The sound again; so I got up and handed myself down the aisle, bar after bar. The old man—pretending to sleep—was so slumped in the back seat I couldn’t see him till I passed the second door. One brown and ivory eye opened over his frayed collar slanting across the black wrinkle of an ear. He closed it again, turned away, and made that strangling moan—the sound, again, that till now I had suspected was something strained and complaining in the engine.
I sat, bare foot on the warm wheel case, boot on the bar below the seat in front. The smoke against the glass was fluid thick; runnels wormed the pane. Thinking (complicated thoughts): Life is smoke; the clear lines through it, encroached on and obliterated by it, are poems, crimes, orgasms—carried this analogy to every jounce and jump of the bus, ripple on the glass, even noticing that through the windows across the aisle I could see a few buildings.
The falsification of this journaclass="underline" First off, it doesn’t reflect my daily life. Most of what happens hour by hour here is quiet and dull. We sit most of the time, watch the dull sky slipping. Frankly, that is too stupid to write about. When something really involving, violent, or important happens, it occupies too much of my time, my physical energy, and my thought for me to be able to write about. I can think of four things that have happened in the nest I would like to have described when they occurred, but they so completed themselves in the happening that even to refer to them seems superfluous.
What is down, then, is a chronicle of incidents with a potential for wholeness they did not have when they occurred; a false picture, again, because they show neither the general spread of our life’s fabric, nor the most significant pattern points.
To show the one is too boring and the other too difficult. That is probably why (as I use up more and more paper trying to return the feeling I had when I thought I was writing poems) I am not a poet…anymore? The poems perhaps hint it to someone else, but for me they are dry as the last leaves dropping from the burned trees on Brisbain. They are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing.
They stuck at me for two weeks? For three?
I don’t really know if they occurred. That would take another such burst. All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.
The bus stopped. The driver twisted around; for a moment I thought he was speaking to the old man behind me: “I can’t take you no farther,” gripping the bar across the back of the driver’s seat, elbow awkward in the air. “I got you past the store.” He pauses significantly; I wish he hadn’t. “You’ll be all right.”
Behind me the old man sniffled and shifted.
I stood up and, under George’s eyes (and knees and hands and left foot and right tit), stepped on the treadle. The doors opened. I got out on the curb.
The pavement was shattered about a hydrant, which leaned from its pipes. I turned and watched the bus turn.
From the doorway at the end of the block a man stepped. Or a woman. Whoever it was, anyway, was naked. I think.
I walked in that direction. The figure went back in. What I passed was a florist’s smashed display window. At first I was surprised at all the greenery on the little shelves up the side. But they were plastic—ferns, leaves, shrubs. Three big pots in the center only had stumps. Back, in the shadow, by the aluminum frame on the glass door of the refrigerator, something big, fetid, and wet moved. I only saw it a second when I hurried by. But I got goose bumps.
The reason the bus driver hadn’t wanted to go on was that Broadway grew ornate scrolled railings on either side and soared over train tracks forty feet down a brick-walled canyon. A few yards out, a twelve foot hunk of paving had fallen off, as though a gap-tooth giant had bitten it away. The railing twisted off both sides of the gash. From the edge, looking down, I couldn’t see where any rubble had landed.
Beyond the overpass, to the left, a rusted wire fence ran before some trees; through the trees, I saw water patched with ash. To the right, up a slope blotched with grass, was the monastery.
Like that.
I walked up the steps between the beige stones. Halfway, I looked back across the road.
Smoke reeds grew from the woods and clotted waters to bloom and blend with the sky.
I reached the top of the steps with the strangest sense of relief and anticipation. The simple journey was the resolve that till now I’d thought suspended. The monastery was several three-story buildings. A tower rose behind the biggest. I put my hands in my pockets, feeling my leg muscles move as I walked; one finger went through a hole.
Thinking: You arrive at a monastery halfway through a round of pocket-pool. Sure. I relaxed my stomach (it had tightened in the climb) and ambled, breathing loudly, over the red and grey flags. Between dusty panes, putty blobbed the leaded tessellations. At the same moment I decided the place was deserted, a man in a hood and robe stepped around the corner and peered.
I took my hands out of my pockets.
He folded his over his lap and came forward. They were big, and translucent. The white-and-black toes of very old basketball sneakers poked alternately from his hem. His eyes were grey. His smile looked like the amphetamine freeze on a particularly pale airline stewardess. His hood was back enough to see his skull was white as bread dough. A sore, mostly hidden, like an eccentric map, was visible under the hood’s edge: wet, raised, with purple bits crusted inside it and yellow flaking around it. “Yes?” he asked. “Can I help you?”
I smiled and shrugged.
“I saw you coming up the steps and I was wondering if there was anything I could do for you, anyone in particular you wanted to see?”
“I was just looking around.”
“Most of the grounds are in the back. We don’t really encourage people to just wander about, unless they’re staying. Frankly, they’re not in such hot shape right through here. The Father was talking yesterday at the morning meal about starting a project to put them back in order. Everybody was delighted to get a place right across from Holland Lake—” He nodded toward the other side of the road. “But now look at it.”
When I turned back from the lacustrine decay, he was pulling his hood further down his forehead with thick thumb and waxy forefinger.
I looked around at the buildings. I’d been trying to find this place so long; but once found, the search seemed so easy. I was off on some trip about—
“Excuse me,” he said.
—and came back.
“Are you the Kid?”
I felt a good feeling in my stomach and a strong urge to say No. “Yeah.”
His chin and his smile twisted in a giggle without sound. “I thought you might be. I don’t know why I thought so, but it seemed a reasonable guess. I mean I’ve seen pictures of…scorpions—in the Times. So I knew you were one of them, but I had no way of knowing which one. That you were the…” and shook his head, a satisfied man. “Well.” He folded his hands. “We’ve never been visited by any scorpions before, so I just took a guess.” His wrinkleless face wrinkled. “Are you sure you weren’t looking for someone?”
“Who’s here to look for?”
“Most people who come usually want to see the Father—but he’s closeted with Mr. Calkins now, so that would be unfeasible today—unless of course you wanted to wait, or come back at some other—”
“Is Mr. Calkins here?” In my head I’d been halfway through an imaginary dialogue which had begun when I’d answered his first question with: The Kid? Who, me? Naw…
“Yes.”
“Could I see him?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t…as I said, he’s closeted with the Father.”
“He’d want to see me,” I said. “He’s a friend of mine.”
“I don’t know if I ought to disturb them.” His smile fixed some emotion I couldn’t understand till he spoke: “And I believe one of the reasons Mr. Calkins came here was to put some of his friends at a more comfortable distance.” Then he giggled. Out loud.