not the grandeur of mountains. She hadn’t seen snow, except
maybe once before she came here. For me snow had been:
trying to get back and forth from school with the boys surrounding the girls, chasing us, heading us off, pelting us with snowballs, and the snow melting under the dirty car smoke
and turning brown and greasy, and a shovel to dig out the cars
and clear the sidewalks, and playing in the snow dressed in
snowsuits and trying to make a snowman: but especially,
trying to get back and forth from school without getting hurt
by a snowball. My snow had nothing to do with solitude or
beauty and it fell on a flat place, not a hill or mountain, with
the cement under it less solid than this New England earth,
less trustworthy, ready to break and split, ready to loosen and
turn into jagged pieces of stone big enough to throw instead of
snowballs or inside them. We were endlessly strange together,
not rich, foreign to this cool, elegant, simple, beautiful winter.
I didn’t touch her, but I touched him. Her best friend since
childhood, both in Kenya, little kids together and now here,
preparing, preparing for some adult future back home. She
took me with her and delivered me to him and I took him
instead of her, because he was as close as I could get. She was
delighted he liked me, and sullen. It happened in a beautiful
room, an elegant room, at elegant Harvard, friends of theirs
from home, their room, all students studying to be the future
of their country, and I was bleeding anyway and so I spread
my legs for him, not knowing of course that it was because I
loved her. I stayed with him over and over, for months, a night
here, an afternoon there, though I came to hate him, a purely
physical aversion to his clumsy, boring fuck: I didn’t want
him to touch me but I had him fuck me anyway, too polite to
say no for one thing, not knowing how to get out of it, and
wanting her, not knowing it. I got pregnant and had an
35
abortion and she went home. Nothing like pregnancy to make
the man disappear. It decided her. The years of exiled youth
ended. She went home. Like everyone else in the world I was
terrified, it would have been easier right then to be an outcast
hero and have a little black baby whom I could love to death
without having to say why and I would have felt brave, brave:
and no one would have hurt that child: but Emmy looked at
me a certain way all the time now, hate, simple, pure, and I
had the abortion, the hate was hard as a rock, diamond,
shredding the light. She got so quiet I could have died. She left,
but I was the deserter. I didn’t care too much. By the time
mother died everyone was a stranger anyway, and after that I
was a too-cold child with a too-cold heart. I have stayed that
way. Everything gets taken away and everyone eventually
weeps and laughs and understands. Why lie?
36
The great thing is to be saturated with
something— that is, in one way or another,
with life; and I chose the form of my
saturation.
Henry James
*
Have you ever seen the Lower East Side of New York in the
summer? The sidewalks are boiling cement, almost molten,
steaming, a spread of heat scorching human feet, the heat like
the pure blue of the pure flame, pure heat saddled with city
dirt and city smell and especially the old urine of the hundreds
of near-dead junkies hanging nearly skeletal in the shadows of
doorways and crouched under the stinking stairwells of
tenements in which the hot, dead air never moves.
The sun burns. It burns like in Africa. It is in the center of
the sky, huge and burning. No clouds can cover it. It comes
through them, a haze of heat. It gets bigger every day. It is a
foul yellow fire, sulfur at the edges. It hangs and burns. It
spreads out. It reaches down like the giant hand of some monster. The buildings burn.
The air is saturated with the hot sun, thick with it. The air
is a fog of fire and steam. The lungs burn and sweat. The skin
drowns in its own boiling water, erupting. The air lies still,
layers of itself, all in place like the bodies filed in a morgue,
corpses grotesquely shelved. Somewhere corpses and rot hang
in the air, an old smell in the old air, the air that has never
moved off these city streets, the air that has been waiting
through the killer winter to burn, to torment, to smother: to
burn: the air that has been there year after year, never moving,
but burning more and more summer after summer, aged air,
old smelclass="underline" immortal, while humans die.
There is never any wind. There is never a cool breeze. The sun
absorbs the wind. The cement absorbs the wind. The wind
evaporates between earth and sky. There is never any air to
breathe. There is only heat. Rain disappears in the heat, making
the air hotter. Rain hangs in the air, in the thick, hot air: bullets
of wet heat stopped in motion. Rain gets hot: water boiled that
37
never cools. Rain becomes steam, hanging in midair: it burns
inside the nose, singes the hairs in the nose, scorches the throat:
leaves scars on the skin. The air gets wetter and hotter and when
the rain stops the air is heavier, thicker, harder to breathe. Rain
refreshes only the smell, giving it wings.
The smell is blood on piss. The blood coagulates on the
cement, then rots. Knives cut and figures track through the
blood making burgundy and scarlet footprints. Cats lap up its
edges. It never gets scrubbed out. The rain does not wash it
away. Dust mixes in with it. Garbage floats on top of it. Candy
bar wrappers get stuck in it. Empty, broken hypodermic
needles float. It is a sickening smell, fouling up the street,
twisting the stomach into knots of despair and revulsion: still,
the blood stays there: old blood followed by new: knives especially: sometimes the sharp shots of gunfire: sometimes the exploding shots of gunfire: the acrid smoke hanging above the
blood: sometimes the body is there, smeared, alone, red seeping
out or bubbling or spurting: sometimes the body is there, the
blood comes out hissing with steam, you can see the steam just
above the blood running with it, the blood is hot, it hits the
pavement, it hisses, hot on hot: sometimes the person moves,
walks, runs, staggers, crawls, the blood trailing behind: it stains
the cement: flies dance on it in a horrible, pulsating mass: it
coagulates: it rots: it stinks: the smell gets old and never dies.