The kitchen helper may be unique to my experience, which recently I have understood as what I have had and own but also don't have and can't own, except that somehow it may add up to what I am. With him, in the sense I was, I pulsed with amorousness and stealth, but an experience is fleet footed and is always something in passing, whether it's profound or not, and still, I had categories of feeling for and comprehension about the event and because of that I could set it and him within these temporalities, while I hovered sensually and mentally over, in, and out of myself. In this and other passing moments, I looked for lessons in everything and everywhere. I had always learned lessons fast if not commandingly, I itched to know it all, when it seemed easy to learn, when nothing was barred from entry, and, later, implanted ideas threatened to oppose alternatives, which is when, if a deliberate excavation doesn't begin, the mind clamps down and shuts. As a child, I wanted to run along, not be bothered by anyone, feared quitting or failing, and also people I perceived as static, who carried immobility in them. I wanted to move, had to keep moving, or I'd die. Without realizing it, I was an American, I didn't know the specifics then, only embodying and enacting them, while I ran along the track of my formal and informal lessons, skipping over cracks, and I didn't see what I didn't want and shed ideas like a snake does dead skin. While I craved attention, I believed that my machinations-and I-were profoundly invisible, and often I sat in the corner of a schoolroom holding firm the theory that I was unseen because what I thought was invisible. Experience and neurosis are temporal and local, as it was for those young female patients of my dermatologist who had suffered from purpura, a skin disease that is no longer a current medical problem but whose causes might return in other forms and with other symptoms. Some Chinese develop pa-feng, a fear of wind and cold; in Malaysia and Indonesia, there is latah, a psychosis that leads to an uncontrollable mimicking of other people. The kitchen helper may also not be unique but an imitation, or derivative, but my pondering of unforeseeable consequences, questionable acts and chaotic decisions, with remorse and regret accompanying them, is not good for my progress, though I don't really believe in progress, only change, which is also rare.
In the beginning, when just being alive was magical, with sleights of whimsy I could ward off the evil eye and recede into what I told myself was true. I winged like a hummingbird at a feeder, nurtured by assuming singular flighty poses, and it was easy to please people, especially by dissembling. I pleased little Johnny by paying attention to how he stood, distressed, behind an oak tree, and I could please myself and the kitchen helper, I could buy the Prouve chair, too, but being pleasing isn't always pleasant, and sex sometimes isn't, which is what I discussed later with the Turkish resident, since he was interested in having more sex in everything, as he insisted daily, though I wasn't sure why, since I wanted not to be wanting, though I couldn't divorce myself from lust and its sensorium of treacheries.
The kitchen helper's grandmother had worked in a mill nearby and his great-great-grandfather carved roughhewn furniture and lost an arm to a lathe. His grandfather was a foreman in a cotton mill, so I told him cotton textiles was the key industry early in the Industrial Revolution, that John Kay's flying shuttle in 1733, James Hargreaves spinning jenny, patented in 1770, Richard Arkwright's spinning frame, in 1769, Samuel Crompton's mule in 1779, and Edmund Cartwright's power loom, patented in 1783, facilitated an incredible increase in production. Then I told him I wanted the Prouve chair from the cafe, which made him laugh, he'd never even noticed it, and I went on about the early 19th century, before the Industrial Revolution was in full gear in America, explaining it was then that the first attempts had been made to shift the chair from a crafted good to a designed product. We were in the health food store, he talked about organic chocolate, I had imitated my first American history teacher, JJ Tucker, for him right in front of the jumbo Medjool dates. When I taught American history, I modeled myself after Mr. Tucker, I explained. Dates, fat and sweet, "those dates, they are like sex," the Turkish poet teased later, "and, you see, dear, they're called sweetmeats for something."
Walking back, following the same route with the plain exception that I avoided the waterfall, which almost disappears when it is past dusk, as it is now, a plaintive time, though if you were to walk beside the water, you could hear the falls' pulsating roars-not like a lion's-I wish I'd brought a flashlight, to light up the rushing waters. Even the woods have receded into an exquisitely quiet evening, while the blacktop road is illuminated only when a car appears, spotlighting the white line running down the middle of it. I was afraid, yet there was nothing to fear except freak accidents. The large, friendly dog who sits in front of its master's white, shingled house ran toward me to say hello the way he always does when he sees me or anyone, he's bigger than my dog, who was killed by my parents and whose life I should have saved. I walked in the dark and hummed, I tossed about internally, I stretched my legs, I swung my arms, and I thought and didn't think. No one was around. I crossed a tricky intersection and, worse, rounded a dangerous bend where a drunken driver could careen off the road and kill me but didn't, and by then I was approaching the compound, with its several beaming lampposts, and relaxed, since now I didn't expect an accident. I could enter the main house and check in with the attendant, but I might meet someone whose presence might ruffle my fur or serve up an obstacle as sticky as a jelly apple, or who, upon closer acquaintance, might become a friend or an enemy. Mostly I have been able to avoid the intimacy and wrath of the residents by maintaining a distant or cordial restraint in conversation, but each day my posture loses its rigor, so my pose is dropping, since I am off guard more often than I know, and surely I will be challenged, since people come and go, not long ago, the partners, Henry, who's supposedly white like me, when actually my skin has a yellow cast, because of Mongolian ancestors, and Arthur, who's supposedly black but nothing like the night-time forest when I walked past it. The pair arrived with their secret plans, spend time freely even lavishly, especially with the Turkish poet, and they might challenge me. More newcomers will have arrived today, to become our dinner companions, clustering expectantly beforehand in the lounge or social zone, where everyone gathers to discuss their day and the news, and where each of us habitually asserts similarity or difference from the others, so I forestall this commonplace adventure and walk on, because I might yet get something done. There might be time to have a bath, too.
Some embers are still glowing in the flagstone fireplace when I return, but it is no miracle, one log smolders, ash white or red like a rare charcoal broiled steak, heat and smoke rising from it, so then I feed it again, as if giving my wild cat a treat, and watch it for a while, to decipher a rhythm to its movements, like a song's on the radio, but there is none. I poke it twice more and remember the Count who might now be awakening for his breakfast, and recollecting him provides a peaceful sensation, after so much restlessness, thrill, and agitation, and then I turn on the radio to hear an actual song, but I don't like anything, since the beat isn't mine. The Count is the bohemian scion of an early Virginia family whose money came from a land grant, they had grown cotton, the cash crop of the South, on their vast holding, a plantation, dependent on the labor of enslaved African men and women, and later during Reconstruction and still later in Jim Crow times, they'd invested well and opened first one, then another bank, which was in turn absorbed in bigger corporations, from which the Count still benefits. By now his inheritance had a history he couldn't deny but wanted to, and, when it was known, he was chagrined by it, so he rarely mentioned his family, except he must have to Contesa, in Paris, since she had inherited the South, also, and I sometimes marveled that some of her ancestors might have worked his ancestors' land before their emancipation. His family never spoke of him, when, after a Princeton education, the Ivy League university best suited for a Southern gentleman, where he excelled, he'd escaped to Paris, where he also excelled in idleness and dabbled in available and some esoteric vices, until his body rebelled and, like Samuel Beckett, whom he also knew, boils formed between his penis and his rectum, violent headaches threw him onto his bed for days, so he took one drug after another to quell the pain. Then, one day walking along the Seine, he was stopped dead by a beautiful clock, small, with a blue enamel face, and it was then that he discovered time's equipment and wanted to live if only to collect it, and his pain left him. The majority of his collection of precious and unique clocks and watches, timepieces so fine museums vied for them, were kept secure, locked in his bedroom, lined with fire-resistant materials, far from here, and those specimens were never seen, not even by his closest friends. Even when absent, with the assistance of his employees, the Count assured their excellent care. Close or far, he was enthralled by their mechanics, age, fragility, the fact that they went on, as he did, would go on and on, if preserved well, as he wouldn't, and once he showed me his pocketwatch that to an untrained eye such as mine didn't appear special but was. This, the Count avidly informed me, was designed by Abraham-Louis Breguet in 1795, in Paris, and signed "Breguet et fill." It was gold with a mechanism invented by Breguet to adjust for a pocketwatch's generally not keeping good time, as it is constantly being moved and held in different positions. With great cleverness, Breguet mounted the escapement; I asked the Count to define escapement: a device in a timepiece which controls the motion of the train of wheelwork and through which the energy of the power source is delivered to the pendulum. Breguet mounted it to balance on a small carriage that averaged out the errors by rotating at regular intervals, "just a marvel," the Count remarked with delight, studying its simple gold face, its delicate roman numerals, its secondary dial for counting seconds and which, like a small moon, was positioned at noon or midnight. Because of its revolving motion, the device is called a tourbillon, a whirlwind. "This is Breguet's invention," the Count repeated to underscore with awe the Frenchman's achievement. Breguet was unrivaled during his time and patronized by Louis XVI and Napoleon.