Purple chrysanthemums appear in my water glass, books on my table, television sets. Soon they move out the next table to replace it with a washer and dryer; after the showers are installed I never have to leave. Still I forget you. Still I see others. A man with long yellow hair tied back with a string shares my table for weeks; he shares my ability to go without sleep, or else he’s the only one I know who can drink as much coffee as me. He makes tiny objects so small one needs a microscope to see them, but his hands are like laser beams and he can see without one, so one learns his trick and one’s own eyes become microscopes too. Tiny sections of the table become very large, magnified a thousand times, until one can see them, the things he makes: intricate boxes full of electronic parts and food for the soul. They are beautiful, they are art.
Then, slowly, I begin to remember. I don’t remember what it is I have forgotten, just a nagging sensation in the thighs. I stare at a man in the phone booth, his hand cupped around the receiver. Is it you? But the question is meaningless, because I have forgotten who you are supposed to be, what it is you do, only (and until recently I didn’t know even this) that once you existed; now you do again. The blond man has moved on, but yet another stranger, this time with short dark hair, comes in and piles his knapsack on the floor under my table. He goes to the bathroom and I get up to do his laundry; in the pockets of his jeans I find maps, maps and names.
For the first time in three years I leave the diner. I call a number I found in the stranger’s pocket, on the same page as a map of a bridge. A woman answers, her voice breezy and sincere. Suddenly I know where she lives; it is a house I once stayed in with you. She didn’t live there then. There were others; we didn’t know them well. We’d sit around the kitchen table reading science fiction books (everyone in that house read science fiction), comparing plots and styles of writing, bitching about the price of cigarettes, the price of time. Whenever I was with you, it was always someone else’s kitchen. In this memory which is not a real one but one invented by the telephone wires, one which cannot exist independently of them, you are going away somewhere, and I am sad. Through the smoke of the cooking, the cigarettes, the people, you smile the smile of a brother and I am comforted.
“I’ll be back,” you say.
But you weren’t. In that life you never came back. Or I waited for you in the wrong place, on the wrong bridge. When I hang up the phone I am released from the invented life, the life that never happened except in the electronic part of memory that exists because of telephones and computers, but I am still left with the nagging suspicion that you are real, that somewhere I will find a real memory of you. So I go to the bridge. It snows; I wait for you. I do not know if this is the right bridge, but it is the only bridge I know.
You died in the fire. But that was in another city, and you and me both had different names then. Maybe in this city I have moved to, this emerald green city below the border, you will have a new name, one that doesn’t burn so easily. Maybe in this city we will meet on the bridge. They do not know, those artists, that this freedom I have is not mine. They do not know I have it only because of you.
I remember how I used to visit you in the hospital and you would tell me you wished for drugs and shock treatments, how it would make you better, because then you could no longer think and see and feel. “But that would mean being stupid,” I said, and you said it would be better. “But that would mean happiness was only possible if you were stupid,” and again you said it would be better.
Sometimes it is as though all of love died with you in that fire. I couldn’t bear it, so I tried to escape, hoping even the memory of you could disappear in this fog. And now it begins to be not you I mourn, but someone else whose name I can never place, someone whose loss I mourn more than all the others, someone whom my human lovers can only approximate, be representations of.
Castoroides
1) IN MY VILLAGE the swollen creek lapped at the edge of the sidewalk. Your young friend and I squatted there, dipping our fingers in. It wasn’t just plain water, lapping over the edge of the sidewalk; it contained secrets. The secret of where you were. The secret of why we missed you. Your friend and I dipped our fingers in and sucked off the secrets one at a time. Then I put my fingers in your friend’s mouth and he put his in mine, and we sucked each other’s secrets. Both my secrets and his secrets were about you. The secret of who you are. The secret of how to get you back. When we were done doing that I told him to go inside and iron your lace collars.
2) What with no ironing to do I swept the stairs from top to bottom and bottom to top. I went back into the bathroom and looked at the untouched stack of wrinkled white collars, at the iron, at the tiles on which you had painted animals. You and your friend and I used to keep busy painting broken dishes with birds and flowers, creating not fake antiquities but relics from a time not yet. “I’m not a good person,” I remember telling you, “I’m a bad person with healing powers.”
3) This story connects to all the other stories. Am I ready to finish it now? You had already been gone for a long time before I painted the stars. I could have told a different story. I could have picked a different staircase to follow down from the freshly painted stars. Out of this story. I could have sat at the sewing machine today and sewn words. I am making a yellow quilt. It is hard work and time consuming. If only I could type on my sewing machine. The sun faded the curtains in streaks. I take them down and cut them into squares. The soft white stripes, irregularly shaped, were made by the sun. I lay these stripes crosswise to one another. I affix things to the squares. My mother’s face. Transparent silk. Coyotes. Pine trees. The great grey owls. Your face.
4) We are the moment that we need. This time it’s easier to repaint the stairs than to try and clean them yet again. Today I even abandoned my quilt and went outside to remind your friend he promised he’d help with your ironing but he was already gone, his big flat tail thwacking the water loudly to announce his submergence. Just before he dove I saw he wore one of your white lace collars. Underwater it wouldn’t matter whether they were ironed or not.
One Day I’m Gonna Give Up the Blues for Good
LITTLE DAVIS IS DEAD, his body dragged out of the river this dawn. He was murdered, his light snapped out by some jalloo who couldn’t let him live for not giving it all. Jalloo. It’s a word that means client, in our game. Benji made it up one night when she was drunk and high, and it stuck.
Me and Little worked together, down in the Clinic on River Street. The Clinic. To cure what ails you. Whatever it may be. Cure the blues with The Blues, I say. Clinic is the only place you can get the stuff. Little only started working here after he got his habit. Most people, it’s where we got ours. But not poor Little. He had me to fuck him up.
Royally.
I come in to work tonight, even though Frankie tells me to stay home. I come in to sit in this chair, soft and grey and comfortable. I come in to look out this window, out onto the street, where I keep hoping I’ll see Little dance around the corner, swing into the big glass doors to start shift. But I know he won’t.
Because he’s dead.
Outside, the blue CLINIC sign blinks off and on, its reflection flashing in the puddles below. The Clinic.