a homecoming. Fighting writing my death,
persistent oxymoron. Perpetrator. Victim.
Terror to fight terror. Fire or an argument with
fire. Firefight. Spitfire. Lawless, Eliot Ness,
childhood. Fighting against or for terror, lies
in mouth. Can’t leave home without it. Get a
horse instead.
People expected the unexpected, unnatural and natural disasters, a jet crashing in the ocean, all lost, hurricanes beating down towns, all lost, bombs doing their dirty work, lives lost and shattered, houses destroyed, and attentive listeners needed to know, instantly, for a sense of control or protection, and for the inevitable shock of recognition: I’m still alive.
The baker’s son Joey, dressed in white like a surgeon, the skin on his florid cheeks dusted with flour, asked him what he wanted, then bantered with him as he always did.
— Sun, Clay, ever see it? You’re pasty-faced.
— You’re flour-faced. I want a sourdough loaf, and the recipe.
— Forget about it, Joey the baker’s son said. Family secret for five generations.
— I’ll get it.
— You’re just like your mother, Joey said.
His mother had played the violin, and when he couldn’t sleep at night, to quiet him after a bad dream, she’d stand in the doorway to his bedroom and pluck each string with adoring concentration. A lullaby, maybe, some song that consoled him for having to leave consciousness at all. He was attached to her concentration, like the strings to her instrument, and this specific image of her, mother violinist bent and absorbed, resisted passing time’s arbitrariness, its uneven dissipations. Her face, for a long time now, rested only against walls or stood upright on tables in framed photographs, and he scarcely remembered a conversation they had, just a sentence or two.
Here, waiting. Can’t leave home, without a
horse. Get a read on. Long ago, here, a drama
with teeth, reneging, nagging. Cracked plates,
baseball bats, stains on home room floor, same
as before, stains like Shroud of Turin.
Jesus bled, writing death, fighting terror.
He hadn’t moved away from the old neighborhood, waiting for something, teaching English and American literature at the high school he attended, while he grew older in the same place, without stopping time, though he found his illusions encouraged and indemnified by traces of the past, like the indentations in the gym’s floor, and, more than traces, bodies, like the baker’s and the butcher’s, and their children, who would replace them, and stand in their places, in a continuity Clay wouldn’t keep up, even by staying in the neighborhood.
Cornelia believed the cult around the Shroud of Turin demonstrated that people do appreciate abstraction, an image instead of a body, though it wasn’t exactly an abstraction but close enough. Even if the cloth had once rested on a body, theirs was a reverence for an impression, drawn from but not the same as the body — even if the body wasn’t Christ’s, since scientists carbon-dated the cloth much later than his death. The cloth was just matter, material separate from and attached to history.
Not the thing, the stain, palimpsest of pain.
Life served with death a sanction.
Sometimes Joey the baker’s son let him go into the back of the store to watch other white-coated men knead dough, their faces also dusted in white, their concentration, like his mother’s on her violin, complete, and he viewed them as content, absorbed in good work. Their hands knew exactly how much to slap and pound, when to stop — every movement was essential. Then Clay ruminated, the way he always did in the bakery, about being a baker; in the butcher shop, he thought about being a butcher. He wanted to be like Joey, they’d gone to school together. If he were, he’d know simple limits, why an action was right or wrong, because the consequences would be immediate, and as usual he rebuked himself for romanticizing their labor and imagining an idyllic life for, say, the old baker and the baker’s son he’d known since he was a child, with a life better than his, because, he told Cornelia that night, their work was what it was, nothing else, its routine might be comforting, his wasn’t. In the moment, as he watched their hands and smelled baking bread’s inimitable aroma, he also felt that the bakers dwelled, as he did, in fantasy, that it enveloped them daily, and that what they did might be something else for them, too. Joey thought he was funny, but Clay loved the way Joey treated him, he felt Joey appreciated him in ways no one else did.
— The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, Cornelia teased.
— Cut it out, Clay said.
— Your heroes might surprise you someday, she said.
— I’d like that, Clay said.
— I bet you wouldn’t, Cornelia said.
He told her about a distressed woman in the news who had found out she’d been adopted when she was twenty-one, which made sense to her, she was even glad, because she had never felt close to her parents, who were like aliens to her, and then the woman spent years searching for her birth parents. When she was fifty, she found her mother, who’d given her up for adoption because she’d been unmarried and only fifteen. But the mother she unearthed wasn’t the mother she expected or wanted, so the woman was very disappointed. Also, her birth father was disreputable and long dead.
— Do you think people have the right to know? Clay asked.
— A constitutional right, Cornelia said.
— Okay.
— What about the right to privacy?
— Maybe some rights kill others.
If Clay turned violent, deranged, on the street, the cops would subdue and cuff him, take him in, interrogate him, or they might just shoot him on the spot, if he charged them menacingly, resisted them, or appeared to be carrying. The cops waited to arrest him and others from doing things they didn’t know they could do or felt they had to do or did because inside them lurked instinctual monsters. He didn’t know what he had in him, but he knew restraint, and he recognized, as Max Weber wrote early in the twentieth century, that only the state had the right to kill, no one else, and that fact alone defined the state. But where he lived everyone had the right to bear arms, to answer and resist the state’s monopoly on power. That was the original idea, anyway, but if Clay carried a gun, he might use it, because he didn’t know what he had in him.
Better to be dead and buried than frank and honest, his mother had said. His father ghosted their dining room table, his tales gone to the grave with him and now to his wife’s grave also. One night his father hadn’t come home from work the way he always did, Clay was seven, and his mother’s face never regained its usual smile. She smiled, but not the way she once had. When little Clay walked into the butcher shop or the bakery, he felt the white-clothed men looking sympathetically at him, prying into him for feelings he hadn’t yet experienced. The fatherly baker gave him an extra cookie or two, and in school, even on the baseball field, Joey the baker’s son didn’t call him names anymore, even when he struck out. But his mother clutched his little hand more tightly on the streets, and he learned there was something to fear about just being alive. He learned his father was dead, but it didn’t mean much to him, death didn’t then, and soon it became everything.
— It’s why you’re a depressive, Cornelia said. Losing a parent at that age.
— I guess, he said.
— It’s why you hold on to everything.
Clay didn’t throw out much, like matchbooks and coasters from old restaurants and bars that had closed, outdated business cards, and with this ephemera he first kept his father with him. There was dust at the back of his father’s big desk that he let stay there. There was hair in his father’s comb, which had been pushed to the back of the bathroom cabinet, so Clay collected the evidence in an envelope, and wondered later if he should have the DNA tested. What if his father wasn’t his father? Maybe there was someone alive out there for him, a father, but his mother disabused him of the possibility, and played the violin so consolingly that Morpheus himself bothered to carry him off to a better life. Now, scratches on a mahogany table that once nestled close to his father’s side of the bed and his mother’s yellowing music books, her sewing cushion with its needles tidily stuck where she’d pushed them last, marked matter-of-fact episodes and incidents in their lives, when accidents occurred or things happened haphazardly, causing nicks and dents, before death recast them as shrines.