LOST TIME

LOST TIME

     We take two steps back for each step forward.  What does that mean?  What does that mean?  Nothing much beyond the cliché.  Except that when we walk our eyes adjust the perception of the world-around so that everything seems stable and our motion appears progressive.  I would be the last to say that we take two steps back for each step forward.  For everyone knows who reads our histories, that is a constant theme.  Everyday is a fall from grace.  Even though we don’t often use that term.  I mean, grace.  

     After all, every age and every people has its idea of The Golden Age, which is not now, of course.  Taking our cue from the metal, everyone lives in the dark and hard and unremorseful age of iron.  We had our Edens and we have our hells.  And always its a matter of now--our pains and disorders and uneasiness turning the millstone of our anxiety.  You know what I mean, we love our misery, our happiness always having that golden haze to it, like those soft-focus photographs of mid-west wheat fields, the evening sun casting its nostalgic light over the rippling waves of ripe grain, the way it never used to be in someone’s boyhood, when the family sat together on the front porch, it all being long gone, anyway, the fields now lying under acres of concrete.  The porridge of misery (all the pain of old times gathered like a mealy sludge in the hollow of one’s spoon) is the food of life, always has been. 

     Think of Brooklyn, now, think of Brooklyn.  No wheat fields there.  Traffic.  Smells of blood and sawdust and chicken feathers at the meat market, and the sweet smells of pastry and the yeasty smell of bread at Ariola’s.  The train dinning overhead.  Boys playing stickball in the streets.  Those little ten by ten dirt plots in front of houses bearing hydrangeas into the tar-smelling summer streets, or privet hedges hiding otherwise weedy patches of neglect. 

     I stroll down Linden Boulevard.  Neighborhood playgrounds are fenced with those twelve-foot high cyclone fences, kids climbing the monkey-bars kicking out for the five-foot drop into the sand, or mothers pushing carriages, sitting on the benches, blanched by the sun, screaming at their kids fighting on the swings. 

     Eventually I find my way to that once sleepy Forbell Street that stretched between Atlantic Avenue and the Conduit, its elms, maybe, even still shading the sidewalks and the cars parked along the curbs.  There I am, now, hands in my pockets, passing the church on the corner, that little sandstone Presbyterian chapel with the high wrought iron fence bordering the sidewalks, having made a left from Liberty Avenue, stepping up over the curb, only a block from that place where we put our television in the door so the neighbors could see and hear it and know that the world had changed, forever and irrevocably. 

     But these are not the boys I knew, and their sisters.  The Macateers and Donahues, the Wisherns, Goldsteins, La Croces, the Weinbergs and Shepherdsons.  They stare open-mouthed, fingers curling into fists.  Jamaican-black, Haitian-black, Korean, Ukranian.  This was a mistake.  Look.  The windows are boarded on Mikey’s house on the corner.  That ragged, spring-popped mattress in the alley.  The cars, that car is a wreck, look.  No wheels there.  That one’s hood is up, windows smashed, seats gone, engine gone.  Look.  Silence and stares.  That is not resentment that beams from those eyes.  Nor is it fear.  And I am stopped, kicking the shards of glass that sparkle the cracked asphalt.  Now it is rainy cold and vapory, and I dreamily raise my collar and cross the way I came, into the dark. 

     And I am passing through Hermosa on the southern borders of the Bad Lands, West River, and the moon is hanging over the end of the world, and I think of that long drive one summer evening, years ago.  Pineridge, Rosebud, south of the Wall and Kadoka.  It’s getting dark, and the road is straight, and as I am traveling east the moon rises right on top of it, looking like the road’s destination, a place as far away as the other end of a lifetime. 

     And I drive for miles and there is nothing but a man walking.  Where is he going in the middle of the night?  Where did he come from?  There was nothing, for miles and miles, not an antelope and not a cow, not a shed on the rise of a slope, and no long dust trail from a pick up winding slowly down some gravel road far away, shining in the moonlight, and I can see to the horizon, into the moon, that there is nothing.  But here a man is walking.  And I stop.  But he walks past, and I roll up to him and lower the window and ask him if he wants a ride.  But he only looks at me and says no, he doesn’t.  So I drive on. 

     And for hours, the moon long ago rising out of view, I drive, straight, making progress, but still there is nothing but darkness, here, in a place called Interior.  Interior.  Yes.  And then there is someone in my home.  Oh, no nostalgia here.  No long far-away glances into the looming infinite.  This is painful.  This is the hell.  It’s a woman.  Her name is Patricia.  And she gives me a book.  It is not a good book.  She looks hard at my wife.  She wants me to stay up with her and talk about the book.  She tells my wife to go to bed.  My wife is angry and mute from the fear of what speaking would make come out of her.  Things look black, to her.  The night already seems too dark and too long.  She goes.  She doesn’t say a thing.  She cares.  But she goes. 

     And I am helpless to go.  I am dry-mouthed and unhappy, and Patricia is very thin, ugly, with sparse brown hair and spectacles and long thin arms and legs.  I have become fixed to the cushion.  My will is not my own but hers.  She is Patricia.  It’s a book of tales, and they are empty and dry.  Their people are not normal, but very, very sick--socially sick, not sick with the flu.  Normal people get sick with the flu.  These are not normal people.  Always, they feel deprived.  Deprived, they feel envious.  Envious, they want revenge.  Wanting revenge makes them sick, and they hurt themselves, like animals whose legs get caught in traps.  They amputate their own limbs with their teeth.  Speaking figuratively, of course.  No one raises a roofbeam.  No one learns how to repair a loose step.  Much less a relationship. 

     The girls have babies, and these are either tortured, killed outright, or raised anesthetically.  Life is boring.  But the women like the men.  They sit in the bar.  The Silver Star.  It’s a place that hoops men and women who, having nothing, care about nothing.  I don’t mean “having nothing” in the sense of not having a car, or a home to live in, or britches to slip their legs in, or a hat to cover the baldness, or what cash the night calls for.  These people have those things.  They have nothing else.  But it is the “else” that always matters.  What they don’t have.  Everybody has that.  What they don’t have. 

     So these people, they come to the Silver Star and they order beer, and then they start bitching.  Bitch.  Bitch.  Bitch.  Until everything gets so depressing, someone kills somebody.  Then that’s it. 

     It’s a woman.  Flat on her back looking dead-eyed at the dark-stained rafters of the ceiling, from which hang all sorts of old tools and artifacts from long ago--a hurricane lantern, an old logger’s saw, fish nets, a scythe, even an old typewriter.  She wasn’t beautiful.  What had she fixed her eye on the moment it went blank?  The story doesn’t say, not being interested in that sort of thing. 

     She had on a plain dress, a kind of blue, black, and white floral, with dashes of pink in it.  Her hair is a mouse-brown.  But she’s dead.  Her hair was a mouse-brown.  She had freckles, light ones, under her eyes and across the tops of her cheeks, and over the ridge of her nose.  Her lips were small.  She had no earrings.  Why would she have earrings?  But she wore cowboy boots.  These had the regular pointed toes and high heels and those leather straps stitched to the rounded tops.  And they told another story, about her.  Her feet were small.  She was narrow-waisted, too. 

     She drank her beer, like everyone else.  What did she care?  It went like this.  Someone who had become pregnant and who hadn’t even a dim idea of who did it to her, was, as usual, bitching.  She got herself all lathered up.  She was frothing and calling all men you know what.  Some guy who had a really bright white set of teeth began laughing.  What did he care, with his flat-fronted seaman’s face and narrow eyes, like he was myopic, or, as they say, always squinting at the horizon?  So the pregnant woman got in a rage. 

     The guy with the teeth was not laughing anymore because he saw that this woman was really mad.  She had a knife.  She took it out of her purse.  It was a big knife.  So the guy shut up.  He didn’t want any trouble.  What did he care?  The woman’s rage was not subsiding.  Her womb was not going to empty itself of its own accord.  She thought of it as her enemy.  She hated her womb.  She didn’t call it a womb.  Men do that.  Women don’t even think of it in words.  It’s just there.  It’s that.  So she hated it.  So she stabbed this woman with the mouse-brown hair. 

     She just pushed the knife in.  Right in.  No reason.  What did she care?  In the side, right under the arm.  The blade was long and it must have cut an artery.  For the woman pushed it in and held it.  Then she leaned on it.  She pushed it in further than it could go.  Then she pulled it out, and the mouse-brown hair girl just gasped, she stood, astonished, looking down at her killer’s hands, lifting her arm, her elbow, up and to the back a little.  Looking down.         She sat down first.  And the woman who stabbed her, no longer lathered but red in the face with excitement, said, in a voice like she was admonishing a little sister, “There, it’s all before you now, and you know.”  Then, blood just pumping out from under her arm, she edged away from the bar.  Crawled.  And died. 

     She lay on her back, stretched out her legs.  Looked up at the ceiling.  The Silver Star.  Stories like that.  Oh, misery.  Such a sweet-scented girl.  More detail, of course.  We get into the minds of those people.  We feel their hatreds.  The idea is that we need to learn to love these people.  And loving them, we, of course, learn to hate ourselves.  That’s the ultimate object.  Hate ourselves.  Because every sick soul is an indictment of our own callousness.  Every pain is, ultimately, inflicted by us.  We are mean.  We should not live.  Only they should live.  Always its they. 

     But when we try to figure out who should and should not live or die, should just go throw themselves off cliffs or drown themselves in the ocean or the river, we get confused.  Because it’s always the reader who should do it, you know.  Great reading.  But anybody can read.  Nobody does, of course.  Most of us are too busy.  So there’s that.  It’s a problem, isn’t it?