And then as I rose sideways out of my desk Bob’s hands lost grip and were not there.
A record number of vectors shot in like auto-retractable steel tape measures, but now for a timeless instance all Intention spread dissolving through my body from my quick neck and sharp shoulder blades down my able back through my butt to the inside bend of my knees under the old desk with its carvings and ink doodlings, and not a drop of Intention was left in my head and I was content and believed I could hold every one of us right on up to Akkie and his hound’s face right where they were, and this I did for what would have been quite a time if the instance hadn’t been timeless. Then, like a spatial extension of this helpless and intentionless magic, there were two voices below and it seemed impossible our athletic director was bawling Bob out, cawing right under our windows (in the wrong sequence no doubt because he was stricken with his own irrelevance), “Got a game tomorrow. Hey whadda you think you’re doing!”
You thought only the thirsty media cared for you, Dom — to drink you down and piss you out: the meteoric you at San Gennaro taking a flap in the face from one of those flag-exposing twin guinea hens who run Empire Hardware while yours truly watched through the fence with Joseph and Mary and their boy behind me; or you not quite upstaging sweet Seeger on the Hudson babbling huskily over your bourbon to a black news-chick while the skipper and his banjo sang us down the stinking tide; you bleeding right onto a hand-mike a raincollared TV reporter darted to you like an electric prod, against a field of dark Barrio stone on the edge of live gunshots one summer night when you were supposed to be not in Spanish Harlem but giving a big birthday party for Dot in Edinburgh; you getting mugged all alone on Brooklyn Bridge a month ago by three kids who it turned out didn’t know who you were then or even by name later in some station house; you vomiting on a TV talk show, pointing at the eggy pool and calling it “Magma,” and after mopping your mouth and tongue-tip, answering the host’s original question straight and mild.
Are those excuses posted in the kitchen for any and all callers? And what about “EARTH = SPACECRAFT”? That addendum hardly seems an excuse for anything. Would you use it to put off a media representative? Or is it a hot-line excuse for the President of the United States to whom if he phoned you to congratulate you on being you you could say, “Sorry, can’t talk now: the earth is a spacecraft.” I’m losing you, Dom, though along with you also my fear that maybe I’d been in part responsible for your evacuation tonight. I have used you during what was tonight, Dom, but in order to dig away at less spectacular puzzles.
To save paper I’ve just for the last few moments been merely talking not writing.
Why write? to remember? or to give? or at last to forget. But soon after I opened my mouth and spoke I heard someone out by the elevator.
Ev says it’s all a phase, my quest for an exit from my well-paid foundational anthroponoia, anthropolymetry, indeed even from my after-all-well-subsidized inquiry into the changes in the ceremonial geometry of the residential ground-grid of Brooklyn Heights. Dear Ev calls it a phase.
Ev can’t know that Al did tell me about phoning her. Last year Al said, “You really should have brought Ev along this weekend, we expected her. You’re a lucky man to have a woman like her. Did you know she took the trouble to phone me and ask me never to tell you she knew about that horror show with her first husband? She was afraid of what you might think she thought.”
But did Ev find out about my nasty run-in with the doomed Doug from Doug himself? He hired his suicide car the next morning; did he phone her to tell her what I said to him? She brings together unlikely people, but would she phone Al out of the blue to open a discussion of the incident? Must I ask Al?
I must ask Al out of the blue. Ev won’t have asked Al and Bob over from the motel, for if they’ve phoned she’ll have wished to cover my absence and has probably told them she thought I’d go there as soon as I was done at the foundation, where I was let’s say working late.
“Gossip,” says my step-grandfather John from his grave which in the cinereal air is somehow just as far from my clean but no longer weightless parabola as other curiously important lines whose course or point may have made me what I am but whom tonight I haven’t time to evoke.
There was no need to delineate for you your own living room: if I’d succeeded in bringing you here, you could see for yourself; if I’d failed to make you materialize, then what would be the point? Nor is it possible to measure this night in the old way. Yet if, then, I’ve made a paraphase here, maybe your room (including that blatant space on the east wall where the super says Dot removed a long narrow blank gray canvas) constitutes a para-site.
“You just do your work, boy,” says old fisherman John, “you’ll get ahead.”
And all interruptions and rates of time and spaces of lapse collapse into even script, though now more cramped because you’ve so little paper left.
I confess I don’t embrace all interruptions. I embrace Emma, but her silky cheek and the crumb of apple in the center hollow of her chin are hard to conceive of as interruption. And because she walks so slowly, we often miss lights and stand curb-bound staring through the cabs that fly by and seeing something very special across the intersection that we might have missed and the impatience in my tight forehead and the sockets of my eyes dissolves in the sights we see like tourists to these ruins of a city. Say it’s afternoon around our TV, it’s last summer and we’re about to go away, and with Emma on my lap I nostalgically watch the Moon’s pale world recede in the frame of the spacecraft’s window through which the NASA lens witnesses the recession. But where am I? Emma squirms to get off me, and succeeds. At once our TV set experiences mechanical difficulty: the interruption isn’t this channel’s fault, I switch in vain to others.
One day I’ll put a raft of these intersectional interruptions together as if they were one life and all the rest were interruption. I’ll type it up and put it in Emma’s safe-deposit box downtown right on top of her deed to a hundred acres of northern Canada that cost me a hundred dollars through an agency in Winnipeg by which I bypass the trickier, New-York-approved people. I’ve shown Ted his deed, but he’s too busy bucking rid of dialectic to care, his psychiatrist asked if Ted had a picture of me but Ted said No of course not, and the shrink said Why do you say “of course”?
But now I remember: the ribbon-spools on my Junior Corona wouldn’t reverse, and if I did it by hand they still wouldn’t feed to the right. And one night doing a paper for English I just picked up my Corona and chucked it back over my head, but from the living room my father heard only my oath, for the infuriating machine landed on my pillow. I retrieved it when I heard his steps and when he came in without knocking asking me what the devil I thought I meant using language like that he found me holding the old thing in my arms. Subtly I ignored his rebuke and asked in piteous exasperation if he could fix the spool-reverse, the ribbon would stop moving and I’d chew a hole in it before I realized it had stopped. My father said he didn’t trust our neighborhood shop on Montague Street, but when he went to Manhattan in the morning he’d take it to the place around Wall that his firm used.
But my mother stayed in bed the next morning and I heard them talking behind the closed bedroom door for what at that hour of the beginning day seemed a long time. I left my Wheaties bowl with a trace of sweet milk in the bottom of it in the sink and looked in on them to say goodbye and left; but my father when he went off to Wall Street forgot my typewriter. And next day he was so concerned about my typing my English paper and one I was even surer of entitled “The Filibuster: Freedom or Tyranny?” that even though it was Saturday he took my Corona over to Wall Street. Ever been in Wall Street on a weekend morning? I took the subway out to school to play tennis.