn't her. It was going to be all right. I could string it out, play the game. See where it led. 
You must be Jacob, she says.
Jacob? 
Is she, then, the woman in the dream? The voice that you heard? 
Jacob. I savored the sound of it. Jacob. Had this ridiculous urge to look in a mirror--to see if, staring back, would be the same face I saw that morning. Or perhaps, none at all?
  * * *
You are Jacob? she asks. What was I going to say? The words I'd rehearsed were for someone else--for the girl I saw the night of the storm, for the space she left in the snow. I stand there. I smile stupidly, clenching and unclenching my fists.
It is... Jacob? Is it not? she asks for the third time--the caller of the other day? 
Yes, I say. Yes, Jacob... here to see... yes (clearing my throat) ...your apartment! And you must be... Mrs. Nacht?
Naomi, please, she says, and holds out her hand. I mean, just holds it out. Palm down, flexed at the wrist. I'm staring at this hand. Does it expect me to kiss it? There are faint marks above her knuckles. A small white scar. Bluish veins. Okay. She wants to shake hands. The strength of her grip surprises me... oh, and it... she... doesn't let go! She takes me by the hand and leads me like a child out of the cold and into the house. 
Jacob, if you don't mind, she says...
Jacob. Four times she's said this name. Four times. A fourfold confirmation. Yes. This shall be my name! My real name, I say. 
Do pull the door closed behind you. 
She leads, still holding my hand in hers. I look back, as though I were leaving someone behind. 
There's a small foyer into the front room--and at last, letting go of my hand--she points to two chairs arranged with a small Chinese table between them. She's not short, but thin... can't weight much over a hundred pounds. Dliberate in movement, careful, restrained of gesture, an air of--what can I call it? Calculated spontaneity; someone who might have spent her life in the theater, I'm thinking.. The picture flashes before me: this woman, in full Victorian splendor, holding forth on a proscenium stage... an image I have to admits doesn't square with the reality--plain cotton pullover top (a T﷓shirt, really); tan slacks with neatly pressed crease. The hair, natural--not quite completely gray, short cropped, pageboy style. No make﷓up. The face, though pleasant enough, something mask-like about it. Expression--interior implied rather than expressed. I'm noticing all this cause she doesn't seem to even see me. Doesn't look me in the eye. A mistress of illusions, I tell myself. What have I gotten myself into?  
She turns and makes her way to the kitchen, taking small, careful steps--like someone walking in the dark. Please, she says, allow me to bring you some tea.
This is good. Gives me time to look around. Check the place out. Get some idea of who I'm dealing with. The room is open, clean: hard wood floors, a few throw rugs in muted colors. Sparsely furnished, but every piece, whether antique or modern, beautifully crafted. The bookshelves that line the walls, filled--not like my house of the dead, not with bric-a-brac, decorated china, family photos--but books. Books bristling with paper markers and Post-its: a library dedicated, it seems, mostly to history, politics, international law, public affairs. Scattered among these, in no particular order, works of literature. Books in half a dozen languages: English, French, German, Italian--a Slavic language I can't identify. In the center, a large antique bookcase with glass doors, shelves filled with leather-bound volumes.
Here is our tea, she says. I see that you've discovered our library. Come. Help with this tea. She's carrying a tiny, porcelain tea pot and two handless stoneware cups on an exquisitely carved wooden tray.
Here... holding the tray in my general direction ...would you mind placing this on that little table between us? And would you do the honors? My hand is not so steady. Those books in the glass case behind me... Thank you so much. My father's. I did mention, did I not, that he came from an old Quaker family. The Society of Friends. One of his ancestors was in the Pennsylvania Assembly when the Quaker faction walked out in 1756 over funding of the Indian wars. Those are all--the old leather bound volumes--journals, they called them.
Journals? The girl on the el, the cicadas, the Snow Angel, the photo and phone number. Here we go again. 
Yes... Quaker journals. 
Quakers? Caulder's Penn on City Hall. The commune in Powelton Village. 
Is something wrong?
No... nothing. Nothing relevant. You were saying, about the journals? 
Yes. A form of spiritual autobiography, or so they are called. (She has a way of drawing out and stressing multi-syllabic words) Travel records, mostly. Deadly boring, to be honest... though some are quite remarkable. The books in that case, most of them date from the early 18th century. Published here in Philadelphia. Second only to London at the time, you know--as publisher of English books in the English language. Cruickshank seems to have been their printer of choice. I've often wondered if Franklin ever got any of their business. I am guessing that this Cruickshank was himself a Friend. They would likely have given the business to one of their own. You know the old saying: the Friends came to Pennsylvania to do good, and they did very well indeed. My, but I do go on. Do forgive me. She closes her eyes, gathering her thoughts. 
Before we move on to the business at hand, I should like to know something about you. You said that you were a tradesman, did you not? 
A tradesman? When had I said anything about being a tradesman?  
I never would have guessed, she says. Construction. Think of that!
I tried to explain--somewhat defensively, that while, yes, I was, was once--a licensed electrician (how dud she know this?), but even then, not construction. Reconstruction, I tell her, only half lying. What I don't say--that I haven't done that sort of think for years. 
Don't tell her about the word processing, office work, last jobs I had. The temp agencies that stopped returning my calls years ago.  
 Electrical renovations! she says. Think of that! as though this were some exotic occupation. She's wearing an odd expression, as though she doesn't quite believe me.  
I do a bit of everything, I say, trying to explain myself. Jack of all trades. The electrical work, you know--that's what I'm licensed for, but... 
I pause to pour tea in Naomi Nacht's cup, and then my own. 
What I suppose I'm saying is... (sipping her tea) that I've been trying to place you, you see. From when I first heard your voice on the phone. What have we here? I asked myself. She speaks softly almost imperceptibly, purses her lips. I'm finding it difficult to picture you with lunch pail and hard hat. Or at all, for that matter. 
She smiles. I stir the tea in my cup, watch the sugar dissolve. She sits there, erect, serene. Like a statue of an Egyptian cat. She's making me nervous. I can imagine this woman reading my mind. I watch how she leans forward, touches the edge of the table with her hand, guides her teacup to rest with the other. Her hands fascinate me.
Restoration, she says, letting the word hang. What else do you do? What are you about? as we used to say. 
What is it she sees? Why the interrogation?
I do sort of... collect things, I tell her... thinking of my own journals... notebooks and scraps of paper tumbling down the stairs, of gathering them up again.
She listens. She sips her tea. There's an earring. Only one. Her left ear. A black pearl suspended by a fine silver chain. She has a barely perceptible tremor and the pearl vibrates every so slightly, shimmering in the light..  
Obituaries, for instance, I say--pulling this out of the blue. I fight off an impulse to scratch the back of my head. Why do I feel like we're in a silent movie? 
Obit-uaries! she says, carefully articulating the dental consonant. But whatever for? 
I sort of specialize in them... obituaries. Pictures, I tell her. I use them...  
Pictures?
  Yes, pictures. I use them...  
Of an obituary? How ever does one make a picture of an obituary? 
Out of them, I say. Not pictures, exactly...more like stories. Of them. From them. Like doing... how can explain. Transformations. A kind of translation. Stories from the lives of these people in the obituaries, only I change everything around. I even had a sort of table--rules I use. If it's an English name, say... I give the person an Italian name. Different combinations. Partly by chance, partly by code. If they give the cause of death--I make it unknown. If not, I draw cards. Different diseases, accidents. Astonishing, how many ways there are to die. But you begin with the names. Names are very important. I mean, you wouldn't thinks so, but... I can't imagine this is of any interest to you.
Au contraire! Why, I've never heard of such a thing. You must be making this up. You wouldn't be making fun of me, would you?
Oh no, not at all... 
There it is again. Like the dream with my landlord's sister. A sudden and powerful urge to confess. Tell her what a fake I am. But I don't. I resist. Go along with her, I tell myself. Make something of this...Why would I make something like that up? I say, twisting around to look out the window, as if to see if anyone is watching. Nerves...  
Naomi closes her eyes.
Imagine, I say, after a long pause. . 
Imagine, she says, slowly opening her eyes. 
At this point I'm thinking about the snapshot in my shirt pocket... thinking about the girl on the el. The Snow Angel. Why it is I came here. I take out the photo, watching her eyes, place it on the coffee table. She seems not to notice..
Naomi Nacht leans back in her chair, nods her head. Obituaries. 
Dust to dust, I say. .
Dust to dust, she says, nodding her head. Obituaries... maybe it's time for you to go to sea? 
  Tell me, I say, turning the snapshot in my hand--do you believe in... I'm not sure I have the right word.
What word is it that you have?
Coincidence... Omens, ... unable to come up with anything closer. 
Omens? 
Do you believe in omens?  
There's a hint of a smile on her lips. Why, I don't know. I can't say I've given the matter much thought. Do you?
I'm not sure... I tell her. Of the feathers that lay on the ground under the feasting raptor, a breath of air had caught hold of one, a single feather among the rest, lifting it briefly, as though it, and it alone, aspired to flight while the others lay motionless around it. ... a feeling you get, I suppose. Something happens. And you feel it should mean something. One of those tricks the brain plays on you. Like deja vous. I'm saying this like I was writing the thoughts in the air... in my mind, formulating an idea for an entry in my journal.  
I take the photo in hand again. Obituaries. Mosaics. Throwing sticks. Reading tea leaves. Patterns in the stars. Constellations. Again, she seems not to notice. There's a cramp in my leg. I message the muscles in the back of my neck. The gray light at the window envelops us, envelops the room. The words, the thoughts that engendered them, hang suspended in the light like writing on air.
You called me, she is saying. I wanted to ask you about this. Naomi pauses... You had my phone number...About an apartment, I believe you said. Where did you... where did you say you found it? 
Did I say? I don't know... what did I say?
That you were planning to move. And happened to be looking through an old paper. And there was my ad. Was that it? Found by accident.
I said that?
I guess I'm wondering if you were looking on this ad as a kind of omen? She pulls her legs up on the chair, sits Buddha style, head at an imperial tilt. You say it begins--with a feeling. Perhaps a better way to look at this--to look for the psychological motive... the susceptibility, if you will. The predisposition that wakens us to unanticipated possibilities, how they serve to put us on alert.
Shifting again in her chair, she settles back, seems prepared to continue this line of thought, but doesn't I feel the picture in my shirt pocket. The way she looks at me--as though she could see through the fabric, through me, past me. As though she knew. 
Where there is a question of wish, of wanting﷓﷓we must be honest enough to admit to ourselves just what it is that we want. These books, she says, changing the subject, nodding slightly in reference to their presence. We were very proud of our library. There are many first editions here, and not a few rare volumes. He was the collector. The connoisseur. I was the reader. Was, I say... and I very much miss it. And him. 
She takes a sip of tea. 
Reading, you see, tires my eyes to incapacity.
She pauses, waiting for his response.
Pardon? ...her voice, the room, my thoughts coming back into focus.. You were saying? About your eyes?
My eyes? She appears startled.  
Ah yes... my eyes, which she closed for a moment, straightening her shoulders, regaining her royal posture.
In point of fact. Indeed. I was saying--that is, about to say... I had something in mind, you see.
They wait for a helicopter to pass overhead. 
I would have wanted the person who I deemed suitable for the type of arrangements I had in mind, that they might do something for me in turn. With compensation, of course. Reading would have been part of the arrangement. But... and this may sound a bit awkward, but let me just come out with it. Would you be able to live with someone like me? Housemates, I mean? Quite unlikely. And for my part, would you be suitable for me? The fact of the matter is, I had a female applicant in mind. Why didn't I mention this when you called, I ask myself. 
Shaking her head, she settles back in her chair, appears to gaze dreamily about the room. There was, of course, your name. Jacob. I had, in fact, been thinking at that very moment about my father--at that very moment. You were saying something about coincidences? And then, there was your voice. You reminded me of someone I once knew﷓or thought I did...
* * *
She smiles, picks up her cup, blows across the surface of the tea and takes a long slow sip. He watches the ripples, the quick-silver rings of light. Thoughts of a river where he had swum as a child. Only once--a single visit. Could not remember where. An hour of an afternoon so many years ago. Had likely not thought of it since. Why now? The universal solvent of memory, touched by an errant breeze, a slant of light--and out of the solution, crystallizing into some new and altered form--every moment a chrysalis sleeping, waiting to wake from its dream. 
I shall give this some thought. I most certainly shall give this some thought. This may yet prove to have been a fortunate coincidence. We must seize on these accidents, mustn't we? Turn them to our advantage, such as we are able.  
The mood in the room has changed, as the light at the window has changed. Clouds, unseen, move rapidly across the sky, opening and closing the portals of light. Now in sun, now in shadow, reflections from the street alternate with hypnotic rhythm, from creamy washes of gray and milky white to brief, intermittent moments of full color. 
He stares at his feet because he can't make himself look her in the eye. How little he is able to read in her face, her gestures. And yet he senses that she knows. Knows why he has come. He thinks of the raptor, wondering where to take this. Whether to come out with it. Confess the whole business. That word again. He hesitates, lets his hand rest on his shirt pocket. 
She shifts, as though preparing to rise--as though to draw their meeting to a close. He starts to rise, following her lead, only to have to resettle himself when she continues.
The question remains, how did you come to make that call? You can't break off without finishing what you started.  
He reaches in his pocket for the photograph. Holds it. Plays with it, Runs his finger over the edge. Lisa. Wren. Studies the image of the girl. The girl on the el. The Snow Angel... only now, at this moment, as he hands her the photo, while he had certainly noticed before--only now does it rise fully to mind that she can not see what he has done. He freezes, unsure how to handle this. She hadn't said anything. Nothing explicit. There was that business about reading to her, of course. Tiring her eyes. And the way she avoided his. 
... but she is waiting, waiting for him to explain.
I'd like you to show you something.
Naomi closes her eyes... reaches out and lets him place the photo in her hand. Turns it, examines it front and back--runs her finger over the writing on the margins.
I'm afraid, she says... without my glasses... she returns the photo. Would you read it for me? 
Read it?
Yes.
Tell me what it says. 
I can't make it out. The writing is blurred. 
Tell me again, how did you know about the apartment?
You told me. 
I told you?
On the phone. It was the first thing you told me. 
She says nothing. 
... when you answered the phone. 
Outside, a Mr. Softee truck is passing. Pop! Goes the Weasel, over and over, as though it were summer. Round and Round the Mulberry Bush The Monkey Chased the weasel. Monkey thought it was all in fun. Pop goes the weasel.......  
  There appears to be writing on the back. She runs her finger across the surface of the photo, appears to be gazing out the window, intent, expectant﷓﷓her mouth slightly drawn, her brow knit.
It was wet. I found it in the snow.
Naomi takes up the snapshot again--lets her fingers play over the surface.
I saw this girl, I assumed it was her.
Her? 
The one in the picture--the one you can see. I recognized her﷓﷓am almost certain, out there in the snow--someone I run into now and then on the el.
In the snow? The photograph, or the girl? 
The last night of the big storm. I saw her from the window of my room. It was late. Someone had been with her, a young man, I assume, but he'd left her out there alone. I watched her lie down in the snow and make a snow angel
A snow angel?
You know, where you wave your arms and legs to ... 
Yes of course. I was once a girl myself, believe it or not
I'm sorry.
Don't be. Where does this photograph come in? Why are you showing it to me?
I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about her out there. I was convinced... I got up, put on my coat, went outside in the snow to where she had been. That's where I found the picture.
Convinced? Convinced of what?
Lying square in the center of the angel's body. That figure out in the snow... a feeling I had.
What sort of a feeling?
I don't know. I really can't say. It's like a dream. You wake up and can't shake it off. Sure that it means something, but can't figure out what.
You didn't have in mind, say, establishing a relationship?
With the girl?
Come now. You're a man--of a certain age ...using the same words ;that had come to mind when he first saw Naomi. ...if I may use the expression. And she is, I assume, a young woman. And apparently, a vulnerable young woman, such as might make the difference in age less a barrier. Need I say more?  
She takes a sip of tea. 
A relationship? No... it never crossed my mind. 
A girl in the snow. I think of my niece. Her mother, my sister-in-law, who is... but we needn't go into that. 
Suddenly, brightly, out of nowhere, she asks, do you eat meat?
Do I what?
Meat. The flesh of animals? I eat no meat at all, you see. I'm inclined to macro-biotic, though not fanatical about it. I make it a point to eat fish once a month. But only peaceful, white fleshed fish. Never shark or bluefish. Bluefish are quite ferocious.
She raises the tea cup to her lips--finds that it's empty. 
My Quaker ancestors, I suppose. Have you ever seen the hands of someone with severe rheumatism? 
She holds out her own hand, fingers curled into a claw. 
I would be blind by now had I not learned to eat wisely. Did you know that congenital rheumatism often leads to blindness? My mother and my grandmother each lost their sight before they reached my age. My doctor told me, I too would lose my vision. Gave me six months. 
She pauses for effect. 
That was five years ago. Chickens. You can learn from observing nature. I don't touch chicken. 
Naomi Nacht rises and extends her hand. Jacob remains seated, thinking about chickens, then he too, quickly rises, offer his hand in return, which she begins to slowly, carefully inspect--feeling the knuckles and joints. Satisfied, she lets him go, pondering what she has found--offering nothing more by way of explanation.
I will have to think on this, she says, turning toward the door. You have aroused in me what Quakers would call a concern. What sort of a concern, I'm not yet prepared to say. You have told me a great deal about yourself. In spite of yourself. And yet I know very little by way of particulars. I suppose, if I should ask, you would be able to supply references? That you are a reader speaks well for you. My husband worked--I guess you would say, in foreign service (spoken with a touch of irony). We did quite a bit of traveling. My own interest leans more toward literature. did I tell you this before?  
She reaches the door. Jacob (shall we agree to call him that now?) ... takes an index card from his pocket, many times folded, opens and smoothes it.
My phone number (placing it in her palm). They shake hands again, this time in the usual manner, and say goodbye. 

* * *
A battered Chevy Camero passed on the street as I stepped out of Naomi Nacht's door, windows rolled down despite the cold, stereo boom and howl to Latin beat, alarms set off in parked cars. I took in at a glance, white gothic script across the rear windshield, superimposed on an image of eagle, wings extended:
 IN MEMORIAM
 Son and Brother
 Forever in our Hearts ...
I did not catch the name. Do not ask, I thought. Another sign. It tolls for me

 
After Nacht
 
We think of memory as the child of time, but it's a rebellious child, refusing to acknowledge its paternal debt, carrying us through its kingdoms on invisible wings, forward and back without regard to calendar or clock.

After wandering distractedly through the neighborhood, I stand on the curb of a wintry Spring Garden, this wind swept street, on a day suddenly gone cold. Tattered clouds race madly overhead. How is it that a gust of wind doesn't snatch me up, send me sailing--free to peer down on the rooftops from this desiccated shell of a body? How strange that I should remain here, curbside, earthbound, heart beating normally in my chest, fixed in space and time, still caught in the lawful net of natural phenomena, a consciousness bound to a body sliding inexorably toward extinction? 
It was happening again. Seized by an absurd sense of wonder, a sense of the uncanny playing tricks with my everyday mind, of a living presence, imminent and untouchable stirring beneath the surface of the visible world. 
It was her presence in that house... a whole new set of questions, to the point where I couldn't be sure in whose voice I'd heard them.  
A cardboard box alternately slides, bounces and tumbles--scuffling and clattering down the center of the street--east to west toward the overpass of the Frankford El. Delaware Avenue. The river. New Jersey. The gray foam specked Atlantic. Stranded on a foreign shore, on the edge of a strange continent, how am I to solve the riddle? 
Without a world, there is no self, no place to habituate. The world is a story everyone must write for himself, but first you must embrace it. A paradox: how embrace what does not exist? How embrace as one, the world, the self that inhabits and invents it, and the inevitable non- existence of both? 
I begin to understand what's gone wrong. I don't want to wake up. I don't want to leave the dream, or is it that the dream doesn't want to leave me? Renunciation--to let go, become an expat from reality, longing for a lost, nonexistent home, or build the very dream we must awake from unto death? Different ways of writing the world. Different worlds. The crows know the falcon from many sides. There are many crows, but the falcon, who does not see himself, is one. 
* * *
A cold gust blows down my collar. I give a little shudder, turn back and look at the people sitting by the windows of a diner. Silk City in red neon. Silver coach prefab classic fifties, coffee in thick white porcelain cups, laminated menus, eggs and fries. With money in my pocket for a change (a pang of guilt--no falcon yet), I could spend a few dollars for something to eat. A counterweight to minor crimes. 
Inside, I think--I will be happy. There will be a stack of newspapers on the counter waiting for customers to read them... waiting for me (how did I know this?). I will rifle through them search for the front page, take a seat, read while I wait for a waitress to bring a menu. She will bring me coffee. At a table at the end of the diner, carrying on an animated conversation with a neatly dressed middle aged man: Wren, the girl in the photo, the Snow Angel.  
A momentary shadow playing at the windows? A light moved suddenly across the faces of people in the diner. Was it a passing cloud? Part of our shared reality? Or some inner predisposition in a state of change, a transient mental phase projected outward, darkening my perceptions? I can not tell; but the word angel hangs about me. Not the angels of greeting cards, of sentiment and solace. Rather--messengers of the unimaginable, winged omens bearing tidings of dissolution, finalities of seem, bright uncanny enigmas of the real. 
Such fantasies! I see them, feel more than see, all in a flash, and just as quickly banish them from thought. I watch her out of the corner of my eye while I eat, find occasion in the ominous roar of a motorcycle, the siren of a passing police car or fire truck, to glance out the window behind her and so, in passing, take her in. I sip my coffee, safe in the privilege of anonymity, bestowing on her, imaginary lives, knowing that she had been here all along, present in mind, and I have only now to summon her.
 Her companion (someone very like myself) is considerably older. I am sure of this, though I couldn't see his face. What is their relationship? What is she to him, or he to her? A supplicant, like me, come to divine from her the secret of her existence? The companion vanishes.
I gaze at her, unaware how absorbed I have become, observing the expressions on her face, taking note of the way she gestures with her left hand, tossing it back as though pointing to something over her shoulder--when suddenly, she sees me!
It's only for a moment. A blink of an eye. Not long enough to be sure she had actually seen me--or that I was the one she was looking at--that she was not, say﷓﷓merely trying to catch the eye of the waitress, who, in fact, is at that very moment brushing past me on her way to refill their cups from the coffee pot she carries. 
I turn, as inconspicuously as possible, back to my newspaper... but then, something occurs to me, an impulse--and I reach into my pocket--finger the edge of the snapshot, comparing in my mind the image of the photo with that of the girl at the end of the diner. I feel aroused, excited, but not by the girl. It's was the act: the fantasy penetrating the film of reality. You imagine a possibility--imagine doing it, and before you have time to think, to think better of, it's over. A flock of crows in ever changing patterns, suddenly converging into singularity.
I see myself walk to the end of the diner, to the table where the girl was sitting. I stand beside her, do not speak, waited--until she take note of me, and even as she begins to form the question on her lips, I draw the snapshot from my pocket, lay it on the table beside her coffee cup. I can see, clear as day, as though I were watching a scene in a movie, the little, excited rings on the surface of the coffee. 
On my way out, I stop to fold and return the newspaper, the one I hoped to find when I entered, push open the door, cross the threshold. A cardboard box alternately slides and tumbles down the center of the street.
* * *
 
Journal Entry
Undated

Later, he will replay it over in his head, this scene that had and had not happened, the diner where he read the paper, ordered and ate a late breakfast of eggs and home fries with rye bread toast, drank coffee listening to Bobby Darin sing Beyond the Sea from the antique juke box, while a couple, a man with tight gray curls and a woman with a broad face and infectious laugh spoke in animated French... Not enough to daydream about it, the snapshot in the snow. Not enough to spin out stories, he had to know. What, exactly--who can say? Like a contagion, a wound, and the source of the wound--these stubborn remnants of the real: the photograph itself, the fact of it. The fact that testified to the fact of her reality. 
Sum it up: a man comes across an image of a girl he has seen. She is real. He did not make this up. She is alive, rides the same trains, walks the same streets, who is, even now, at this very moment, perhaps... taking a lighted cigarette, holding it-- the smoldering ash--close to her skin, close enough to feel its warmth, to see the orange glow on her arm﷓﷓now observing the fine hairs on her arm crinkle and shrivel away, the skin begin to redden in a halo around the burning stub--now pressing it, at last, into the flesh. I hurt, I wound, I suffer, I exist, and at last, the peace that lies at the end of pain. I exist. Remnants beyond our power to alter. 
 
 

Tell the story that she might take flight
--at last 
My angel of a winter's night.
  Wren: Écorché vif
Dear Diary,
Last night I shot bolt up in bed--grabbed at my arm. This time it was no dream. A memory like a river rushing from a burst damn. I was taken back to a time when I was still part of what surrounded me: There was the house where I used to live, the back yard where I played, the bed I slept in, my mother and father, and then a thought: like being burned by an iron--that I was bad. And it hurt. It hurt. I didn't want to be. And then it was like a door opened under me and I fell through. And woke up as a flayed animal. 
There was a book I found in the attack on my birthday. I can't remember anymore which one. I had a corner there by a dormer window. It was my hideaway. Like a dollhouse my own size where I could play and there was a trunk with dolls that had belonged to my mother and there were doll clothes sewn by my grandmother. I wish I could remember which one--how old I was. But I remember the book that I found that day, under a secret panel, a false floor at the bottom of the trunk. I remember its name: Animal Drawing: Anatomy and Action for Artists. And I remember the name of the man who wrote it: Charles Knight! And I remember my father before he went away, how he told me he remembered paintings on the walls of a museum in Chicago where his aunt would take him as a child--of dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals. This was the same man who drew the pictures in my book. A knight whose magic pencil could strip away time and flesh and see through to the bone.
It was old and the cover was warped and the pages seared like it had been left out in the rain. Pencil drawings finely rendered: wolf, elephant, tiger, horse... man. First as they appeared in life--with skin and hair-- and then pictures of the same animal, but skinned, showing the muscles and tendons, and last of all--the bones. The skeleton of each animal like it was still alive.
How it fascinated me, this book! I would stand in front of the mirror and stare, amazed! Trying to remember how my body looked under my clothes. And then I would peel them off and stand there naked, staring and staring. In my fantasy I would strip myself like in the book of skin, of flesh--until I was one of those animals: nothing left but a frame of bones. 
It was a wish to see within, yes! Not bones and flesh, but the words that whispered in my head, the thoughts, the pictures that come in dreams--to see and be the inside of myself, of things, of the life that hides beneath every surface of every thing in the universe. 
For a long time I carried the book everywhere. I took it to school. I carried it with me when I went out to play with my friends. I carried it to the table at dinner and placed it carefully under my chair where I could reach down with my feet and feel it there while I ate. My uncle observing it as the sign of a born artist; my father: the making of a future doctor. They didn't understand. How it meant for me the great emptiness I felt inside myself. The space that wasn't there because I couldn't see or find it. The blank that was my real self, an angel who held my true name in an invisible trunk locked with a magic key--not a golden key like in a fairy tale--more beautiful! It was of copper or bronze, green and rough, but shining like gold at sunset where worn down with use. Those pictures and the image of my own skinny girl's body in the mirror--where I began to understand that no matter how deep the cut, there would always be only another layer, another surface. How later the pain of peeling back the skin became a sign. The mark of truth. 
ecorché vif 
I'd knew then from the beginning, didn't I? What I've begun to discover this past year? I've been given a secret knowledge and I can't keep it to myself any longer. Its too big, too painful. Even then, how I wanted to tell them, my friends, my family. How I wanted to get it out, this splinter festering under my skin, but I couldn't. I couldn't because it was my mouth, my tongue that was the secret trunk locked with the angel's magic key. Inside it were the words, the names, the real names of everything, every feeling and every thought in the whole wide world.
  Because I didn't have the words I tried to point. To leave hints. I left the book lying on the table--lying open to the picture of the flayed tiger and watch in secret. It was always the same. Someone would come by, and, if they saw the book at all, they wouldn't say. Or give it a passing glance, close it and set it aside. They did not see, or if they did, what they saw was something else, something altogether different. Different--because I was different. .
I will settle back on my pillow now and let myself drift into sleep, and in my sleep I see him. In my sleep I will hear a voice calling as I walk down Spring Garden toward the el. It is my own voice.
Mister! he will hear, calling from down the street, from somewhere behind him. Mister! Where did you find this? And there I will be, the girl, his Snow Angel, Wren--running after him, and in my hand, the snapshot... the snapshot and my diary.  
He reaches out for it, but before I can draw close
enough for him to take it, he slips into a deep and dreamless sleep
 O Lady of Literal Enigmas, Mistress of the Alef-Bet, I call upon you in my moment of need--if indeed, you are more than a figment of my imagining... to grace with mortal names the shadows of my dreams that they may burn away like morning fog in light of day!
 

The Aleph Bet
Stacked on the table, strewn across the floor, the journals he rescued from the street a few short months ago. No "obituaries." The only life rewritten, his own. He finds the volume with the account of their meeting; messenger, malach, avatar. How she took a seat across the isle, the #44 bus on City Avenue. Behind her, he wrote, through the window, the enigmatic logo of the Adam's Mark hotel--long gone-- like a red ribbon tied in a knot, like a letter from a lost language...

The bus is crowed with kitchen staff. The woman across the aisle places several bags on the floor. She's beginning to open them. The passengers around her retreat into studied indifference. She takes out what look like children's toys: puzzles, little plastic dolls, card games. All the while, casting meaningful looks at a man to her right, trying to catch his attention: one of those who had failed to learn--or did not care to honor--the convention of maintaining polite distance from strangers in public places. The passengers around her recognized the type--a visitation from the garden of innocence--and retreated into studied indifference. 
The bus was crowded: kitchen staff in checked pants heading for the evening shift, mothers with infants on their shoulders and shopping bags at their feet, badly shaved old men nodding off in baggy jackets and crumpled ties, heads bobbing to the lurch and sway of the ride. The man beside her﷓the one whose attention she solicited﷓in his dark, well tailored suit and conservative tie, tiny American flag in his lapel. Self-conscious, conspicuously out of place. Made no effort to hide his discomfort. She seemed not to notice, held out her hand, introduced herself. He ignored her, or tried, jowls and cheeks flushed and round, swelling over the stiff collar of his dress shirt. Double scoops of strawberry ice cream on a white cone. 
She persisted, asked him questions, pointed to articles in her bag, but to no avail. He averted his eyes, read the rows of ads posted above the windows, unfolded a newspaper and held it to his face, and when he could not shake her, slapped the paper down on his seat and moved to the back of the bus.
As though to console it, she stroked the hair of a tiny plastic doll she'd drawn from her bag, kissing it softly on the top of its head. Seeing no one else to talk to, she began to rewrap the plastic figures on her lap, each in a separate square of colored paper, placing them one at a time into the shopping bag by her side. As she folded the last doll, she caught Jacob's eye﷓the signal she'd been waiting for. She waved at him with her little finger, promptly picked up her bags, crossed the isle and sat down beside him--offering her hand in introduction. 
She had an accent, Russian, he guessed. She told him her name, but over the noise of the bus he couldn't make it out. Each time he asked, it seemed the bus accelerated, or a truck passed by or a siren wailed. The third time, she smiled, held out her hands, palms up and shrugged. 
It's only a name. Does it really matter? she asked, trying to read the title of the book he was holding. 
I know this poet! Amichai. Oh, this is English--have you read in Hebrew? I have translated some of his poems. Only for myself you see, but he is almost favorite poet. I write poems too, do you know? In Russian. In Hebrew. I am translating them now to English, my poems I have somewhere... (pulling a large scrapbook from her bag). Here, she said, you read this one by me. 
They were about the war, she said. Her grandmother had starved to death in the siege of Stalingrad. One day maybe she would write their stories, but it was the holocaust that haunted her now--because of the books she had been reading. That was what her poem was about--and she pulled a scrapbook from her bag, turned to the page she wanted, placed it on my lap. 
Jacob read a few lines-her childlike manner, and the subject matter--he prepared himself for the worst. The usual clichés: acrostics with the names of the death camps, barbed wire and snarling dogs--but it was nothing like that. He nodded, smiled at her--and began to read again from the beginning. It was surprisingly good. All indirection--nothing, in fact, about the war, the Jews, no gas chambers, no columns of smoke bearing souls to nothingness; only her remarks to link the poem to its stated subject. And yet, it was chilling. Disturbing in a way he couldn't put his finger on.. The impersonal voice--like a disembodied god naming seeking names for the objects of its creation, how in nature there are no names, and when there are no names, there is no death but only change. 
He finished the poem, and before he had a chance to say a word, she took the scrapbook, explaining as she tucked it into her bag, that her stop was coming soon.  
What did you say your name was? No! Don't tell me! Let me guess... 
Oh, (holding out a clenched fist) I have for you ... a gift! Shhhhh (Pressing a finger to her lips. She took his hand, placed it in her own.
Take this, she whispered. But must not look! Promise--not until off buss! At that, she snatched up her bags and made a dash for the door--waving over her shoulder as she left. He looked for her out the window as the buss pulled away, but could see no sign of her. 
* * *
I've told the story so many times I can no longer be sure it really happened. Yet here it is, on the pages of this notebook. I read the words, how I opened my hand, and there it was: an alphabet block. The one that rests on my window sill. Real. No apparition. No figment. And there, on the side of the block facing me: the letter 'J'.
* * *
I place the block beside the open volume, begin to spin out an imaginary history. I would have her come from Odessa, a city on the shore of an inland sea. Streets lined with acacia trees. She is like the one who returns to us in dreams, once in childhood, once before we set out into the world, once at the beginning of love, always in a form we do not recognize until it is too late to ask her name.  
Think of Ovid (exile on the shores of the Black Sea), how he transformed like-qualities to like, a bird-like nose would become a beak; a spinner of tales--a spider. Metaphor as metamorphosis. Rearrange the parts to make anew. Language as the universal solvent, precipitating names and stories like crystals on the receptacles of memory. 
 Take what I have given you, she tells me, with her Delphic smile. Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.

 He opens his journal and begins to write.

The bus is crowed with kitchen staff. The woman across the aisle places several bags on the floor. She's beginning to open them. The passengers around her retreat into studied indifference.
 

 


ARI FIGUE

Ari Figue
What's in a Name
Journal Entry
One Morning I woke up--at least I'm pretty sure I did--there were these men there and later people I knew--even to hear their voices on the telephone in a way that doesn't happen in dreams--not even in those dreams where you say--it was so real...no the truth there's never anything even remotely real about dreams--except for the fact that when you're asleep you forget so when you wake up what you remember--or think that you remember though I'm not sure that it's really a memory at all and not something that we make up after-the-fact--a product generated by our waking--this is what it felt like we say, but what do feelings have to do with reality? Which is not to say the fear isn't real, falling down that elevator shaft head over heels to certain death--the fear at least even in the dream or making it up afterwards--or not even afterwards but from the beginning like shooting a movie meant to scare you because being scared is exactly what you wanted--exactly what you needed, the question is--how else could it be, the woman on the bus with her aleph bet and the girl on the el and even Sorrell﷓﷓as though they were all one--all of them falling into that space in the snow or rising out it--the question is how does one know? How does one know in a dream or making it up--what has never happened like writing the script of a movie--how does one know what it feels like to fall to ones death when it hasn't happened unless it really has maybe in another life and you've forgotten only you really haven't. Like those Marines in the real war not the movie at all who wake up and not for the first time on a spring morning far away and long after in a ditch running with human filth and the smell of burning hair and the mortars keep falling and whistling and falling and whistling as they come and you're still waiting years later never knowing just which day just which morning will be the one when you hear the voice...  
... Jacob  
... and he awoke and was amazed... 
 

Serpentine lines--blue on white--writhe across the envelope, almost alive: a letter, a real letter. Old fashioned kind. Hand written. Still dazed with sleep, half blind after closing the door on the morning sun, I stare at the writing--waiting for the words to crawl off the page, to take wing, to melt into the half﷓light in the hall. But nothing happens. A piece of paper. Writing. Nothing more. 
A name comes into focus:
Jacob
I toss it along with a small package into the stack of junk mail and bills collecting on the floor. 
Jacob... 
... from Naomi Nacht. In old fashioned longhand. 
Having given the matter my careful attention and a great deal of thought I have decided against taking on a housemate. 
And? What am I missing here? Hadn't we already agreed to as much? 
I want to thank you for our conversation. As we talked, I was drawn once more to remind myself of something of which I had been aware for some time--even before the loss of my husband--but for some reason had put out of mind--that my deepest wish at this stage in my life is to live alone, as best I am able, learning to overcome the inconvenience (which you must have noticed) of having less than perfect vision. However, in consideration of your expressed wish to find alternate housing, and the hope my ill-timed ad must have aroused in you, I have taken the liberty (I do hope you will not mind) of relaying my name to an acquaintance who had a proposal I do believe might be of interest to you... . 
 Jacob had been stuck for so long, emotionally, psychologically, no work. Seriously worried about what had been happening with his memory, with lost connections: like pages torn from a book. It was hard to believe that anything would ever change, and if it did, that it might be for the better. He went over the enclosed note, every word, every letter. An interview, a proposal? He could see himself sitting on the curb surrounded by all his worldly possessions, such as they were: clothes, boxes of books--waiting to join the ranks of the homeless. 
 If he stayed? Refused to leave? The cops dragging him out by his feet, skull bouncing against the concrete steps. A stolen grocery cart, fighting for the right to a dry spot under an overpass. The backdoor of the American dream.

 
Wren. I whisper the name. Wren. Like a bitter prayer. A prayer into the void. The space where she lay in the snow.
 
 
 

Ari Figue's Cat
Ari Figue's cat lies curled on a carpet in the middle of the room: a remnant of what had once been a rag-rug, room size--one of those things woven of salvaged clothing, sheets, mattress ticking. Rags to rags, as the saying goes. The cat loves it. For him, a flying carpet, a ship to ply the sea of dreams, his private prayer rug. 
Ari lies on the floor beside him in a sleeping bag--or rather, a kind of blanket roll he fashioned for himself. Feet to the north, head to the south, he stares at the ceiling; if he stretches out his left arm he can touch the west wall. He doesn't. Instead, he reaches over with his right to stroke the cat gently behind his ears. Cosmos contained.
At his feet there's barely enough room for the small table that doubles as a reading desk (or will when he finds a chair.) On the table, and on the floor against the wall, towers of books, stacks of magazines, mounds of unopened mail--almost all of it junk. These too, he reads, as a believer searches scripture for hidden meaning. Every word of every piece before throwing it out﷓﷓or setting it aside as a possible addition to his memorial wall.
The cushion that holds his head is pressed against the south wall. A doorway (no door) to the right on the north wall opens to what serves as the kitchen: a small sink, stove, an ancient refrigerator that makes the floor vibrate in resonance when it clicks on. There's no counter space, and no room to sit down. He eats kneeling on a cushion, Japanese style.
A door on the east wall at a right angle to the kitchen opens to the bathroom: commode, sink, stand-up shower. No closets. His clothes lie on the floor scattered about the room, draped over piles of books.
There are two windows, both on the west side. A row of pigeons sit on the edge of the roof of a building across a narrow lot. Figue counts them: seven females, two males. 
Cows and bulls. Sows and boars. Hens and cocks... 
What are the names for male and female pigeons? He consults the cat; it opens its eyes, but the question doesn't seem to interest him.
The south wall over the bed is covered from the ceiling to about four feet above the floor, to high for the cat to reach when stretching its claws--covered with pictures: snapshots, glossies, old Polaroid's, clippings from newspapers and magazines, cut-outs from junk mail ads, religious fliers.... obituaries.
The cat has opened his eyes, perked up his ears. One of those pictures, it seems, disturbed by an errant breeze (Figue, who cannot stand confinement, leaves a window open on all but the most frigid days of winter) flutters on its hinge of transparent tape, flutters and falls loose, looping in pendular arcs on its way to the floor--which it will never reach (remember the cat!). Figue manages to rescue the picture without major damage. The Peaceable Kingdom pasted onto a dollar bill. I know the story. I saw the tooth marks when he showed it to me, like Braille. Like the perforations of a piano roll. I run my fingers over the paper and it comes back to me like a recording, note by note.
 

* Peaceable Kingdom *
 Laticia Hardly had a vision, I mean, it was not precisely hers, that is, not a vision of her own manufacture, What I'm saying is, it didn't pop out of her head or descend like a voice out of the ether or rise up from a cleft in a rock and for Laticia that was all to the good, being as she liked to present herself to the world, or at least to Lenex, as a level headed, no nonsense sort of woman. It happened on her way to work at the State Wine and Spirits store across the street from the Kornberg School of Dentistry (chartered in 1863, the second oldest dental school in continuous existence in the United States). There it was. Lying on the steps. And the moment she laid eyes on it, she knew.
 Papa Lenox had his doubts.  
 Laticia tried at first to explain, but how does one explain what one doesn't understand oneself? To Papa Lenox, it sounded too much like religion. Not that he was an unbeliever--he was every bit the match for Laticia in that department; both of 'em being high end believers and keepers of the faith, it's just that they believed in different things. For Lenox, it was animals. Especially dogs: He didn't have one, understand--he just believed in them. He'd done twenty-eight years with the S.P.C.A,--rounding them up. Most didn't leave the shelter alive. Laticia took that as cause for what she saw as his loss of faith, while in his mind there was no loss; it was rather, a displacement--from gods to dogs. If there were any sentient beings (Lenox would not have used that word either), natural or super, who suffered for our sins, he was convinced it would have to be those dogs.
 What Laticia believed in was her own sense of calling, or destiny, or of being chosen for something special and all her own--though she wouldn't have used any of those words for it and until she found that flyer on the pavement in front of the State Wine and Spirits store she had no inkling of what it was that might be in store for her. Like her grandfather, her beliefs lurked somewhere beyond the threshold of language. Lenox himself didn’t' give any of this much thought; he was no philosopher and way too impatient to work out connections, expose contradictions, match like with like, harmonize apparent paradoxes. This saved him any number of headaches, leaving him free to "drop calf," as he put it (he was given to odd coinages of a slightly off target rural folkish quality), to any new conviction that came his way without concern for pedigree or how it would get along with the rest of the menagerie, his ideas being a kind of Peaceable Kingdom, the lambs in no danger of being eaten by antithetical lions. 
 Laticia took the flier and tucked it into the frame of the mirror over her dresser. She hadn't read it. Hadn't even opened it. What was the need? A picture's worth a thousand words There it was, lamb lying down with the wolf, the lion and the ox, the little child cradling a serpent. Puffy white clouds in a powder blue sky. Her own Peaceable Kingdom.
  * No such thing as a free lunch *
 The next day at work Laticia was nervous, ill at ease, an uncomfortable excitement hung about her, a presentiment, a sense of expectation. the clunk of a bottle placed a little too firmly on the counter, a car horn on the street, the squeak of sponge-rubber soles on the vinyl flooring--any unexpected noise was enough to make her wince. Expectation, but of what? 
 That morning, in the few moments between waking and getting out of bed, it occurred to her that what she was feeling had to do with that flyer... with her vision, that her dis-ease was nothing less that a sign and confirmation of that very calling she had so long anticipated. Her eye was drawn to the mirror where the little flyer, its glossy paper reflecting light from the window, shimmered, bathed in its own halo. Laticia flushed. A sudden warmth (a radiance like sunlight caressing her from within); she didn't want to move. Didn't want to leave her room. Laticia, who had never missed a day of work, not even once been late, was astonished to find herself entertaining the thought of calling in sick, wanting to stay right there on the edge of that bed, eyes fixed on that flyer until she understood what she was supposed to do with it. But there was her grandfather--shuffling past her door on his way to the kitchen, settling himself at the table. He would be expecting her--to see her already up and about, coffee made, breakfast on the stove. She begged forgiveness of the little flyer, whispered a promise to come back, to take it with her wherever she went, to never leave it behind, but in the bustle of morning duties: washing, dressing preparing breakfast, rushing out the door for the bus, all her promises were forgotten.
 

* Closing Time *
 Late in the day, about an hour before closing, comes a palpable change in mood; the pace accelerates: shelves are inspected and restocked, empty boxes stacked, new shipments organized in the store room; thoughts turn to the ride home, to family, to recollections of where life had left off some eight to ten hours before, a mental transport from servitude to freedom, from the collective determined bustle and boredom of the workplace to private or domestic life--in short, a brief moment of awakening, of heightened consciousness between one state of waking sleep to another. It was only natural that at such a moment she would remember: her broken promise. A moment of confusion. she remembered the promise but without its meaning, without understanding the urgency she had felt that morning, Why had she wanted to bring it to work? What was she to do with it? A customer placed a bottle of Absolute on the counter; one glance was all it took, the half distracted blank look in his eyes, his mind elsewhere--an absence reflecting back her own renewed wakefulness. The bright flat colors, the fields at noon, they were at peace because they were awake, truly awake. She saw it, yes a vision of the peace of a dream that had shucked off the dark husk of sleep, a waking to a dream that would not fade. Yes, that was it, that was the vision! But a vision, the real thing, does not come free. It carries its own obligations--and what had she done but treat it like any other sort of found thing, a curiosity of a moment--to put down, leave behind and forget. How could she have been so blind? 
 This man needed me, she told Lenox that evening. I saw it. I looked at him and I saw it and I knew and the moment I knew that I knew the poison flowed out of me and I was flushed clean, flushed clean, awake, clean awake and filled with light...  
 And just what you think this man need you for, he asked. She held out on her open palm the little flyer for Lenox to behold. Nor did she let his credulity, his crinkled brow, that little snort, shake her faith, the conviction of her newly revealed calling. Drifting into sleep that night she saw herself behind the counter at work. She saw the expression on the faces of her customers when she handed them the copies she'd made of the flyer, puzzled at first, gradual awakening--their realization of what this meant--and all without a word. A little child still innocent of speech, the ox and the lion, the lamb, the wolf, the serpent--all there in the eyes of the silent animals, more eloquent than words; it seemed so easy, like slipping into an old pair of jeans, a perfect fit: there she was, Laticia Veronica Haile, visionary vehicle of enlightenment distributing peace and happiness to a troubled world. Then she caught a glimpse of Marshal, the store manager watching with furrowed brow from the office window. The warmth of her conviction turned to ice. She quickly swept the copies back into her purse.
 
 
* Like Night and Day *
 Being chosen to receive a vision, it seemed, had complicated her life beyond anything she'd anticipated. A thing you couldn't just pull out in broad daylight, needed a little shade, a little chiaroscuro; full exposure went and bleached out all the mystery. It'll come, she told herself, tucking the flier into her mirror, it'll come. In bed at night she could almost feel it pulling at her, reaching out on rays of invisible light. She would have dreams of explosions--celestial fireworks; one minute she would be in the dream and the next, sitting bolt upright in bed wide eyed and wider awake... but she could never remember the rest of the dream, only the explosion that woke her up! Lenox was right, she told herself. What was she thinking? But the little peaceable kingdom would chide her from its place on the mirror. O ye of little faith. The lion purred. The oxen lowed and chewed its cud. The wolf wagged its tail. She stretched, as though to demonstrate indifference, padded over to her dresser and put the flyer in a drawer, changed her mind, slipped it back in the frame, but in reverse. It went on like that for the rest of the week. At night after she turned the lights off, before she fell asleep, she was so confident, so sure of her mission. The questions that perplexed her through the day melted away in the darkness and her dreams seemed to offer answers, arguments, plans, but day after day, morning light proved stronger than the dream, melting her faith like an early summer frost. .  
 

* Faith is a Test of Faith *
 Monday morning she woke early. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, waiting for it to fade, waiting for weekday reality to wash it away. The lion purred gently from the mirror. She felt the child's smile. It was time to take matters into her own hands. It was up to her. Her loss of confidence was only a test. On Monday and Tuesday the store didn't open till 11:00. She'd have just enough time to go to Kinkos before work. Faith is a test, she told herself. Her very doubts confirmed the truth of her calling. 
 In front of the copy center. Her heart was pounding, she could not breath. Her hand stopped short of the door, as though paralyzed. She couldn't move, could not lift her foot, as though nailed to the walk, could not recognize her own reflection in the glass. Whether it was a few seconds, a few minutes, an hour... no, it could not have been that long. People would have noticed. No one had come in or out. Time had stopped, the only explanation. Literally, like for Joshua in the battle of Beth-Horon. Laticia trembled, ashamed. She fought back tears, ashamed of her weakness--but she could not do it. She could not open that door. Perhaps this too was a sign. There was always tomorrow. She could try again on Tuesday. She relaxed--almost to the point of collapsing in a limp faint, but she didn't. She pulled herself together... and never had that phrase seemed more apt--like the strings tightening on a loose jointed marionette. If my will is faint, she thought, if that is my undoing, if that is my weakness then I must let it go, be guided by the will of my calling. To give the Peaceable Kingdom to others I must first enter it myself. I must leave my old foolish weak and fearful self beside the gate that I might enter unafraid. .  
 Never had the hours crept by so slowly. If it had it been closer to a holiday the rush might have kept her occupied, but business was exceptionally slow. There were long periods with no customers in the store. Tortured by doubts, she watched the clock, took the broom to sweep the storage room for the third time, stood idly by the register. She longed for evening, for the comfort of her bed, for the reassurance of dreams. It was all foolishness, a stroke of vanity. The age of miracles is long past, she told herself, but she couldn't let it go. She'd passed the point of no return. There was no denying the facts. It was hers. She had found it She had seem it for what it was. When everyone else had passed it by, she alone had had the courage to humble herself, to bend her knee to a higher purpose, to rescue the message of the Kingdom from the gutter.  
 They closed at 7:00 on Monday and Tuesday, two hours earlier than the rest of the week. I wouldn't have made it, she told Lenox when she got home. Never would have mad it to nine.  
 Sure you would, he said, talk like that just make it worse. 
 

* Dark Night of the Soul *
 Sleep didn't come easily that night and when it did, she found no comfort in its fold. She found herself beset by the same doubts that had dogged her daylight hours, but now embodied, dramatized, made sensuous, in full color and wrap-around sound. There was her mother standing at the stove in the kitchen of the house of her childhood. She could only see her from the back but knew her by the shape of her body and the sound of her voice. Though she couldn't make out the words, she knew their meaning. Her mother was scolding her. Can't you see it, child? You mind is playing tricks on you. Why are you doing this to herself, acting like you in some kind of fairly tale? Know perfectly well you making it all up. Laticia tried to protest; reminded her mother how she herself would go through the house, doing laundry, cleaning and sweeping, cooking supper and all the while carrying on a lively conversation, speaking with her mother and grandmother, both long in the grave, as though they were present there and then at that very moment. There is more in this world, child, than you have dreamt of, she would say by way of explanation and Laticia would have turned those words back on her mother but before she could open her mouth her mother cut her off. Listen to your grandfather, Girl, I have been the other side and there is no there there. What you see now is but your own mind talking back at you. Life is what you find, you're right in that, but like no story ever told it has no moral makes no sense and has no fine end. It just go on , with you in it for a while and then without. 
 But I found it, Mama, she called out in her dream; though still sound asleep called out in her own real world waking voice, and we are responsible forever for what we have found. 
 You got it wrong, child. You always did, you always will. This time, no more awake than before, she sat upright like she was about to spring right out of that bed. Then tell me, Mama, tell me true! It's you have to tell me, don't you see, as I am the one who is nothing more than a flicker of thought dancing in the backrooms of your mind... and at that, she woke up for sure.
 

* Fold and Cut to the Chase *
 The tract was pretty much the right shape and almost the right size. After several tries, by gluing a slightly reduced photocopy to a sheet of paper, cutting that to the right proportion, she got the image to perfectly match the dimensions of a United States Treasury bill. Equipped with three bundles of one hundred each, Laticia (in her mother's mind or hers we cannot tell) proceeded via the Orange Line to Allegheny to the State Wine and Liquor Store on North Broad across from the second oldest dental school in continuous existence, an incidental fact that would play through her mind several times a day when she looked out the plate glass store front at that gray stone façade. Gold teeth. Silver certificate. Though we wish we could have found a happier ending to this story we are obliged, as pledged from the beginning, to report the truth, be it ever so sad, terrifying, dull or otherwise unsatisfying. It had been Laticia's plan to deposit her Peaceable Kingdom certificates in the cash door and surreptitiously pass them out (cleverly hidden under genuine legal tender) whenever it was necessary to return change for cash purchases. She believed the discovery of these Bills of the Kingdom would have a cumulative effect, each one, upon its discovery by yet another customer counting his or her change, opening yet another heart to the message of true brother and sisterhood between man and beast until at last the tipping point would have been crossed and in very fact the lion would lie down with the lamb, the child clutch the asp to its bosom the wolf and the ox graze on flowers of the meadow and pastel clouds would drift across an azure Maxwell Parrish sky. Would have been... alas. The conditional must hold and we will never know whether Laticia, had she found the courage to realize her vision, might in fact have brought about this great, and much needed transformation. Alas, it was not to be. Marshal's watchful eye, perhaps made suspicious by her unusually nervous manner, seemed that day to follow her every move--that one last test, which had she passed, like Britomart through the wizard's wall of flame, might well have led us all into that blessed valley, but no--she could not, could not. The bundled bills remained in her handbag, and not without a deep sigh of relief, she left that night, laughing at her foolishness, amazed at this near lapse of sanity. Anyone who chanced upon her as she crossed Broad to the steps of the subway could see in Latica a woman clearly transformed, a lightness in her step, a smile on her face--here in deed was someone who had come into a great and unexpected good fortune. This was, in fact, exactly what crossed the mind of a man waiting beside her for the train. She looked at him and smiled--did not catch the expression on his face, the way his eye was fixed on that fateful handbag, and for a fraction of second, when he requested her to hand it over, it crossed her mind that this must be part of the plan, that here was the very one who had been meant all along to receive and realize the Kingdom, so without a second thought, to his considerable surprise and momentary delight, she opened the bag, withdrew and handed him the bundles, one by one, smiling with pleasure at this surprise ending as she turned to face the train just now approaching the station. The man was not long deceived. Thinking himself the victim of a joke, enraged at this worthless gift, he gave Laticia a violent push into the path of the oncoming train. The Bills of the Kingdom, which he threw after her, scattering hither and yon, continued to flutter in the air, settling on the station platform on the shoulders and heads of horrified passengers and on the roof of the train long after it had come to a stop and the assailant had fled up the stairs hurling after him curses for his lost fortune.  


 
 
The Fire:
Part One: The Meeting

There's a man seated across from me, a wine glass in his hand, almost empty. The tables are small. Less than an arm's length. across. He's holding a blue foam alphabet block, turning it nervously this way and that, squeezing it between his fingers. It seems that he's been here for some time. Absorbed in my journal, I didn't see him come in. 
Used to have pool tables in there, he says, pointing to a door at the end of the bar. The new owners tore them out. Replaced the dart boards with rock posters. Stage. Speakers. 
Is that right? I say, feigning interest.
He strikes up this conversation. Out of nowhere, mind you. No introduction. Does he know who I am? Or is this just bar talk? Something you say to a stranger who has come to occupy the same personal space. More to create distance than to overcome it. Idle thoughts﷓﷓what's the point. We both know each other. As far as names, go, I mean, though there's clearly more to it than that. I just don't know how to explain it. He goes on about compressors, amplifiers, crossovers, the mixer panel in the back. All switches and jacks, buzzers buttons and blinking lights. 
Frankly, I don't see it as an improvement, he says. He looks at his glass, swirls around what's left of the wine, finishes it off. The band in the back room has begun to play. The place is filling up with young couples. 
So, he says, looking around the room, pursing his lips. Jacob, I presume? Do you mind? He points to my glass, flips my journal shut with his finger, signaling with a sweep of his hand that he wants the table cleared. 
I put the notebook on the floor under my chair, the glass on the window sill. He has yet to introduce himself. I know very well who this is, but I find this irritating. As though, by having pronounced my name--what he has been told is my name, he's gained some advantage over me. Who knows. Maybe he has. 
He unrolls a vinyl tournament chessboard, gives it a shake, lays it on the table and smoothes it out with one hand, holding his drink off to the side with the other. 
 I used to play pool in the back. Now I play chess. Chess. Pool. Achieves the same purpose. He pulls a handful of pieces from a bag and places them on the corner of the board, in no particular order. To avert boredom. So you don't have to talk to any one. To channel the mind. Did you know Tom Hanks shot a scene in here once? Here. In this bar? The movie where he died of AIDS. 
A kid wearing an Eagles jersey, a Philly's cap turned backwards, puts his glass down on the chess board. Figue picks it up, holds it out to him. 
Yours? he says.
The kid is big, already visibly drunk  
Wanna play a game? 
Chess in a bar? You nuts? He grins. Hey, he says, laying his hand on Figue's shoulder, no need to answer that!  
A girl in a purple tank top sidles up beside him, tugs at his sleeve. An elaborate tattoo on her shoulder, spiraled shell, a snail on a grape leaf, a cluster of grapes tattooed over her upper arm. I look away for a moment and they disappear into the smoke.  
Figue tucks in his shirt, adjusts himself in his chair, rolls back a corner of the board, takes my hand, uses my finger to draw a small circle on the table top., pressing it down at the center, and from the center outward--tracing a radiating spiral, enclosing it in a circle.
This is how you--how one--achieves a certain distance, he says. A certain perspective, if you know what I mean.. He taps the invisible circle. 
Figue Pulls on his lower lip. It's like, he starts to say... stops. He keeps looking around. Making me nervous. 
That's where we get caught, isn't it? Where we go wrong? He squints. There is something definitely wrong with this guy.
Okay, he says, rubbing his hands together. It's like this. He looks me in the eye to make sure he's got my attention. 
A man walks into a bar. Orders the usual. A few drinks. Pretty soon he's feeling good--you know how it goes. So the guy in the bar gets to talking, and one by one, the patrons he's talking to, who can't get a word in edgewise, they get bored, make excuses, get up and move away. Finally, there's no one's left to talk to but the bartender. By last call he's told this bartender his whole life's story. The God's truth! he says when he's done, raising his glass. The God's truth! 
The God's truth, I say, like an echo. And then what happens?
Next night, it's the same thing. A few drinks to loosen his tongue. Wears everyone out until it's just him and the bartender. His whole life's story. Night after night. Same thing. Same story. Same ending. It's the God's truth, he says.
Figue raises his glass as witness. It's the God's truth! He cocks his head, purses his lips, feeling under his eye with his pinky, testing the skin on his cheek. 
That's it? 
Figue looks puzzled. You don't get it?
I don't get it. Where's the punch line?
The punch line?
Yeah, the punch line. It's a joke, right?
It's the same story! 
That's it? That's the punch line? It's the same story?
 Every night, see--it's the same story! Why? See, you have to ask yourself, why is that?
I haven't a clue. 
Cause it's the God's truth!. 
Figue breaks out in laughter. He has a nice laugh. It surprises me. Not at all what I would have expected. A perfectly normal laugh. Very infectious. I can't help but smile. I'm even beginning to laugh with him. He points at me. I point back. We both laugh like it's the best joke we've ever heard. And then when we've laughed our fill, I shake my head.
I still don't get it. 
You're kidding!
Explain it to me.
If I explained it, it wouldn't be funny. 
Try me.
It's because he told the truth, Figue says. What he thought was the truth. Like the ancient mariner. The poor fool, says Figue, shaking his head.  
We both signal the bartender for a refill. Figue offers to pay and I don't refuse. So, he says to me when he comes back to the table. What's yours?
My what? I say--seeing as I already have my drink.
Your story. 
My story? 
The ancient mariner. 
I hold out my drink for a toast, cause I don't know what else to do. But Figue isn't with me on this. He's looking at me, dead serious. 
You remind me of this girl I used to know.
A girl? I remind you of a girl? 
Not like you're a girl, I mean... I don't know.
Explain. 
She confused me. Like, she'd tell me stuff. Stories. I could never quite follow where she was going. 
I confuse you?
I don't get your jokes.
Maybe I wasn't joking. 
What about you, I ask? What's your story.
He smiles again. I can't figure out if he's drunk, or pulling my leg. I smile back at him. Tell you what, he says. I'll tell you yours and you tell me mine.
  I'll drink to that, I say.. We click our glasses together and I begin...
* * *
First off---tell me your name.
Ari.Figue.
No, your given name..
Ariel. Ariel Figuero.
Okay, I say... here goes.
I close my eyes and let the words form out of the white noise that surrounds us... 
Ariel Figuero... knew in his heart he'd been wrongly named. 
I stop to look at Figue. He nods, seems to approve. So far so good. 
It was his conviction, I continue, clearing my throat--that that power, whose duty it is to preside ...
   
 

The Fire
Part Two, Ari Figue's Story

 Ariel Figuero knew in his heart he'd been wrongly named. It was his conviction that that power, whose duty it was to preside over each birth and to bind a unique soul to the newborn, had, at the critical moment, sneezed--sending his true name spiraling into the void, and leaving the child destined to be a foundling all its life, helpless against the winds of chance.
A child of multiple foster homes, twice adopted, thrice orphaned, his surname was that of his second adoptive family, Ariel, having come to him by way of the first. His biological parents had been citizens of Lebanon, father and mother, respectively, Italian and French by birth. Children of post-war Europe, they had themselves been orphans, each, the sole surviving member of the family, so when he was found by a cultural attaché--an infant in an open briefcase in the back seat of a maroon Peugeot sedan parked not fifty yards from the American Embassy in Beirut, father and mother in the front, each with a gunshot wound to the head--there was no kin to take him in. The very name they lent him, erased from the record. 
The attaché, a man named Henry Smythe from Elkhart, Indiana, a graduate of the University of Chicago with degrees in intentional affairs and literature of the Italian Renaissance, being childless (a near fatal, adult case of mumps, medically confirmed, to blame), and deeply moved at the sight of this poor orphaned child in the company of his slain parents, left no strings unpulled to secure the boy for himself and his wife. 
Thanks to his connections, and aided by the parents having been European and Christian, the Smythes, Henry and Donna, natives (as reported) of Elkhart, Indiana, won full custody only six months after finding him. Winning the blessing of the adoptive grandparents was more difficult.
Both in-laws were dead set against the adoption. What do you know of this child's family history?, they demanded, when they got wind of the matter. Diseases? Mental Illness? Deformities? Alcoholism? Homosexuality? A lineage of criminality? Atheists and leftists? God knows what problems you're inheriting!
These warnings came from both sides--their families were old friends.
We'll send them pictures, Henry said, naively. When they see he's not black as an Arab they'll be fine.
Are you calling my parents racists? His wife shot back.
It was a difficult time. 
Only an exercise of the imagination could tell us how--or if--this might have been resolved. The adventures awaiting this child, snakebit by fate, are, at this point in his story, far from over.
On the very day the adoption was finalized, Donna and Henry Smythe, having put their new son to bed, sat holding hands on the balcony of their condo, the smell of lemon in the air, the sunset turning the Mediterranean to a sea of fire. Later, after a light supper of bread, olives, goat cheese, oranges, they opened a bottle of champagne and raised a toast to the future. Donna lit candles, turned off the lights, spread a blanket on the floor and they made love, drifting to sleep in each other's arms.
And so they were found the next morning. A fairy tale ending, if you think about it. Two young people who, having at last gotten what they most wanted in life, died at peace with one another and the world, full of love and hope, believing in the future. Of the trials and heartbreaks of child raising, not even a faint cloud on the horizon to cast a shadow on their moment of happiness. How many of us could ask as much, caught as we are in our petty trials and dull routine? 
They'd left the window open in little Ari's room--shut his door so not to disturb him. A gesture that saved his life. It had been the synthetic carpets of their modern condo. One of the candles softened as it burned, bent over, eventually fell to the floor, wick still flickering. It went on burning, slowly--no conflagration. Fueled by the pool of melted wax, the carpet smoldered in a widening circle of charred synthetic ash. The chemical fumes were to blame. When the smoke alarm went off it was already too late. Their bodies weren't even burned--unmarred, naked in their last embrace.
While the question of what prompted Salvador and Angelica Figuero (Sal and Angie, as they were called by their friends) to return to Beirut in July of 1982, is, as usual with such decisions, complex. On the practical level, there were career considerations. Sal's dissertation, Capital and Capitulation: War by Other Means, An Economic History: The Projection of Ethno-Religious Power in Secular Lebanon, well received on its publication, had led to the offer of an assistant professorship at the American University (a dubious gift). For Angie, who had earned her PhD on the topology of Late Bronze pottery at Tel Deir 'Alla, it meant that she would be able to continue her own research and to do additional field work at nearby sites in both Lebanon and Syria. Even that may not have been enough to prompt the move, for Ari had proved to be a difficult child. 
Little Fig, they called him, with affectionate irony (he was neither small nor sweet). A deeper irony, that the very difficulty of their years with this boy, the bitter trial it proved to be in their relationship, may in the end, have been what tipped the scale. Not, I am sorry to report, in their favor. 
Ten years before, when they had come to receive the child from the American adoption agency--and meet for the first time--their son-to-be, they had fallen in love with Beirut--and on side trips to the Greek islands, or diving among the coral reefs of Elat, they had fallen newly in love with one another as well, so it would not be surprising if, when they left Philadelphia, they did so in the hope of rediscovering in this city by the sea, some of the passion they had once known there. Their timing, however, was not good.
Not far from the road, in a rubble strewn lot, the site of an apartment complex, recently razed, sat, dust covered, unshaded in autumn sun, a black derelict Mercedes with missing right front fender. From a distance, no one would have suspected the tall figure behind the wheel was a child--a boy, who, a few days ago, had been eagerly looking forward to his eleventh birthday. No family photos from those years have survived, so we can't do more by way of a description than offer the obvious: that he was unnaturally tall for his age. Beyond that, it's probably safe to assume that, despite his size, on closer inspection there would have been no mistaking his youth. 
I pictured him (this was before I knew him) as large--heavy as well as tall, with a round baby face--though this goes against the natural pattern, it being more common for the thin, angular youth to grow portly in middle age, than the other way around (heavy children tend to grow into heavy adults, not to mention that the Ari Figue Marta had seen on the el was angular and wiry to an extreme.
It was hot. All the windows were rolled up: a miracle the child didn't die. I suppose, now that I think about it, this would argue against my image of him as fat--making him even more susceptible to heat stroke. But then, it's not clear that he had remained in the car this whole time. Most unlikely, in fact.
It had been a week since they had been reported missing--the very day they were to have fled the increasingly dangerous chaos that Lebanon had become since the invasion by the IDF. A few hours in the sun would have been enough to finish him off. No water. No air. Of course﷓﷓we can only guess--but he must have gotten out from time to time. For all we know, he'd spent most of that week--or however long it may have been--wondering about, finding water, sleeping in the open--only to have come back to the car shortly before his rescue.
This is not something we will ever know--what happened to him in the week he was missing. He never spoke of it, never told anyone. It was, in fact, a year before he spoke at all. 
I'm not sure who first stopped--or why. I don't think anyone would have, not on his own, not in that atmosphere, where minding anyone's business but your own could get you killed. I believe it was children playing near by who reported him. When four Phalangist militia opened the door, the child held out a key he'd been holding--as though waiting all along for this very moment. It was the key to the trunk of the car where his parents lay, with hands and fingers bloody, nails broken off from attempting to claw their way out before (according to the medical examiner) dying of dehydration and heat exhaustion some four days earlier. And so, improbable as it might seem, the Figuero's, the second set of this child's would be saviors, suffered a fate, uncannily close (though less merciful) to that of his first adoptive parents.  
The next to try their luck at taking care of little Figue were Angie's parents, the Torinos, who, on Mr. Torino's retirement had moved back to the South Philadelphia neighborhood where they had grown up. The task proved to be more than they could handle. 
My glass is empty. Telling his story has made me thirsty. 
Where's the rest of it? he asks.
I drank it, I say.
I mean, my story. What happens next?
You know the rest. 
Tell it anyway, he says. 
Within a year, you were in foster care, where you stayed for the next five-and-a-half years, passed from family to family--more than a dozen in all, until, in the confusion of a fire of suspicious origin at the house of your last foster residence, not quite sixteen years old, you disappeared, and, for all anyone knows, ceased to exist until that day on the el when Marta Schevreteski first suspected she was being followed.
Marta Schevreteski?
I reach in my pocket. Hand him the snapshot. The picture of my Snow Angel. 
Her mother, I say. 
He looks around the room, vaguely anxious, then back at me. Looks at the snap shot.
Her mother? he says, tapping the photo, the image of the girl. the one's that's been erased. 
The other one, I say. 
. Figue nods. Takes something from his pocket, leans over the table; I have them too, he whispers, mysteriously... looking both left and right. visitations, he says, and hands me a flyer from the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
My cat, he says, pointing to some perforations on the edge of the paper he's given me a flyer.
Edward Hicks, he says. The Peaceable Kingdom. 
Where'd you get it?
Found it. . 
Figue lays an index finger on his eyebrow. Strokes. it. 
Notice anything? You don't think it's too obvious do you? The fold on my eyelid? Definitely a symptom of a genetic disorder. It's what JFK had, you know. You see it in the photographs. The droopy eyelids. 
I reassure him. Looks perfectly normal to me. He seems disappointed. 
You think I'm imagining this? He frowns, looks around, regarding the wall fixture over the table.  
It could be the light. Simply far and away the best thing about a bar, don't you think? ...how merciful they are, the lights Just look. See how beautiful the women look in this light?
They are beautiful. I don't think it's the lights.
But of course it is! That's why we come to these places... 
Speak for yourself. 
.... to see one another in this kindly light. Do you believe in an afterlife? I mean, not after, exactly. He places his hand on his forehead like a shade, lowers it to cover his eyes.
With one small hand we can cover the whole universe. Don't you see? The hand over the eyes, the door swings closed, you lose your way... 
 
What about my story?  
Figue stacks the rooks, one on top of the other. Ein Turm
I told your story. We moved that up to the beginning, remember?
I don't remember. Tell me again. 
If you want your story, you know what you have to do. 
I'm not sure I know it. My real name.
Why not?
That's what I want to find out. 
Will it be all right if I begin with someone else's? Someone you once knew.
I know who you're thinking of. 
I expect you do. 
A girl, isn't it.
It usually is. 
Go on.
  You were in love... 
That's what I believed then. How did you know.
You wrote it down, remember?
I wrote this down? About her? 
That's what you told me.
But I've never seen you before!
That's neither here nor there. Just tell me the name again.
You already know it if you've told the story before.
True. But I want to hear it from you..

* * *
I stare at the flyer, trying to make it out in the dim light. I feel the tooth marks. Ari Figue's cat. Ari... Ariel... 
When I look up, the chess board is gone, Figue is sidling through the crowd heading for the door. I sit for a long trying to tracing the evening back to the last point I'm able to anchor safely in memory. I keep getting stuck at the point where Figue asked me my name. Jacob. 
I pick up the foam block, turn it to the side with the letter J, hold the flyer to the light. There are the tooth marks. The flyer. The block. I feel them. Like brail. It's only now, in this kindly light, that I begin to see what lies before me

 
* * *
After the Fire
The wide expanse of Girard, all but deserted when I step out of the Fire's sonic embrace, glistens under curling wisps of fog. A light rain cools my face, waking me from the sorcerer's fire, the fire that only burns believers, Ari Figue's enchanted castle. No el this time of morning. How will I get home? I stand there for some time in the early morning mist before I remember: the shuttle bus! Its purgatorial run under the tracks up Frankford and Kensington's corridor of desolation. How many times have I made this journey? How many times, with my notebook on my lap, have I described the scene? Drunk and exhausted, the illusion of singularity burned away: a journey suitable to my condition.
Across from me on the shuttle, a man with stars tattooed on his cheekbones, deep scars on his chin. He's talking to someone--a younger man in sleeveless shirt, weight-lifter arms. They appear to be escorting a girl--can't be more than thirteen or fourteen--shorts and halter top, a ragged sweater over her shoulders. She huddles between them, shivering, bare feet pulled under her to keep warm, a pair of high heels on the floor under her seat. There's a man with pocked face, thin, gangly--of indeterminate age, hair long down the back of his neck. Transport of the possessed... and dispossessed. All the while I'm thinking about Figue, my conversation with Naomi Nacht, how he came to have a picture of my snow angel. By what natural laws had all this been arranged? Follow the signs, he said, or lose your way.
 Waiting at Margaret-Orthodox for the #59, the air is fumed with burning pitch and lumber. The street lights are haloed in smoke. A man stands outside the bar on the corner of Arrott and Griscomb urinating against the building, the rivulet running between his legs on the sidewalk, to the curb, to the street. On the back of his jacket, an Eagle, wings spread wide. Sirens begin to wail in the distance. Omens of my a life... my new lives. Whose name will the oracle whisper into being tonight? 


 

Marta...  
 
...tucks her bags between her feet, unbuttons her coat and slumps back in her seat. Across the isle, several rows down, a man in a filthy yellow watch cap, soiled checkered cook's pants, and (despite the cold) short sleeved, grease stained t-shirt and no coat, sat down beside a girl in a Catholic school uniform. Her friends, three of them squeezed into the seat behind her, covered their faces with their hands and laughed. She squirmed around in her seat and shot them a look. When the man pulled the remnants of a tuna hoagie from an oil soaked paper bag, she wrinkled her nose in disgust, jumped up, and with her friends in close pursuit, pushed, dodged and squeezed her way to the other end of the car--shrieking with laughter and knocking off balance as they passed a tall man with a cat in a travel case, who barely managed to catch himself to keep from falling into Marta's lap.
He apologized profusely. Marta ignores him, as though she hadn't noticed. She turned to face the window, and found that his reflection met her own in the glass, merging into a double image. She felt his eyes inside her own. The rest of the train ride, she couldn't get him off her mind. She tried to doze off, but when she opened her eyes, there he was, his face in the glass. She was sure he was watching her, and she grew increasingly nervous as the el drew closer to her stop. She imagined him following her when she walked to her car in the lot. As the train pulled away from the last stop before the end of the line, her heart was racing. She took deep breaths to quell a growing panic. She glanced quickly at the window--looking for his reflection, but he was no longer there. She scanned the passengers standing in the isle--up an down the length of the car, his face in the glass of her mind, eidetic phantom, after-image fading. Eyes closed--acid bath of absence. Why so
 
 disturbing? This one face in the crowd. Of thousands passing day after day...
DOORS... 
Are OPENING  
Goddess voice prerecorded. Mass trance. All over the world she saw them.
Opening. 
Doors.
From Mendocino to Nags Head and all points between. 
Brescia to Inawatan 
Buzerolles 
Doloon 
Enoch
Figueira da Fay 
Fuy 
Greeneville 
from Blackpool to Great Yarmouth 
Lucknow 
Nakadka
Rodez 
Tuapse 
Union City 
Urgench 
Vinjumare 
Walsenburg 
Wichita
From the arched portal of the Palazzo Strazzi to yak skin yurts of the Gobi,
Philadelphia row houses (like the keys on a player piano, opening down the length of the block,) from Brooklyn brownstones to the town halls of Bremen 
Leiden 
Antwerp
New England colonials to the Angoulême Cathedral 
Masjid-i Shah mosque 
back doors, porch doors, front doors, baffles, bulkheads pocket trap shutter cellar folding pantry bedroom bathroom double leaves and sliding...
A white frame farmhouse in Iowa, a screen door on a summer night rusted hinges singing to the stars... and the doors of the train of the Frankford El, Bridge and Pratt, end of the line, bodies poured out on the platform shuffle fold and file in shifting ordinals, simultaneous release out 
out 
out...  
And on the glass of her mind the negative imprinted face flickers, fades, a watermark, a citrus stain unseen, only to emerge in lemon yellow sun fever heat or flame. Invisible ink of the heart's hidden dread.


 


  The Fire Next Time

Philly Bar and Grill
I was to meet him here tonight--Ari Figue. Nervous about coming person. I prefer to keep a certain distance, to observe their arrangements indirectly, letters from informants, notes left in the door, messages passed on by the Pigeon Man. The danger of cross-contamination increases chapter by chapter. Our subject is shedding his skin. The closer the proximity, the more difficult to see. The figures bleed together. 
Four TV's going, but no sound.. Not much action on Mondays. Quiet, almost empty. The usual four or five regulars, the rain-or-shiners. Allison, with her horny yellow dog, whispering in Danny's ear, who stares impassively at the perpetually frowning Japanese cartoon superheroes flying, exploding--screaming silent challenges at giants with magical powers; an old sot who, with tearful eyes--a perfect self-caricature, will bend your ear improbably with questions about Life (what does it mean? Is it all worth it?); Henley--an electrician in his early thirties--recently divorced, whose Camelot was Beat San Francisco, his knights of the round table: Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg and Ferlingetti; Mellisa--with the face of an Irish angel, red hair, blue eyes the size of dinner plates, a tall sprig of a girl, one of the regular bartenders. Tonight, here on her day off, drinking, staring at reflections of bottles in the mirror. The Philly Bar and Grill in the afternoon, before it turns into The Fire.
Ah, there he is now. His usual place, the center table under the light...pages spread across the table, writing in his journal.

He doesn't see him come in. Looks up and there he is. Nervous, scanning the other patrons as though ... as though what? His eyes dart around the room. But then, he tells himself--that's how he always is. 
Scanning. 
A word that pops up later in the conversation. He has a way of doing that: planting words in your head so when you try to remember what happened it will come back as though through his mind, in his words. He accuses me of the doing the same thing to him.  
Figue is strange--but it's more than that. He's strange in an oddly taxing way. The way he sits there, drumming on the table with his fingers--taking my silence as acquiescence. I should have listened more closely--or made an effort to shut him out. Instead, I let his words wash over me. White noise. Lulling me to indifference. A diffusion fading in and out of focus--his gaze will drift like a leaf on the surface of a stream, blown this way by the wind, pulled that way by the current. One moment he'll be gazing at the ceiling fan, telling you about a rock band he plans to form (if only he could decide on which instrument he should learn to play), the next, worrying about carcinogenic additives in the wine he's drinking, asking you about the tucks his plastic surgeon made under his eyes, telling tales on his cat... then suddenly he'll stop, look you in the eye, all attention--on the verge of a question, some life-altering question he's been preparing, holding in store--the patter that came before, merely building up to this critical moment--and then, a little breeze will ripple the surface of the water, the raft of his attention, that fragile leaf will spin, topple, be pulled under by the current, vanish into shimmering light and shadow. I have this disturbing feeling when I'm with him that I'm a character in one of his scripts. Someone he's invented. I tried to keep in mind my purpose, to ask him about her. The Snow Angel.
What do you think it means? he asks.
You tell me, I say. 
The dream. What do you think it means?
You see what I'm saying? He must have been telling me about a recent dream. A reasonable surmise--my mind adrift.
Figue shakes his head, no. Like I've missed something, which I had, but it wasn't his dream I'd missed.
You just asked me what I thought it meant, he says. The dream you just told me about. 
I told him? 
My dream? 
And then he sets in to explain it to me. His whole theory of dreams..  
Dream interpretation 101, he says. Think constellations. He points to the ceiling. Think stars, he says. Random points connected. You tell me they don't mean anything. Random excitation of neural synopses. Your standard objection.
Why should I object to stars? I ask, dreamily, indulging him. 
You want to claim that dreams have no meaning. Just tossed salad of the days events, that sort of thing. Not so_ 
What does this have to do with stars? I ask.  
Everything_ he says, throwing up his hands, sloshing wine from the glass he's holding. Think about it_ The patterns we make of star configurations. Infinite_ A number too big to imagine. 
Billions and Billions, I say, conjuring Carl Sagan. 
That any one pattern should be right, should stand for any one clear, definitive meaning: impossible_ Pattern. Picture. The stories we make of them. Accidental conversions. Electrical brain storms. Lightning strikes--so we think it has to mean something. Okay, you'll protest: same problem. The pattern is as arbitrary as the form taken in the dream.
You see what I mean? How could anyone follow what he's saying? But he's absolutely earnest. The furrowed brow. The clenched jaw. It's comical. You want to laugh, to be able to laugh. But you can't_ He draws you in. Like turning on the TV in the middle of a scene... a guy looking for something in the dark. The beam of the flashlight. the fear in his eyes. What's going one? You want to switch channels but you can't do it. Have to find out what he's looking for.
Constellations, he's saying. Constellations. The Greeks saw a bear. Someone else sees a big dipper. Someone else draws the lines to another set of stars altogether, another pattern. None of it has anything to do with the stars themselves. No more than the symbols we think we see in a dream can tell us anything about the dream. 
My attention strayed to a couple buying a drink at the bar... more specifically, her, in particular, her bare midriff, the tattoo below her navel that disappears into her hip﷓hugging cut-offs. An intriguing curve, her belly; unashamedly, pleasingly round... inviting. I suddenly feel my age... 
What we need to do, he said, when the girl vanishes into the crowd... is take it to a second level.
At this point, he falls silent. One of those trance-like states that comes over him. I half expect him to come out of it on a different subject, in the middle of another conversation, but after a few minutes he takes up where he left off. 
It's not like the meaning is, like--in the dream itself, he's telling me. In those excited neurons, to be mined and extracted and purified like raw material. He was waving his finger in the air, gesturing with his long, bony hand--at what, I have no idea.
No, the interpretation itself is the raw material. Is the meaning. Do you understand? An individual--with his history, fears, desires﷓﷓how is it conceivable that none of that should enter into the process? 
He pauses. Looks at me expectantly. I wait for him to continue.
You have to ask that question seriously, he says. The stimulus may be random, but so what_ It's about the associations you make after the fact--that's the substance, not of the dream but your memory of the dream. The mind that insists on finding patterns in everything. You walk down the street at dusk. A shadow at the end of the block. You see first a man, then a large dog... ominous. You think about crossing the street to avoid... whatever it is, and then, as you approach... it's just a mail box. Do you follow me? That formless shadow--the mind insists on rendering it familiar, associating it with something known. There's my argument. We want to believe dreams have meaning because we can't bear the alternative. To think that we're nothing more than...electric pings. Yes, I know what you're going to say, who cares? No one pays attention to their dreams anymore. Forgotten before you step out of the shower. But that's the point. We don't remember the dream--anymore than we can remember the formless shadow we took for the lurking mugger, the surly dog. We remember only what we made of them. The dream and the shadow vanish, absorbed into the objects of our waking life... and we go on, safe for a time. Safe from the reality of the dream, the reality of the shadow. Or so we think.
Figue begins to draw on the table with his finger.
The woman with the tattoo has reappeared with her presumed paramour. Figue's eye, too, is taking her in. For a moment we both forgot what we'd been saying, arrested by a pattern more primal than dreams. Or perhaps... not. 
It's the mother, he says, turning back to face me, finger in his cheek. I look to the door--closing now behind the couple. 
Not her, he says--catching my reaction--an unusual level of perception for Figue, who has a tendency to disappear into his own world... a disposition I recognize in myself: discursive invagination, Figue calls it. 
Whose mother? I ask..
The one in the picture I showed you.
Ah, yes. This is why you said you were upset. The girl's mother.
I knew about this, of course. Max had told me. It wasn't Wren watching from behind the lion and the serpent at the end their game. 
What about her? I asked, thinking this might be a way to get him to talk about the girl. 
  Figue looks at me hopefully... doubtfully. I misunderstood him, but only for a second. He fingered the photograph. Or was it something else? I can't help it--I confuse these meetings in my mind. Unsure of their order first to last. I seem just now to remember that he had said something about Wren before, but I could be mistaken. Because, like I said--that's what I wanted to talk about... 
Like an ink blot, he says.
Wren. The whole time he'd been talking about dreams, it was her. Now it came back to me in a rush. 
Like an ink blot, I say, trying to show I'm paying attention. 
Seeing faces in clouds. That sort of thing. 
What does it have to do with her mother?
It's like this, he says. Like what I was saying. The ink blot isn't a product of mind. The stars aren't a product of mind. In the dream, when you remember it, I mean--once you've drawn the lines between the points, the points don't matter anymore. I have this picture on my wall. I say, a picture. But that's only after the scanning. You remember my wall? I find them in magazines, on the street. This all started where I used to work. I had a job in a photo processing lab.
He leans forward. A long time ago. You known how people get multiples? He says this in a conspiratorial voice. When they have film developed? He looks around--like a suspicious character in a cartoon. 
Figue pauses for effect.
I was going over photos on a conveyer belt--sorting them out. Which ones not to charge for, you know? A boring job. Boring boring boring. This was a long time ago. I was still a kid. Before cameras went digital. My mind was in outer space. Nothing like a really boring job--like having a fever. It is. A kind of sickness. You're in the same state. You can feel it eating away and digesting and excreting... poison.
He fingers his glass--he'd been drinking wine, a cheap merlot.
Go ahead, I said. Knock yourself out.
We only live once? he says, nervously--more a question than a statement.
We both go to the bar to fill our empty glasses--his with red, mine with white.
You were sorting photographs, I say, when we resume our places; and something happened... 
Did it? he says, quite startled. You may be right. 
At that point he went off on an elaborate explanation which I couldn't possibly recreate. Something about reading novels. How he would get lost trying to keep the names straight, the information in order. Better, he explained, to read at random: flip pages here and there; and if by accident you find one piece that fits another, that's enough. This is how he does it now, he says. Reads books in pieces. Cuts the pages out, shuffles them. Reads what he has. Then he shuffles them again. That way, he says--one book lasts you for years, and if you cut it by paragraph, or sentence, or word by word, letter by letter, it would be like the sea.
Everything would be in it... 
Exactly, he says.  
I was listening, but growing increasingly impatient. What about the photos? I ask, the ones on your wall. And what do they have to do with the girl's mother? Or the snapshots on the conveyer belt? And Wren--when was he going to tell what he knew about Wren?
The clouds of unknowing have no shape, he says, falling silent--as though this were an answer to all my questions.
Someone has gotten into an argument at the other end of the bar. Voices are raised. I try to tune in to what they're saying--curious to know what it's about. Allison's dog comes by, lays his head on my lap. I scratch behind its ears. Scratch its back so his nose points up and his back leg begins to pump. 
Something about a fire on the news. The sound is off, but the reporter is standing in front of a row house--it looks like Logan, or West Philly... the front porch is charred. Pieces of blackened furniture lay on the walk. Now there's a picture of a car. The remains of a car. Shredded and twisted metal. The police commissioner being interviewed. The news program breaks to an ad for some drug that seems to make you feel you're dancing in slow motion over Elysian Fields. The idea is, the Elysian Fields aren't going to make you sneeze anymore. 
Drawing lines, connecting dots, making constellations. He was tapping the photo, the one with the cat's teeth. The pictures on his wall are like stars, so when you scan the wall you see in them other pictures, shapes, constellations. Scanning. This is where we came in. I look at the photo he's placed on the table--a cat scan... the way a cat will detect the slightest motion, focus in an instant--attending with absolute attention to a single point. Relax, pass control to your feline brain and the focal point--that one picture, will draw around itself and organize visual field, bring everything into harmony with that single point﷓﷓not by drawing lines, one to another, one at a time, but by a revelation of the whole at once.
Tapping on the picture... the photo on the table. His tapping wakes me up, calls me back again.
I understand you have a truck, he says.
A van. A friend. A former student. 
You're a teacher?
It's a long story. 
 


Other Lives

 


Journal Entry
Noon 
He's been writing since first morning light. Absorbed in his efforts, he's lost track of the hour--surprised to see that the sun had passed out of view when he looks up at the window. The alphabet block is randomly dented and punctured, needle sized holes in the white letters: cat teeth. 
Someone is calling from the street. And by his old name. Not in a dream.
He goes to the window, leans out...
...Max!

A few years ago, on a gusty Sunday morning, out of the blue, a woman knocked on my door. Hunch shouldered, a faded blue cloth coat wrapped around her against the cold. It took me a moment to place her, a woman whose family had recently moved in to the house at the end of the block: Russians from Ukraine, part of the wave of Jews who fled the old USSR before it disintegrated under Gorbachev. I invited her in. It was so cold, I didn't even ask what she wanted. 
She'd come for a reason, needed something, but had trouble finding the words. Kept apologizing for imposing on me. Her son, she explained, was having trouble in school. ESL problems, they told her. English as a second language. I don't understand, she said. He knows English well. Even in Odessa he could hold his own in conversation.
He is strong reader, she said. 
I couldn't understand why she was telling me this. But you are teacher, she said, eyes full of tears--You can help me. 
A teacher? 
The first I'd heard of it. This was evidently, common knowledge up and down the block, That I was a teacher, unemployed. Without thinking (she looked so needy, so innocent and trusting) I told her, yes, of course.
For how much? she wanted to know.
Twenty an hour, I said--expecting her to throw herself at my feet, to kiss my hand in gratitude. (I knew someone who taught ESL, a private tutor: $35 an hour he got., minimum.)
fifteen, she said, her tears turned to ice. Take it or leave it. 
I took it. 
It wasn't hard figuring out what the problem was. Bilingual writers block. Everything was okay until they asked him to write. Put a blank sheet of paper in front of him and he'd and freeze. His English would abandon him. 
He doesn't need tutoring, I explained to his mother. He needs to relax--find a way to take the pressure off--thinking that would be the end of it.. Well, she said. Don't tell me about it. Do it!
Do it? Do what?. I'm no educator. What do I know about children--a teenager, no less? Still, there had to be a reason she'd come to me. If I gave up, I'd not only be out of the money--which I desperately needed, but I'd never learn what it really is that brought them to my door. I look back at this now and see it as a turning point--maybe the turning point. All my life I'd told myself, try to be reasonable, and where did it get me? No, this time was going to be different. Follow the signs, no looking back.
I tried to draw him out, get him talking about school, what was it like to be living in America. He was a kid. A normal boy. What did he have to say to me--an old man and a stranger? I would have a cup of tea. He'd pour himself a coke. After an hour or so, time would be up and he'd go home. His mother was getting impatient. What kind teacher you are? she'd say. I pay you help him. He comes home school. Nothing changes! 
One day, when I'd finished my tea and he was working on his third coke, I played a hunch and pulled out a chess set. In fifteen moves the game was over. Max had me. A rook and a bishop down in an exchange I couldn't avoid, nothing to do but resign. Five minutes into the second game, Max was looking around the room, staring out the window, straining to be polite. I tipped my king in surrender.
Max, it turned out, had been something of a prodigy. On a chess scholarship--selected to go to one of those elite schools in Moscow where they used to train kids to be grandmasters, only to have been--not exactly rejected, Max explained--once you were in, nobody got rejected--way too direct; they just bumped you down on the waiting list. This happened again and again. Max's name would climb the top of the list. Just as the family would get its hopes up, someone else would be selected ahead of him. 
They were never told why. This is what happens to Jews here, his father told them. It was time to leave.
I hunted down copies of games I'd played in some rated quads a few years back and (swallowing my pride--or shame--as the case may be), we began to analyze them together. 
I had him write notes, which at first involved only the algebraic abbreviations used to record moves.
If 25.Qxc6 ?? (25 ...Nd6 Bxa6 Rb-b6 Qxc7 +/-)... that sort of thing.
After a while I got him to add commentary--a few words at a time so the writing part snuck up on him. To bump him up to more complicated levels, I got him to explain strategic and positional ideas﷓﷓which, by their nature, demanded something in the way of a narrative. I worked my butt off, studying books, going over master games. We started in early January. By March, Max was writing English without a second thought. As a kind of final exam, I assigned a short essay on middle to end game transitions, something he might give to the novice players in the chess club at Northeast.. I convinced him to show his English teacher.
She was impressed. Maybe I missed my calling. Max's grades picked up. Mama Odessa was pleased. I had a little pocket money. Happy ending for all.
For a while, Max would drop in after school and give me progress reports. Gradually, his interest turned from chess to girls and hip-hop. Like I said, a normal teenager. I hadn't seen him for some time. Then last week on my way to the store, who should I run into, big as life--and more to the point--sitting at the wheel of an old Dodge van parked in front of the Shop Rite... his Dodge van, I might add! Max! 
Doors, are opening...


 


The Keys in Hand
And so it happens on a beautiful spring day, the sweet smell of iris in the air, petals of flowering cherry drifting over the walk like pink snow, all his worldly possessions packed into the van (variations on a theme) --Max and Jacob pull up in front of the three story row house on Lawrence Street, home of Naomi Nacht, ring the bell to pick up the keys to my his apartment and are greeted at the door by a girl... a young woman, that is--in her early twenties, who--evidently expecting them--introduces herself as Karin Reshevsky. 

That is, Reshevsky is what Max hears.  
As for Jacob--He's not paying attention to the name. He's in a state of dislocation. Shock. There she is... ...this plain-pretty girl, not much past adolescence. Straight brown hair, unremarkable face, slight figure lost in a pair of baggy jeans and oversized sweatshirt.
It can't be... 
Like encountering a ghost--of someone intimately known, but with all her features altered--suddenly become a stranger. Suddenly, all too real!
But you can call me Wren, she says--ushering them in. Everybody does. 

It is the sweet breath of honeysuckle I will remember, a fence and tiny yard overgrown with it across the street, the scent of it drifting in waves, rising and falling with the breeze. And there, wrapped in the perfume of spring, and no dream--all too real. Was I really there--or only remembering what I wrote? What Max has told me? Suspended in some interstitial sector of reality and time. I can see that when she speaks, it isn't to me, but to Max--as though I'm invisible.  
I try to reconcile her face with the image in the photo, to recall what I saw on the train but can neither confirm nor rule out the connection. My own conjectures and imaginings have gotten in the way, distorted my hold on the past. The mere appearance of this girl--strips me clean. Flayed by her reality--everything I thought I knew, erased. The mere fact of her, her living presence in the world. What I felt at that moment, standing in the snow, the photo in hand, the impression at my feet--that it meant something. The way it set free in an instant a torrent of pent up reckonings, associations. And now... there she is--keys in hand, and to her, it is as though I don't exist. She began for me in medias res: expanding into time in two directions, accumulating a future, acquiring a past. Her whole reality--the reality she represented--her necessary and non-contingent reality, had been generated by, had its genesis in that photo, but could not be contained there. ... and Sorrell, another figment, like a black and gray negative, transparent behind the image at the center. Desire in abeyance.  
There were some papers she was to give us, and the keys. She turns and goes in the door, Max on her heels. Something in the air: a rasping noise. A blue jay on the phone line. Suddenly a mockingbird appears, dive-bombing the jay.  
There's Max inside checking out the books. There's Karin (that is, Wren) opening the glass doors of the cabinet with the Quaker journals, taking out a "10 x 13" brown envelope that had been lying on top of the books. Taped to the envelope are three keys. Here, she says, handing it to Max. She is to take is to my new place.
He takes the envelope, passes it to me without looking at it. He's holding one volume from the cabinet in his hand and leafing through the pages.
You read Russian? Wren asks. She sounds impressed
Yes, Max says. But the book he's holding isn't Russian. It's Serbo-Croatian. This is what he tells her. 
Your name, he says. He could have been champion of the world if it wasn't for the war. I love his games.
What's that?
Samuel Reshevsky, the chess player. Was he a relative? She gives this some thought.
My grandfather, she says. He played chess sometimes. Or so I'm told. But I don't think he was ever a champion of the world.
Reshevsky. He was good. Really good.
Really? she says, softly... looking suddenly lost, but you mean at chess. Her voice trails off: whispers, voiceless, something to herself. Wren cocks her head.
Max, right? She says, taking the book from his hand, returning it to its place on the shelf, ... mustn't touch without permission. Where are your manners?
He tries to apologize, to defend himself--for what, he isn't sure--when suddenly she whirls around, runs up the steps, turns a corner and SLAMS a door.


No. It was later that he gave me the envelope. I'd told him I'd wait in front of the building. We were outside. I didn't want to see her, her real face. Wanted to capture again the image of my daydreams.  
The strong scent of honeysuckle. Like the tangle of vines that bore the scented blooms, a single tendril taken up only to be lost in the mass, impossible to trace. This is how it is when I try to remember--my mind will not obey, overgrown with vines of my own imagining, a thicket of speculations, a garden grown wild before a sudden defoliating gale will appear out of nowhere, tear, blast, rip free root and stock--leave me bereft before a leafless page, a blank. Now, herself before me. The blank I would have filled, filled in--erased.  
Access denied.

The door opens. Wren looks down at us, gripping the knob, knuckles white. A moment of uncomfortable silence. Max and Jacob. Was this the moment it became my own? The moment I fully accepted the gift of my name? 
Max and Jacob on the sidewalk; Wren in the doorway.
* * *
She asked me to join them in their arrangement--the Sufis. We can not possess what belongs to God, she told me. Least of all, another human soul. But I didn't want to share her. We argued. I lost. This is how I remember our parting. On the day I left Sorrel, after leaving the house for the last time, my clothes and books packed in a blue Datsun station wagon, I stop on the walk under the London plain tree that shaded the tiny yard in front of the house. A blue jay calls out in a shrill complaint. The jay is speaking to me, mocking me. Think of what you're giving up!, it cries: You will never make love again! Miserable and chaste to the end of your days!  
Now, older, if not wiser, I can only ask--had I ever truly loved her? If so﷓﷓why then did I choose to leave? And yet, having shut the door behind, I tried to make myself believe that it was so. I try, even now, to believe that I was, at least once in my life, capable of love. But truth mocks the memory. Love in those days was (is it still so?) --was the obligation that went with sex. I had felt it my duty to believe in love. Sex had to mean something. It was my duty to believe that I believed that. 
Obligation obliterates reality.
There I was, trembling with doubt, guilt, thwarted desire--when the door opened. 
Sorrel... Wren...  
In her hand, a bag of trash. This is the moment, the sign that will save me. Prove that we were meant for one another after all! She will see me, call out to me, break into tears of relief, invite me back--we'll... work it out. I look at her and see our future, see us together, old and bent--the very model of enduring love.  
She glances up. 
My heart stops. 
Then, as though I were a stranger, she sets the bag of trash down on the porch, and, without a word, without a single word--goes back into the house.
 Doors are closing.
 
* * *
Well, she says, voice in neutral. We'd better go. I retrace my thoughts, mind on rewind. Serbo-Croatian. A book. Max. Chess and the end of the cold war. Someone's grandfather on the shores of a lake (where did that come from?) Ah yes, the birds. Inside, Wren, apropos of who knows what, had been going on about her grandfather's birdhouses. And it wasn't Reshevsy; it was Shevretski: Felix Shevretski). Had tons of them, she claimed--birdhouses. Hanging from all the trees, practically one on every branch. Made them all himself before he vanished. 
She is making this all up, of course.
They were for wrens, she told Max. Birds so small--almost as small as hummingbirds. Her voice was throaty, deep, authoritative. Her voice was frail and distant, like a bird calling from deep in the forest. It was both and neither. It was her voice. Real. Opaque with reality. Transparent to desire; but this was not Jacob--it was Max spinning himself into her web.
As small as hummingbirds, Max said.
Almost. If the hole--the door in the birdhouse--I guess it's not really a door. If it's open all the time, is it still a door? Anyway--if the hole is too big other birds will move in and crowd out them out. 
Her name--her birth name was Karin . Who, then, was the other? And again, the honeysuckle, sweet, sweet. Follow the vine into the maze. In the beginning, the journals. The envelope waiting. 
Wren fished a key from her pocket, locked the door behind her. 
Right, she said, taking a deep breath. You know the address. Fourth and Fairmont.
You're not coming?
I'm only here for Lisa, she says, and strides off down St. John Newman Way, headed west to 4th Street, past the yard overgrown with honeysuckle, down converging graphic parallels of reality. I can almost see her growing in my mind as she recedes toward her vanishing point.
I wiggle my toes. My legs begin to come back to life. When I look up, there's Max turning the envelope in his hand, fingering the keys, staring after his vanished Wren.
Above, a blue jay chatters in the dead ailanthus
 


A Little Book of Max and Wren
Mangos

Max, after helping carry what seemed like endless boxes of books, what little furniture there was: a desk, a mattress, a couple of plastic bags full of clothes--up two flights of stairs to Jacob's apartment, finds his mind wandering back to the girl with the keys--the way she'd scolded him about the book, her open familiarity, how she looked at him when she thought he wasn't paying attention, the way she made him feel self-conscious, a little embarrassed and at the same time, like there was, maybe... something special about him? Something she--perhaps, found attractive? And yes--there's her strangeness, a quality that nurses his own sense of being an outsider, draws him to her, makes him imagine there's much they might have in common. 
For no particular reason, other than a reluctance to leave the neighborhood, to put distance between himself and wherever she might be, he parks the van on 5th Street, gets out and begins walking north. At Girard, seeing a small market open--he thinks he might buy an ice cream bar, crosses the street and goes in. At the counter, two men are talking in Spanish to a woman. They seem quite agitated. Intent on getting an armload of cans and packages on the counter, she pays them no attention. One of the cans slips, falls on the floor and rolls to Max's feet. When she bends to retrieve it, her blouse falls open, revealing her breasts. Max can't help but stare and almost jumps out of his own shirt when he sees, holding two ripe mangos and watching him with great interest: Wren standing in line behind the two men. 
Wanna feel these, she says, holding out the mangos. Not getting it, and not knowing what else to do, Max takes the mangos, feels them, testing for firmness.
I don't know anything about this, he says, thinking she was asking if he thought they were ripe.  
You're a trip, she says. Anything I'd add to that and well, nevermind! Where did you say you were from? I don't remember you mentioning Mars. No, I'm sorry. Forget it I said that. Max, right? It's like﷓﷓give me those before you squeeze them to death! 
Wren takes the mangos from Max. 
You know, this afternoon I was sure you were gay? And usually I'm pretty good at that﷓﷓gay-dar, you know what I mean? Some of my best friends and all that--except it's true! No, really! Like my friend Jerry--we've been best buddies since he came out in ninth grade. Sometimes I crash at his place and he lets me sleep next to him like we're sister and brother, you know? But the way you were staring at Miss Victoria's secrets there, so not-that-side-of-the- fence! Wow. Am I babbling incoherently? I'm sorry--come on--you know what? Let's get out of here--I don't need these; puts the mangos back in the box where she found them. A glass of wine sounds more like it. You know what they say about drinking alone. Wanna hang out?
The first two blocks, Max isn't able to get a word in edgewise, then suddenly she falls silent. He listens to the click click click of her steps on the otherwise quiet street. He doesn't know what to say. He thinks about holding her hand but it seems childish, and besides, what had she actually said or done that he should believe she had any romantic interest in him. Not to mention that he only saw her for the first time that morning. And really--holding hands? She seems preoccupied, like she's forgotten he's. The elation of a moment before evaporates, but when they reach the steps outside her apartment, she stops and turns to him, looks into his eyes, a little smile on her face. His hopes soar. He even thinks he might embrace her, leans towards her, is on the verge of closing his eyes in expectation of a kiss, when she reaches out and shakes his hand.
Thanks for walking me home, she says, cocking her head a little to the side. 
I thought... 
... he was going to remind her of the glass of wine, but she had had already turned, climbed the steps and was putting the key in the lock. When the door opens light spills out over the steps, she gives him a little wave.
Wait! he calls, finding his courage at last. Can I have you're number? 
She looks at him, hesitates, as though his request had taken her completely by surprise. I guess, she says, after a moment. Sure. 
She recites the number as he fumbles in his pocket for the pen and little notebook he carries--but without waiting to see if he's got it, she waves again, says goodnight and softly closes the door behind her.


 
A Little Book of Max and Wren (ii)
The Invitation

Max couldn't find the note pad. Afraid he'd forget before he got back to his van, he wrote the number on his arm. Promised himself as he drove home that he would wait at least a week to call. What was the rush? No, only make a fool of himself if he seemed too eager--and he didn't want to scare her off. Sunday night--had to be at work tomorrow. The week would pass quickly enough. Would she want to get together over the weekend? He could call her on Friday. Sounded like a plan. Friday, then. Right after work. 
Someplace just past the twin bridges on Roosevelt Boulevard his resolve begins to weaken. What if she already had plans? Friday would be pretty short notice, and if she turned him down, he'd have to call again. How was that going to help? He didn't want to seem like he was chasing her. Defeated the purpose. Thursday will be better. Hey! I'm going to the Khyber Pass Saturday. You wanna come along--I mean, if you're free? Leave it more up to her, give her an easy out--like it wasn't any big deal.
Rounding the curve where Sears used to be before they blew it up, he convinced himself that Thursday was still kind of tight for the weekend. Why put pressure on her? Wednesday will be better. Give her more time to think it over. Ten minutes after he walks in the house, copying the number from his arm to an address book, his fears seem like so much foolishness and his caution an excuse for school boy stage fright. Still, he tells himself﷓﷓staring at the phone on the kitchen wall--what's the point of rushing things? ... even as he picks up the receiver and begins to punch in the number Wren gave him. 
No sooner does the phone began to wring then he has second thoughts. On the third ring, he hangs up. There's something else, something about her, something tells him that getting involved with this woman may not be a good idea. Better to go with his instincts. Relieved, he sits down, lets the silence embrace him like a cloak, and when the phone rings, he jumps like he'd been shot by a gun. 
Hello? Who's calling, please? 
You just phoned here? Max freezes, horrified. 
My caller I.D. says Orloff? 
Wren? 
Yeah, who is this? Is this Max? 
Wren, yes... Max. I'm sorry...
The phone rang but nobody was there.
Yeah, I'm sorry--the doorbell rang. I mean, I thought someone was at the door. I'm sorry, I can call back. I know it's late and...
It's only 9:30.
Sunday night, tomorrow's Monday and... 
Usually is.
What's that?
Monday does come after Sunday. You must go to bed real early. Are you okay? You sound, like... is something wrong? 
No no, nothing's wrong. I just, you know...
It's okay, you know what? I was just thinking--why didn't I ask you in? I mean, really. Sometimes I'm so stupid that way.
Stupid? No--I just...
Is that why you called? After I asked you over for a glass of wine. You must think I'm terrible!
Not at all! In fact...
You don't think I'm terrible? You didn't call to tell me how awful I was?
Oh my god, you know--I was, the truth is, I thought you'd be upset if I called back so soon and...
Why don't you come over! It's not too late. Would you?
Really?
Really! Yes, please! The second I closed the door--I looked out to call you back but you were gone already. I was going to run out after you but then you really would have thought I was stupid! 
You really don't mind?
Mind? No please! I was wishing--I mean I really feel like company. 
I guess I could...
And I have a bottle of wine like I said. So you think you can? Come over I mean?
Okay, sure. I can be there in about half-an-hour, if that's not too late.
Ten minutes later Max is in his van driving down Roosevelt Boulevard. Stretching out below and to his left, Nicetown, Tioga, North Philadelphia, the lights of Center City glittering on the horizon. An hour ago, he would have thought he'd be ecstatic to be invited back, but now, all he can feel is apprehension. Above, unseen, countless stars, nebulae, galaxies scattered across space to the end of the universe. How feeble their power to overcome the darkness. 
 
A Little Book of Max and Wren (iii)
To Know, To Do, To Be

The door opened before he could knock. Wren was lying in wait, 1.5 litter bottle of chilled chardonnay in hand. 
I have the worst opener in the world: handing him the bottle and a Swiss army knife, bent cork screw already extended. I always manage to mangle the cork You have to be better at this than me. Here! She says, leaving him standing in the vestibule, bottle and corkscrew in hand. I'll get some glasses. What are you waiting for? Don't stand there! Come on in. 
Wren and Lisa share a first floor apartment. A queen size bed, unmade, piled with books and stuffed toy animals, takes most of the space in what would have been the living room. To the left, Lisa's bedroom, a DANGER: KEEP OUT! sign taped to the door. The kitchen is in the back.
So, tell me! What do you do? Besides play chess I mean?
Chess?
Yeah yeah, Shevitsy or something, world whatever.
Reshevsky. 
Shivsky, Shevsky--so what do you do? 
Max set the bottle on the table and begins to open it. Let me! she says, when the corkscrew begins to deviate to the side, taking the bottle from Max. You're not any better at this than me.
Well? What is it? Do you plan to be world chess champion someday?
Me? That's a laugh! No, I don't play chess anymore, seriously, I mean.
Anymore?
Something I did when I was a kid. 
That's how I think too. Games are for children. I don't understand how grown men... Oh Shit! I told you: handing the bottle back to Max, a piece of broken cork skewered on the end of the corkscrew. It happens every time. Here, now you can rescue the wine for us! 
This time Max had no problem, he centers the corkscrew, turning it carefully till it gripps the remaining half of the cork, extractes it with a pleasing bop.
My champion! So what is it then, what is it that you really do?
What do you mean, what do I do? People always ask that: what do you do? Meaning, I guess, like what is your job.
Well, yeah. What else does it mean? This is a pretty normal thing to know about a person, don't you think? 
Right, I know. It just strikes me funny.
Funny? I guess, when you think about it... Hey, this is good, you know? I like this, asking questions. Why should we take everything for granted, you know? People do that--take everything for granted. It makes me crazy.  
I guess what I'm doing now is... trying to decide.
Decide?
  What I'm going to do. You know, like for a living. I do have a pretty good idea though. 
Okay, tell me what you're going to do. 
Max grins. You really want to know? It's not very interesting.
If it's not interesting, why would you want to do it? I'd never want to do anything I wasn't really really interested in. That's why I quit school. I couldn't stand taking courses I wasn't interested in. Like we had to take something in social studies, you know, like economics or political science or sociology. I thought I'd like anthropology so I took an intro and hated it! And math. Don't even talk about math.
I love math.
Really? How absolutely totally completely boring! Just numbers and rules and rules and numbers. I like things with people.
Sociology is with people.
Not real people. People aren't numbers, you know, in case you haven't noticed. People﷓arithmetic! bore-ing! 
Wren, ignoring Max, who waves her off--she makes a point of keeping both glasses filled to the rim--pours them both more wine.  
For you, maybe, Max says, leaning down to sip the wine to avoid spilling it. But you don't have to do it, do you?
Birds do it, bees do it, even educated... how does it go? You're being very mysterious about all this, what you do. Going to want to maybe do... which, when you think about, makes it sort of interesting. Even if it is really boring. Speaking of boring--well, not boring exactly; sitting in the kitchen makes me think of my mother. She took Max by the hand and leads him back into the living room. 
Here, hold this, she says, handing him her glass, plopping down on the bed. This is way more comfortable. 
You think mysterious stuff is interesting?
Don't you?
  How can something you can't know anything about be interesting?
Who says you can't know anything about mysterious?
Pretty much by definition, isn't it? A mystery is something you can't know anything about.
Definitions, oh my God, here we go. This is why I couldn't stand school
  Definitions matter.
Can't or don't?
Can't or don't what?
Know. A mystery. Can't know or don't know?
Once you know, it's not a mystery anymore, is it? And if you find out what it is, than it wasn't a true mystery, but only an unknown. Unknowns you can solve for. Mysteries are... well, mysteries. Boring.
Wow! We have completely different ideas about this don't we? And you still haven't answered my question! 
If I tell you, it won't be a mystery. Then you'll think I'm boring.
Do you find me mysterious?
I guess, sort of. Yeah. The way you mean it probably. 
Mysterious.
Yeah. Max blushes, looks at his glass, feeling a little foolish--surprised to see it empty, Why not? he says, to Wren's signal. 
So you don't think I'm boring then? filling both glasses. You see, I'm right. Things you can figure out are boring. So what is it you do? 
Promise you won't be bored?
We went through this already. And it's beginning to bore me. Stop teasing and tell me!
Actuarial accounting.
Bless you!
I'm sorry?
Wren laughs, poked him in the ribs. It's what you say when someone sneezes!
I didn't sneeze.
You silly pumpkin! What you said--what you were going to be.
Actuary?
Bless you!
Max lets himself fall back on the bed, slapps his head. Sometimes I'm kind of slow, he says, laughing. Humor--that's the hardest part in English. I'm awful with jokes. 
English? Not your native language, is it?
I don't think I have a native language anymore. 
What do you mean?
Used to be Russian but I've forgotten most of it. So I don't have a first language anymore. I don't think about it until someone starts telling jokes. 
Okay, I'll be serious, she says, folding her legs, leaning back, arms behind her. Tell me about this actch-you-ary work you want to do?
 It's a kind of statistics. Statistics and probability. Insurance companies use it.
Why are you laughing?
You look funny when you try to be serious!
Then don't look at me! Wren turns around on the bed, back to Max. And insurance companies are evil, she says... and mega boring! Insurance is evil!
If you're married and have children and your husband dies, wouldn't you want some way to take care of them?
I'm never getting married, and I think we'd better not go there, with insurance companies. Just tell me about the doing part. I like doing better than dying.
Believe it or not, it has to do with chess.
Another boring subject.
Have you ever played?
No. 
Then how would you know?
I don't.
Then it's a mystery. I thought you said mysteries were the only things that interest you.
If I learned chess, it wouldn't be a mystery.
You can never learn chess. Not everything. The more you understand, the more strange and mysterious and difficult it becomes. 
Maybe you'll have to teach me then.
I could do that.
For real?
I think I'd like being your teacher.
I think I'd like having you as a teacher...more wine?
Sure.
But first (pouring the wine), I mean, before you become my teacher, how is actho... what was it?
Actuarial accounting.
Actuarial accounting (she imitates his slight accent). How is actuarial accounting like chess? And if chess is mysterious... this is beginning to become interesting.
Not like chess. Chess is how I heard about it. An IM. I was talking with at a tournament.
An IM?
International Master. We were talking--he's from Ukraine, like my family, and he was telling what he was, um... doing. His whole life had been chess, and then he's in the U.S. and twenty-two years old and how is he going to make a living?
Why not playing chess?
It takes money. You have to live. You have to go to tournaments. If you're not a grandmaster, you pay, and the competition is unbelievable. There's no way out--you have to have a day job. So he went to this career counseling place took tests and they interviewed him, and because he was always good at math...
I guess so, if he's so good at chess.
For a computer maybe. Not for people. Chess is spatial. Visual. And memory and pattern recognition. For us humans. it's about holding ideas in your head while you try out other ideas. Anyway--this combination--being good at math so you learn statistics, and thinking about probabilities, okay, they said: it's a natural! A no-brainer--actuarial accounting. Good money, and there's places you can take the classes you need to be accredited. And it turns out--he really likes it...
He?
The IM. A kind of poetry, he says. The formal kind, you know, where you have fixed patterns, stanzas, meter and rhyme. Where you count the syllables, make it all come out according to a set of rules.
Max was feeling the wine. Feeling good. It was good to be sitting across the table from Wren. Good--the way she followed what he said, took note of everything around her--with such intensity. He felt how her eyes--how they followed his every movement, read the gestures of his hands--the way she looked him in the face with such openness. She wasn't exactly beautiful. Not like the women in magazines, not the kind of woman guys turn around and stare at on the street﷓﷓ but he liked the way she looked, liked looking at her. It made him feel... there. Gave him a sense of gravity, weight--just to see her.  
He didn't know how long they'd been sitting there. Wren doesn't say anything for a long time. He's aware of street noise--cars passing, an occasional siren, a couple arguing as they walk past the open window in front of the house. There's a little buzz in his head. The wine bottle sits empty on the table. Wren holds her finger on the cork, rolling it forward and back with the finger, not moving her hand.
It's getting late, she says, waking out of her own daydream. Lisa's away. If you want to crash, you can? 

 

A Little Book of Max and Wren (vi)
Sharp Was the Blade

...that is the freedom of his mind. More noble than life, too noble for it -- that is the devotion of his heart. There, I have rhymed it all together, dreamed a poem of humankind. I will remember it. I will be good.
 The Magic Mountain

I see her sitting on a bed in a first floor apartment--two rooms, kitchen and bath. The bed is in the front room. Lisa--the other one--I can not see. A blank. An erasure on the page, but I can make out her voice--distant at first, almost indistinguishable from the sound of traffic on the street, the box fan in the window, but growing more clear, stronger. She is calling from the bathroom. For toilet paper. 
Karen? Did you hear me?
Called her Karin , not Wren. 
Wren... Karin , opens the bathroom door, tosses a new roll of paper at Lisa. 
She runs her fingers over the scars on her arm, turns, closes the door behind her. She is thinking about tattoos. I know this. I see everything as though I were there, see her on the bed, one foot tucked under her, only half hearing Lisa calling her from the bathroom. Her name--calling her name. Like it wasn't her name at all. Like she wasn't there in the room and the figure on the bed is someone else. I know this too--what it is she's thinking?
A tattoo. 
Where on her body? she's asking herself, touching the scars on her arm. Of roses or butterflies, winged horses, unicorns, hearts wrapped in flames. Serpents. Clinging vines. Bracelets of thorn. Interlocking Celtic keys. 
They have catalogs, she is saying to Lisa who is standing at the window now, a window with bars. Her hands grip them. Lisa is an actress. Community theater. Philadelphia indy films. Mike Lemon casting parties on 7th Street. She sees her reflection staring back at her, pleading with her. An image in black and white. A 40's movie. Camera running but she can't remember her lines. Doesn't know the script. What did I do? it is asking her--the reflection. What did I do to deserve this? Why did they put me here? If she is guilty--she cannot remember why. A story that makes no sense.
What are you whispering about? 
Lisa doesn't answer. Karin is sitting on the bed. She is asking her something now. A question about catalogs.
Catalogs?
Tattoos. Like wallpaper samples, you know. The place on Girard--on the way to the el. The one with that sexy tattooed lady in the window. The walls, the walls are always covered with them. So what do you think? What do you think I should get?
Lisa rolls her eyes. 
Whatever, she says, releasing the bars, brushing past, leaving the movie, picking up a jacket from the back of a chair, tossing it over her shoulder, striking a pose. If it doesn't make sense, what's the point?
Point?
I'm going out to eat. 
You just ate.
Did not.
Yes you did.
Not!
What were you doing in the kitchen?
Dishes!. 
Dishes?
The one's you left last night, darling.
I told you I'd do them!
Telling's not doing. 
Wren reflects on this.. 
I left them on purpose, you know.
You what?
To prove a point.
Being?
That you'd do them--just so you could tell me how responsible and whatever--so you could have the huge pleasure of giving me grief with your guilt tripping everything has to be like Lisa wants it whatever!
No, you know what you do? You make a promise and think: Okay! I said it--it's done! A word is good as a deed. You did it on purpose? Right! That we can believe, can't we? So I'd do them and you wouldn't have to that's what. I'll see you in the morning.
You were going out to eat.
I'm going out to eat.
An all night diner?
I'm seeing Steven.
Steven! Steven? You gotta be kidding. 
What did I say? I'm seeing Steven.
Is Steven seeing you, this is the question?
Good-bye, Karin . Lisa blows her a kiss. The door closes before she can say anything more. 
Wren--let it be Wren--reaches down and tries to pick up the cat﷓﷓the cat that's been rubbing against her ankles, but when she stands up it bolts, scratching her arm. Unintentionally. 
Wren looks at the trickle of blood. An accident. Pokes it with a finger nail. Stares at it for a long time. When the blood begins to dry and crust, she goes into the bathroom to wash it off, squeezes a thread of white antibacterial ointment over the scratch. She had lied to Max. When he kissed the scars they had burned more intensely than cigarettes pressed to her skin.
He didn't mean it, she said, kneeling to stroke his ears. 
It has been a long time. She's done well. Six months. Six months since she cleaned out the sharps. 
Jesus Christ, Lisa had said, spring cleaning in November? She Searched for all the hidden stashes: the razor blades, the kitchen matches, the cigarettes she never smoked. What would she do with the kitchen knives? Wren squinted, gazed into the mirror. Sharp was the blade that pressed at her heart.
What would it be like? It was a form of curiosity as much as anything. As though, to entertain an act in thought were an invitation, to imagine it, a commitment. Lisa was right.
Predestination. Are we compelled, sooner or later, to make real everything the imagination is capable of conceiving? How could we have dreamt of the bomb and denied ourselves that moment in the desert, the delight and wonder and beauty of igniting a living city with a miniature star of our own creating? Are we an animal compelled to dream, and then to make its dreams come true? And who has power to control the dream? The question is, the lion said: who will be the master?
What would the real thing be like? It would feel, she thinks... but can not find a word for it. 
You see the problem? How would it feel? What would it really be like? How could she ever know if she didn't act? And this unknowing, like a weight that grows heavier with each passive hour. 
Her eyelids grow heavy and dreamy in her thoughts. You do not open the wound all at once. You do not slice or cut or slash. You stroke, as a lover's finger strokes the skin of her beloved. You slide the blade lightly over the surface. You do not think, I am hurting myself. You do not think, pain. You slide the blade over the surface of the skin. Ever so lightly. You do not think of pressing the blade into flesh. You stroke, as the finger of a lover would stroke, gently sliding the edge of the blade over the surface until, as though it were something in a dream, a trail of blood, razor thin, appears, as though by itself, as though without agent. Dark, crimson, beautiful, hypnotic. 
Draw the blade again and again, weightless. Like a feather stroking the skin, and the fissure opens, opens, and the blood, so bright and fresh and lovely, pools in the widening fissure, pooling and overflowing. Like a lovers heart overflows with love for his beloved.
Above all--you do not think.  
This she understands. This much she has known. 
But what of the deeper cut? The thrust of the blade, the point of the knife? Through to the hilt, to the heart?
How hard would it be? Thousands have done it before you. It is easy, easy as falling down, as falling on the blade of a sword. In Rome--even the women. Better than the soldiers coming to get you. Remember what's her name That PBS show about Rome. Took her by the hair because she wouldn't by herself. 
But Wren is learning to deny her dream. She will be good. To slice the dream from the heart--a blade of spirit not of flesh. She will be good instead.
She makes a face in the mirror. Curls her lips back and growls. Her gums are pink, pale at the roots of her teeth, the crooked lower incisor. Curls her lips back and growls. Examines the pores in her nose. Pulls her lower lip out--the frenulum linguae, that delicate little flap holding the lip to the gum at its center. 
Shit! I didn't even think to stop--to put in my diaphragm! Why did I do it? He's so sweet. Why does the thought of him make me shudder? She notes the day of the month--counts forward. A week from tomorrow--no, the day after. Nine days. A bad sign. 

The idea grows on her. 
It's what I am--a person who wants to be good. And when I am good, who will I want then? I mean--what? Nothing! How can you want what you already have? And what will I be? But to be good--it must be in secret. The second you tell, it's not good anymore.
She runs her finger over the scars on her left arm, counts the suture marks--sixty eight. White dots. We counted them together. She touches the burns, one by one, but doesn't count them. 
Just the same, she says to the face in the mirror: You could use a new life. 
One of us does, the reflection says. The question is: who will go first?
No. The question is... what the fuck am I going to do about Max?

 
Moving In: The Apartment

The apartment, abandoned for years, had been little more than a shell when Max helped me move in. There were holes in the floor where appliances had been ripped out, wallpaper was peeling from the walls. I've stripped the plaster and lathing from the west wall, cleaned and pointed the bricks. There's a desk between the two windows overlooking 4th Street--painted the wall on that side of the room a deep maroon so the warm yellow﷓ocher sills and the white ceiling and the creamy sunflower yellow on the other walls have the effect of making the unshaded windows seem even more brilliant when glazed with morning light. Books are still in their boxes on the floor.  
For furniture, besides the desk, there's a small table with two straight back chairs and a low cabinet for dishes and tableware.  
I built a crude loft to sleep on--a frame of 2x4's bolted together supporting a 3/4 inch plywood panel and mattress. I hooked up a curtain underneath; you pull it aside and there's a closet, two shelves and a clothes rod across the length of the space. 
The indirect consequence of procrastination. I've been doing everything but the work I was contracted for. Who did I think I was fooling? All that bull shit. Rehab... what I should be in, not do. I get up in the morning, walk to the Korean deli on Spring Garden for a paper, come home, spend the next two, three hours going over it. I read everything: baseball scores, celebrity gossip, the comics, business news, the classified pages, the obits. Over coffee, I work on the crossword puzzle until it defeats me--or I grew bored, whichever comes first. I look at the clock. I already know what time it is, but no matter; never fails to unnerve me seeing how much time I've wasted, another morning gone. 
I tell myself, it's congenital. A natural inclination to reject externally imposed obligations. I sit there at the window, watch the traffic, take long distracted walks through city neighborhoods, add to my collection of obituaries--yes, I've actually started doing this. Then I begin to write, recording disconnected odds and ends of no consequence. See where they lead. Hoping for that one opening that will lead me to her.  
My old pattern: I'd scramble for work when my money ran out, keep at it for a few months. When I couldn't stand it anymore, I'd walk off the job--sometimes, not even bothering to pick up my last paycheck. Things are different now.
It's the heat, I tell myself. A week without a break. Thick, soaking heat. A box fan in the window moans away--last night I began to hear voices again. In the fan. Like someone playing a radio in another room I couldn't make out the words. There's no end to it. A gray haze clings to the trees, bleeding them of color. I sit at this desk--papers stuck to my arms. There in the photograph, a blur of snow in the lamplight. I drift away--float over the world out of all seasons.
Snow. The thought of it. I look up at the window: wince. Shade my eyes. Can not fathom the reality of winter in this unreal heat. Rivulets of sweat trickle down over my ribs. Can not fathom any reality beyond the orb of bodily heat that encompasses me, suckles me in its hot mouth--sensual imagination overwhelmed. How am I to feel her presence, to find my way to her, to understand her muted life, my own existence barely a pulse in the undulant flow, the lava-form tidal current ferrying me to extinction? 
And yet--I do. I never cease to feel it now. Not even in sleep. Especially in sleep. If only as an absence, as something missing, the unknown cipher I'm forever compelled to solve; a blank space to fill. Sometimes I almost have her, can almost touch her, the idea of her--a single point of white light... almost in hand, it scatters in a spectral shower, the kaleidoscope turns and the image is lost. Like melted snow. 
At night I lie in bed, naked, that box fan blowing over my skin, wondering how I'm going to pull this off. In the morning, I make coffee, open a few more boxes of books, make another cup of coffee. Comes afternoon, nothing accomplished--I sit at the table, stare at the stacks of legal pads, already filled. Suddenly it will come to me--a new idea--I'll pronounce her name, and she'll be in the room with me, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of others... visiting spirits from the left side of the world whispering their secrets, telling me stories of their lives.  
End Book One