With a similar maneuver of finger and thumb I reach out and touch the lapel and then touch my own, the familiar feel of each material, the body warmth they transmit… the smell of sweet ripe cherries, the melancholy of airliners turning in the stack; this is the work, we cannot be told apart by those we fear. Leech grips my extended arm and shakes it. Open your eyes, open your eyes. You’ll see it’s not like yours at all. Here the lapels are wider, the jacket has two slits behind at my request and while they are the same shade of blue, mine has little flecks of white and the total effect is lighter. At the sound of footsteps far behind us we continue on our way.
Asleep and so moist? The synesthesia of the ancient to and fro, the salt water and spice warehouses, a rise beyond which the contours smooth and roll and dip against the skyline like a giant tree hinging on the sky, a tongue of flesh. I kiss and suck where her daughters sucked. Come away, she said, leave it alone. The white bones of some creature I wanted to approach and touch, the flat-socketed skull, the long curving spine diminishing to the delicate point… Leave it alone, she said when I put out my arm. No mistaking the terror in those words, she said it was a nightmare and clutched our picnic to her—when we embraced, a bottle rattled against a tin. Holding hands we ran through the wood and out across the slopes, around the knots of gorse, the big valley below us, the good big clouds, the wood a flat scar on the dull green.
Yes, it is the Director’s habit to advance several feet into the room and pause to survey the activities of his subordinates. But for a tightening in the air (the very space the air inhabits compresses) nothing changes, everyone looks, no one looks up… The Director’s look is sunk in fat bound by wonderful translucent skin, it has accumulated on the ridge of his cheekbone and now, like a glacier, seeps down into the hollow of his eye. The sunken authoritative eye sweeps the room, desk, faces, the open window, and fixes like a sluggish spinning bottle on me… Ah Leech, he says.
In her house it smells sweetly of sleeping children, of cats drying in the warmth, of dust warming in the tubes of an old radio—is this the news, fewer injured, more dead? How can I be sure the earth is turning towards the morning? In the morning I’ll tell her across the empty cups and stains, more memory than dream, I claim waking status in my dreams. Nothing exaggerated but fine points of physical disgust and those exaggerated only appropriately, and all seen through, so I shall claim, a hole so big there was no ice to surround it.
It is tranquil here at the trestle table by the window. This is the work, not happy, not unhappy, sifting through the returned cuttings. This is the work, finding the categories appropriate to the filing system. The sky a blank yellow-white, the canal odor reduced by distance to the smell of sweet ripe cherries, the melancholy of airliners in the stack and elsewhere in the office others cut up the day’s papers, paste columns to index cards; pollution/air, pollution/noise, pollution/water, the genteel sound of scissors, the shuffle of glue on pots, a hand pushing open the door. The Director advances several feet into the room and pauses to survey the activity of his subordinates.
I will tell her… she sighs and stirs, sweeps her unbrushed hair clear of her watery eyes, goes to rise but remains sitting, cups her hands around a jug—a junk shop present to herself. In her eyes the window makes small bright squares, under her eyes cusps of blue twin-moon her white face. She pushes her hair clear, sighs and stirs.
He is walking towards me. Ah Leech, he says as he comes. He calls me Leech. Ah Leech, there’s something I want you to do for me. Something I do not hear, mesmerized where I sit by the mouth which forms itself round the syllables. Something I want you to do for me. At the casual, unworried moment he realizes his mistake, Leech occurs from behind a bank of cabinets, effusively forgiving. The Director is briskly apologetic. As my colleague will confirm, says Leech, people are always confusing us, and so saying he rests his hand on my shoulder, forgiving me too. A very easy mistake, colleague, to allow yourself to be confused with Leech.
Listen to her breathing, rise and fall, rise and fall, between the rise and fall the perilous gap, the decision she makes to go on… the weight of hours. I will tell her and avoid confusion. Her eyes will budge from left to right and back, study each of my eyes in turn, compare them for honesty or shift in intent, dip intermittently to my mouth and round and round to make a meaning of a face, and likewise my eyes in hers, round and round our eyes will dance and chase.
I sit wedged between the two standing men and the Director repeats his instructions, impatiently leaves us, and when he reaches the door turns to look back and smiles indulgently. Yes! I have never seen him smile. I see what he sees—twins as posed for a formal photograph. One stands, his hand settled forever on the shoulder of the other who sits; possibly a confusion, a trick of the lens, for if we turn this bright metal ring their images coalesce and there is only one. Name of? Hopeful and with good reason… anxious.
To and fro is my clock, will make the earth turn, the dawn come, bring her daughters to her bed… to and fro laughs at the stillness, to and fro drops her children between the spicy adult warmth, attaches them to her sides like starfish, do you remember … the thrill of seeing what you are not intended to see, the great rock thrust across the wet, striated sand, the water’s edge receding against its will to the horizon, and in the rock-thrust the hungry pools sucked and slopped and sucked. A fat black boulder hung across a pool and beneath it there it hung, and stretched its legs and arms, you saw it first, so orange, bright, beautiful, singular, its dripping white dots. It clung to the black rock it commanded, and how the water slapped it against its rock while far away the sea receded. The starfish did not threaten like the bones for being dead, it threatened for being so awake, like a child’s shout in the dead of night.
The body warmth they transmit. Are we the same? Leech, are we? Leech stretches, answers, bats, pushes, pretends, consults, flatters, stoops, checks, poses, approaches, salutes, touches, examines, indicates, grips, murmurs, gazes, trembles, shakes, occurs, smiles, faintly, so very faintly, says, Open your… the warmth?… open your eyes, open your eyes.
Is it true? I lie in the dark… it is true, I think it is over. She sleeps, there was no end, the suspension came unnoticed like sleep itself. Yes, the ancient to and fro rocked her to sleep, and in sleep she drew me to her side and placed her leg over mine. The dark grows blue and gray and I feel on my temple, beneath her breast, the ancient tread of her heart to and fro.
Psychopolis
Mary worked in and part-owned a feminist bookstore in Venice. I met her there lunchtime on my second day in Los Angeles. That same evening we were lovers, and not so long after that, friends. The following Friday I chained her by the foot to my bed for the whole weekend. It was, she explained to me, something she “had to go into to come out of.” I remember her extracting (later, in a crowded bar) my solemn promise that I would not listen if she demanded to be set free. Anxious to please my new friend, I bought a fine chain and diminutive padlock. With brass screws I secured a steel ring to the wooden base of the bed and all was set. Within hours she was insisting on her freedom, and though a little confused I got out of bed, showered, dressed, put on my carpet slippers and brought her a large frying pan to urinate in. She tried on a firm, sensible voice.