SLOT
The jets are back as the intermission clown car of the cargo plane settles down for a landing on the other side of the river, and the jets — there are four of them now — in their famous formation of four, emerge from behind a cloud, diamond-shaped, the fourth airplane in the slot beneath and behind the lead plane that's wingtip-to-wingtip with his two wingmen's wingtips, but that is hard to see, hard to say, because what is behind or below or above changes instantly effortlessly constantly, it seems, as the planes move through the delta-v of this calculus, rearranging themselves in each dimension — x, y, z, and time — and from this distance, it looks as if there is just one plane instead of four, so precise is the handling as the “they“ that is really an “it“ roll and pitch and yaw as one, and the students have all been talking to me on the other end of the phone, asking their last question, saying this question coming now at me at the speed of sound, at the speed of light, is their last question, and it is this: would I consider publishing something online, as their magazine Pendulum is published online, and would I send them something to publish? and with the four blue jets up in the blue-going-to-white sky, their manufactured blue smoke spilling from them, another signature, with serifs and accents and underlines, I tell the students that I am working on a book of fictions made up of things made up of fours — the four chambers of the heart, the four seasons, the four humors, the four winds, etc., etc., etc., etc., and I am working on something now I will try to finish and send to them to consider putting in the magazine, and I am watching the formation reposition itself into what I will learn later is called a Double Farvel, with two of the four planes inverted, creating a mirrored image of each other, before they break apart once again, corkscrewing through the air, vectoring to each corner of the sky, reining in their speeds, then raising their noses at an extreme angle to almost stall, and then extending their gear, banking, and heading for the airport over the river, and I tell the students that the Blue Angels seem to be finished for the day, and the pilots of the F/A 18s will now attempt what they call a “landing“ on land but that they usually “land“ at sea, on an aircraft carrier (they are Navy planes, after all, and the pilots are not pilots because in the Navy a pilot is someone who pilots a ship not an airship, so these pilots are naval aviators), and they are about to land on land and not on the deck of a ship with a tail hook and arresting cables, the ungainly and suddenly ungraceful difficult ending to what has been all effortless and elegant, the falling, gliding, silence, all taken back with a vengeance, in the final maneuver called, simply, a controlled crash, the only true answer without question…gravity.
Four Eyes
MOOSH
I see him goggled with his glasses, sitting in the sitting room, the space that is the split-level of the split-level, between the upstairs and downstairs, where he has come to live with my Aunt Mad and her family, blind by then. He shaves by feel and misses patches of whiskers on his cheek or leaves swaths of stubble on purpose. He grabs my hand to skin his skin. “Moosh,“ he says, and “Moosh“ again, sands my hand. His eyes, magnified, run behind the useless lenses of his useless eyes. I see the scum of the cataracts, enlarged by the glasses' lenses, mica veneers, a cloudy wax beneath the waxy glass. The right eye blinded outright, a spring sprung from a couch long ago — a darkness penetrating, spiraling into the aperture of the iris — as he moved furniture at the Hotel Indiana where he was a custodian of cushions, a janitor of the terrazzo. The whites of his runny eyes are nougat. They, the eyes, weep as if they've forgotten that they are weeping, more a welling leak that tears and tears. “Moosh,“ he says and says again, those double Os scooping out the sight for the sound. At Grandma's wake, years before, no one saw him disappear. I found him later in the basement of the old house — the basement dug out for the dirt to be used in the backyard garden — lost in the dark, trapped in what had been the coal bin once and now was the root cellar seamed with sacks of seed potatoes gone bad, their eyes sprouting a pulpy fur of fingers.
MA
I see her see the saints, Anthony of Padua, the patron of lost things, lost people, and Jude, the patron of losing, of lost lost causes. She read with a glass, magnified, squinting, coaxing the print to grow. She mussed the Mass cards, spread them out on the kitchen table like tarot, like my baseball cards, the statistics, the details of the dead, the final prayers, recipe cards for funerals. I fielded my cards across the table — St. Mickey, St. Willie, St. Aparicio, St. Sandy, St. Ernie — my voice introducing them to the audience of her, a public address booming, echoing in the vast stadium of her kitchen, her echo doubling the litany of the canon. Later, when she decides to die and then dies, she will say that the saints have said it is so, so she does. That was after I lost my eyeteeth, pulled to make spaces for the spacers. The new bands smarted, wired my mouth closed, a declension — tender, tenderly, tenderness. I look angelic in the first communion portrait, a pseudosaint, orthodontic. She looked at me askance. Cornered me in the corner of her eye. She saw me as another icon, saw me suffer under a mal occhio. So, she made the mal occhio mirrored back at my mal occhio to combat it. At the kitchen table, she mumbled the mumble while drip-dropping the olio in the water, watching until, at last, it collected itself into the shiny slimy worry beads she worried, the sign I'd been seen, and then spat and pinned the amulets of twisted horn to pierce open the bad glance. I saw her see the saints in the light falling through her kitchen windows. They talked to her in pulses of light, plosives of color. I followed instructions, building the scale model of the Avenger, its parts spread out on the floor spread with morning papers, the words worming under my gaze. It was blue, the airplane, and its wings folded and the decals were stars. The furniture was wrapped in plastic she polished. I fogged the clear plastic of the toy canopy with the dissolving glue on my fingers. The pilot's head was the size of a pea. I fit tab A into slot B, lost a blue piece in the nap of the rug. I caught her looking as I looked.
GRANDMA BLANCHE
I see her, eyes closed, in the bed she is going to die in. I have just arrived, taking the red-eye overnight to make it in time. Everyone will say she waited for me to arrive, and when I did arrive we didn't wait long to witness the last laboring breaths, her eyelids fluttering. Everyone says she had been dying a long time, sitting up in her chair, staring out through the picture window, awake through the day, through the night, seeing shadows in the shadows, dust in the clouds of dust blown up from the ball diamonds in the park across the street. Everyone said it was the cable, the witnessing all the Eyewitness News that put her over this edge, the flickering loop of muggings and murders in the Loop, daily box scores of death. I'm not so sure. I watched her watch out all my life. Stare. Always there, she was never there. She wore trifocals, their optics fragmenting her eyes, fracturing the light, bluing there, going to indigo, then violet, her unblinking eyes a puzzle beneath the broken-up stains. The television was black-and-white, even after color had been invented, and the screen was haloed by a lighted frame advertised by Zenith to soften contrast. Her chair was angled so she could catch the oblique pictures bouncing from the TV and the ones glancing in through the picture window. She watched me for her daughter, my mother, who worked as I was growing up. I watched her fall asleep sitting up, her eyes not closing. Playing in the front yard so that she could keep an eye on me, I made faces and waved my arms to startle her pictured inside the window. She didn't start but didn't take her eyes from me, the optical illusions of flat portraits where the look follows you back and forth, and I went back and forth, her mirage of me, the only movement her eyes panning as I moved. No one knew where she went when she went behind her eyes, but everyone agreed that as she failed she went there more and more, her eyes turned inward. We wondered what she was imagining, what she saw when she wasn't seeing. We all asked her all the time what she was thinking when she was thinking and what did she dream when she dreamed and, “Oh, nothing,“ was what she always answered when she answered at all.