And if I did?
Let me focus here — as she tends to my wound.
Then, when she’s done being my nurse: So why did you do it? she asks.
Because of everything I wanted and never had.
Because of everything you wanted and never had. You’ll catch your death of cold sitting here.
So? To sit out this cold night and in the morning be found frozen blue, think I’d mind if it’s for you?
For me or for you?
I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know the answer. Both answers were right.
Amphibalence, she says.
Amphibalence, I say.
And it hits me that more was being said in this short conversation between our shadow selves in this lonely park than anything we’d spoken all night. A lovers’ colloquy, as in Verlaine’s poem, where both our shadows touch, the rest just waits, and waits, and waits. This wasn’t new. I’d been doing this for years.
•
“Something wrong?” It was a uniformed policeman who had just shut the door of his car and was crossing the park toward me. He looked like the only other being left on this planet.
I shook my head and pretended to look elsewhere. Had I been speaking to myself all this time?
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, Officer. I was just trying to collect my thoughts.”
Collect my thoughts—people get arrested for speaking like this.
“Not thinking of doing anything stupid, are you?”
Again I shook my head, smiling. Second time tonight.
“Been drinking?”
“Too much. Way too much.”
“Merry Christmas.”
“And to you too, Officer—?”
“Rahoon.”
“Rahoon, as in ‘She weeps over Rahoon’?”
“Don’t know that song.”
“Not a song — poem. Irish.”
“You don’t say!”
I was about to say youbetya but figured, better not.
“So what you got, woman trouble?” He crossed his arms. I could see the edges of his bulletproof vest bulge under his tight blue jacket.
“Nope. Not woman trouble. It’s just the old man’s gone. Was just thinking about him tonight, soon it will be exactly a year ago.” And suddenly I remembered his very own words, Soon I won’t even know I ever lived—and if my shadow bumps into yours on a busy sidewalk, my heart won’t jump as it did that night when you peeked into my room. So much love and all of it a waste, so many books and verses stored, and all of it gone. I look at this hand, and I know, soon I’ll no longer see it, for it’s no longer quite mine, the way my eyes are not quite mine, I’m not even here, my feet have already gone before me and found a cozier spot at God knows what time zone beyond Lethe and Phlegethon. I won’t even remember Lethe or Phlegethon, or the mutinous Shannon waves, or Phaedo, or brave Aristides and those long speeches by Thucydides we read together. All these immortal words, gone; Byzantium, gone. Pff! Part of me is no longer mine, the way life was never really mine, the way my clothes and my shoes and the smell on my body were never really mine, the way even “mine” isn’t mine any longer, my thoughts, my hair, my everything have drifted from me, and love too is no longer mine, just borrowed, like an umbrella from a tattered old coatrack — you and me, umbrellas on a coatrack, though you’re closer to me now than the blood in my neck, the breath of my life. I look at myself in the mirror and all I’m doing is saying goodbye to both my face and yours. I’m leaving you piecemeal, my love, and I don’t want you to grieve, I want to take this picture of you now to wherever they’re forcing me to go now and hope that once I’ve shut my eyes this will be the last thing to go, for the last thing you see they say is the one you take forever, if “take” means anything beyond Lethe and Phlegethon.
“Do you know Lethe and Phlegethon, Officer?”
“Who’re they?”
“No matter.” The worst part of dying is knowing you’ll forget you ever lived and ever loved. You live seventy or so years, and you die forever. Why can’t it be the other way? To be dead for seventy years — and throw in another seventy for good measure — but to live forever. What purpose does dying serve, anyway? I don’t care who says no human could endure living more than a lifetime. Ask the dead and see what answer you get — ask the dead what they wouldn’t give to be here and catch tonight’s snow, or have a week of starlit nights like these, or fall for the world’s most beautiful woman. Ask the dead.
“ ‘Just promise me this,’ he would say, ‘that when the time comes, you’ll help me — but only if I ask, not before, and so long as I can hold out, but not sooner.’ ”
“And did he ask?”
Was the lawman being cunning with me?
“He never asked.”
“They never do when the time comes. So what you so broken up for?”
“He went to sleep for a few hours and I walked about the neighborhood like a lover waiting for a girlfriend to clear every last thing she owns from his home, hoping she’ll change her mind, until I passed by a park and I knew, by the hiss of the wind through the trees in the cold, that he’d arrived safely. I was to read Plutarch to him. I let it happen.”
“Intentionally?”
“I’ll never know.”
Tell me I’m not cruel, Officer Rahoon. Tell me that he knew, Officer Rahoon.
“Just look at this moon.”
“Good night, moon,” I said.
“Good night, moon,” he repeated, to humor me, shaking his head, meaning, You people!
A beggar woman had crossed the street and was coming toward us. The park was probably her bedroom. Her bathroom. Her kitchen. Her parlor. “Mister, some bread.”
I put my hand in my pocket.
“Are you out of your mind!?” said the policeman. Then turning to the beggar, “Beat it, mamacita.”
“Don’t be cross with her. It’s Christmas.”
“She puts her grubby fingers on you — and see how Christmasy you feel.”
The beggar woman who had spotted a soft heart kept her gaze on me, begging silently.
Just when I was about to leave Straus Park, I took out a five-dollar bill and snuck it into the hand of the beggar woman. Por mi padre.
“Seriously?”
“Let it rest, Officer,” I said. You never know, I wanted to say. In another age, the old hag would have asked me to sit on one of these benches, brought a bucket to wash my feet, spotted something, and I’d be home. Y por Clara también. I should have added.
Rahoon and his car were gone, everything was quiet again.
As I crossed what must have been the street and not just the sidewalk, I looked back at the park, knowing now that I’d give anything to start the evening all over again exactly as it had turned out — do with time what Romans did when they gorged themselves on food — regurgitate time, wind the clock back to seven o’clock, and start right here in Straus Park again. It is snowing. I am still very early for the party. I’ll stop and have tea in this little coffeehouse. Then I’ll head to the building, pretend I am not sure that this is the correct address, shake my umbrella, watch the burly Russian with the stentorian voice open the door for me, and walk into the elevator, whose Gothic doorway doesn’t give a hint of where things are headed tonight. I wanted to start the evening all over again, and many more times again, because I did not want it to end, because, even if something wistful and unfinished hung over the entire night, I would take it, wistful and unfinished night that it was, and consider myself twice blessed.