“In the name of Allah — oh, yes, I believe.”
I put my shoes back on.
It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.
“In the name of Allah.”
In the name of la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. I took off, out into the street, crying. I ran and ran and never turned around and no one came running after me. I ran past the Muslim Students’ League, a small house not far from Reynaldo’s, painted turquoise and white; a makeshift mosque of some sort, I knew, had been constructed in the back. Reynaldo himself had been part of a team that had helped paint it. At this time of night no one was in or near it at all; at times during the day I had seen it ominously busy. Nothing, I thought, should be busy. All should be slow and sparse. I ran past a block I usually took but that was being ripped up for sewage pipe replacement, and in the middle of the street was a municipal barricade with a sign that said ROAD CLOSED. Beneath it but still on the sign a graffiti artist had sprayed, in black, I love you. In the sky were starry poisons, like the hundred spiders that, throughout a human life span, are said to drop into one’s mouth, while sleeping with a dropped jaw. I ran north and north and north and could perhaps have run all the way to Canada, where, paralyzed with sadness and exhaustion, my arms and fingers would stiffen upward and I would, in one of grief’s mythic transformations, become a maple tree, my sappy tears cooked down to syrup for someone’s flapjacks.
The interesting thing about a wound in the foot was that the pressure of just standing on it, not babying it, stanched the bleeding and healed the thing: Was that a robustly New Age truth or what? ROAD CLOSED I love you. When I got home I stripped naked and climbed into a filling tub, sat waist-deep in water and let loose with deeper weeping. The toilet paper I had wrapped around my toe was shredded and came off in milky wisps and fronds, floating all around in the water, and when I went under completely — to disappear, to clean, to alter my conscious state, whatever that was — the shreds swam toward my head and clung to my hair. When I could hold my breath no longer, I burst back up and saw that the warmth of the bath had caused my toe to start bleeding again, so that bright crimson swirled riotously through the water like life sprung free — though it was really a hello from death. I got out of the bath, wrapped myself in a towel, and then spun and spun, the towel falling away, my wet hair whipping droplets through the room, and I kept whirling until I felt neither death nor life but a kind of dizzying transport, which I was pretty sure wasn’t Sufism, or the radiant depths of my soul lifting from bottomland to lovely storm: it was more like low blood pressure combined with PE — something I’d experienced a lot as a child — a slight separation from the body, to serve as a reminder of what you were.
V
The clocks were wound forward an hour, and light flew down early and persisted into evening. My sleep was shallow, and the nights were long and full of chiding conversation from people who seemed actually to be in the room. But when I awoke there was no one. The apartment was muggy. The prairie, increasingly, I had noticed, could not hang on to spring. It was as if there were not enough branches to grip it, hills to hold it — it could get little traction, really, and the humid heat of summer slid right in. Soon the chiding conversation of hovering people was replaced with a feeling that I was being bitten by bugs I couldn’t see. Everything I ate seemed to collect in a clayey ball in my bowel, and my pulse would stop in my sleep then start up again in a hurry, discombobulated, waking me from dreams of blind alleys, naked running, and wrath. I would get out of bed with the scary meat-step of a foot that had gone to sleep and toenails that had loosened oddly, lost a firm grip on the actual toe — all this from a broken heart.
I had not mopped or swept the floors in months. I had used paper towels when there was a spill and hoped that eventually the entire apartment floor would get wiped up this way. This method of cleaning the floor, in patches, I imagined was like writing a poem every day until you eventually said everything about the human condition there was to be said. But it didn’t really work that way, even in poetry: grimy corners remained while certain floorboards got burnished to a slippery hellish gleam. Sometimes, when out of paper towels, I would use one of the wipes I often packed in my backpack for Mary-Emma, and I would start with the counters and work down: it seemed I could clean almost an entire room with just one — that was the sort of delusional housekeeping I was becoming a devotee of.
Not one person asked me about Reynaldo, which made me realize just how private and isolated our affair had been. Temporary and vanished. Like Brigadoon with headscarves. My own emotions felt a disgrace. There was apparently no indication left of me in his apartment — except the blood — and no one came knocking on my door. I felt as blue as the lips of a fish, which was really just a line from a song I had going through my head. “The grass don’t care / the wind is free / the prairie — once a sea — don’t sing no song for me.” Bad grammar was totemic for bass player grief.
What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling, and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feelings might take on actual physical form, like those sad fish lips, a mouth speared into a gasping silence, or worse. I swung my hair and slapped the face of my bass like Jaco Pastorius, squinting the neck into a fretless blur; perhaps one day I would dig those frets out with a file and fill them with epoxy, too.
Sometimes I would awake too early in my bed and would feel my foot flap beneath the sheets, and I wouldn’t know at first that it was mine. I felt only the movement of the cool sheet, and it felt like someone else was there, in the bed with me, but I would quickly turn to see there was no one; it was always just me. At night before I fell asleep I was not above staring at the phone. Are you there? Yes. Are you falling asleep? Not really. How many fingers am I holding up?
In reality, no one asked me any questions whatsoever. No one said a word, except Sarah.
“Did you see in the papers the story about this student who disappeared? They found blood in his apartment but they don’t know whose.”
“Really,” I said.
“This wasn’t the guy who was taking pictures of Emmie, was it? Or a friend of his?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You see, that’s the problem: Not that I know of. There’s room for possibility.”
Her look at me was a darting thing. I just stared at her without seeing all that much, and I must have looked crazy with unhappiness, because she then came up to me and smoothed my sweater sleeve and petted my arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m going on like this.”
“It’s OK,” I said. It was quasi OK.
She returned to her theme menus. Invasive Species Night: the mustard-vine gnocchi; the steamed zebra mussels; the soup of wild carrot and wild parsnip; the salad of chicory, mustard garlic, fig buttercup, watercress, and burdock. Napkins of human hair! Well, that I just invented, piping up to amuse her, but she said, “Hmm. Yum.” And then there was Endangered Species Night: wild rice and free-range bison; American eel gratin and Chanticleer chicken with short and thick parsnips. Eating endangered species made some ecological sense, she claimed — if it was tasty and grew popular, people would save it? — but I wasn’t paying complete attention. The general idea was that food always survived. I wondered.