It started with the sweeping away of walls and the exchanging of souvenirs, I’ll trade you a piece of the wall for a bullet shell from the square, a lump of candle wax, a piece of phone-tap wire, as time went by I lost my collection, it only made sense at first, amid the joy and exhilaration, what use is there in saving splinters, iron scales, an besides: obvious symbols only work for things closed by time. Yet you haven’t left that reality. You’re still walkin the boards in the same performance, on the same familiar set, your rankled nerves detect the presence of the board of directors, the ones that’re runnin the show, and is it? or is it not? part of a plan? is it by design? You still sense the nasty looks on the other side of the curtain, the sneering, the rat, the wicked uncle’s grin. The Face.
You still feel the pain in your chewed-up fist, the one you stuff in your mouth to keep from talking, to keep from telling yourself what it really is, what’s going on: with you. And you’d just as soon take your share and bury it.
I look into the mirror, a gift from the Chinese, on back is an inscription, letters to the wall. I take a slug of the Fiery, still a long way to the bottom.
Whenever I feel time losing its power, whenever it stops sucking me in and the swirl of chaos and noise in the tunnel falls still, the Fiery always helps. And the next day that rigor mortis is proof that time is dead for me again. Like the way the Chippewas gripped their paddles after they drank the Fiery, seated stiffly in their canoes, heads shattered from inside. They needed it too: rifles and steel knives and smallpox were what smashed time for them. They maybe wanted a circle; I longed for a straight line.
Reaching up to the shelf for the Firewater, I touch a hand groping for it from the other side, a bracelet, fingers chewed like mine, but his hand’s dusky, smells of smoke, it’s calloused and scraped, mine doesn’t have callouses, not anymore. We clutch the bottle, each from one side, but it doesn’t want war: this demon wants us both. The bottle splits in two, each of us tugging the cold glass onto our side of the darkness, and on the spot where my hand and the Chippewa’s touched, a new bottle stands now, there will always be a new one, as long as we die.
Not anymore, we said. Together. That time with her. I don’t know anymore which one of us said it.
As the hangover recedes, everything picks up again, you come to life, feeling that time and motion are back again, you know that it’s false but only at the base of your mind, up above the lights are beginning to come back on, falling flatly over the everyday scenery, but you toy with the illusion for a little while longer. You drink because of the hangover, it’s an edge, like twilight, not quite day, not quite night. Every instant still sharply fractured. This time still has an end, too far off for me to see, this time can still be reckoned from the moment the first crack in the concrete showed.
The concrete block, stifling anything that tried to move on its own, is gone, you know very well how everything was rotting, gasping for freedom, mutating in the stench, in the bush, in the bushes, the roly-polies under the rock. The bushes: the especially robust runners found chinks in the slowly cracking concrete and squeezed their way out, twisting, creeping, it was doable. That’s me too of course, I’m one of the bushes, and for a long time I expected the blow, the command, the deafening whistle, the pounding on the door.
I don’t get it, I don’t know why it didn’t happen to me. Why me, how come you didn’t get eight years, an iron bar in the head, a one-way plane ticket out of the country? But it’s gone now.
Or is it? And now do we live like this or like that? I saw an old woman and a German shepherd in the morning haze by the train station. Everyone else had just cleared out. A fire blazed in a trash can. The woman was feeding it. Burning old grass, ma’am? I asked. No, these’re my files, my documents. The dog growled, a beetle crept along the sidewalk, the wind rolled softly over the windowpanes.
Aha, so that’s how we’re going do it now, people thought to themselves. That before was nothing, that we had to do. After all, on the outside you’re one thing and at your underlying source you’re something else, everybody knows that, it’s like ABC. So open up your sources, now, the whole world is theirs. Aha, so what’s reality? And what’s just scenery? What do we do? And what am I gonna do now? I asked myself in unison with the rest.
Our friendship was the dawning of the firm, the company to be, that was the foundation. I lived with Little White She-Dog back in the days when I knew nothing and had nothing to lose. She made me so in turn I could make someone else, so there would be a tribe. She knew we needed a tribe if we wanted to survive without giving away all our time, and she also knew how to save at least a piece of time for ourselves.
It also works with objects, she taught me. Back then I kept time tucked away in shards of broken glass in the pockets of my shorts. Sitting at home or in class, I’d unwrap a shard from my handkerchief and watch as time began to unwind, gently at first, like a feather floating to the ground (later on she taught me that for gentleness it works best to put time into feathers), and then the time in the shard would accelerate and I’d be inside it with Little White She-Dog, with the grass and the trees, in our hole in the hillside, with her touches, in reality.
She also saw the green eyes of the woman I was to meet in the future, which gifted females can see into. You’ll probly end up with some wrestler, she said, examining her bruises in bed one day. I won’t toss an turn anymore, I said, yeah you will, she told me back.
Long before I tossed and turned and ground my teeth in my dreams, I was a gimp, in the autumn of my childhood, and my being lame only before her and for her was the beginning of our games, our exploration of human power, it was the origin of the perversion. I would sit motionless while Little White She-Dog set the nerves in my body to tingling, sitting still as long as possible so that she could learn my body, so she could teach my body to feel. My role model was a cripple from an engraving. A medieval engraving peopled with knights and cripples. It was the time of St. George the dragon slayer, and I was a child cripple with a twisted soul and a studiously acquired schizophrenia because what was permitted and required inside was undesirable and dangerous outside. Family pride was a weight around my neck. I was to be the future that would pay back the humiliation, in this I was just like thousands of others.
Just like them, something drove me to bury deceased pigeons and sparrows, making crosses for their little graves and reeling off the words, but She-Dog brought me back to myself, through herself, through her movements and voice and touches, just like a little wife.
Elsewhere I had to pull off the role of the cheerful, inquisitive little boy, bringing home top grades to honor my obligations. The Communists mopped up the floor with families like ours, but that was precisely why fathers and mothers forced their children to study Latin. Fathers waged long-winded debates on whether it was best to teach Latin or English, and always concluded that both were essential. Latin, church, languages; dual geography, dual history, and religion: it was a pretty shabby arsenal for battling the world around us. George at least had a lance. And the dragon wasn’t even trying to take away his time, it only wanted to kill him.
With Little White She-Dog I was no one again, a shape born of vapor, wind, moisture. She stroked nerves I didn’t know I had, my face took on a new appearance, I started to feel my body. I started to dance. For a cripple, just stretching your hand is a dance. She drew me in, forming me, and that in turn shaped her nature.