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They have come, early, to a river without a bridge.
Scuttle down the sides the papers fly from their
pockets in the race to a cool water. The banks are
muddy but one of them has swam here before, come
through the woods. That one says he would take him to
a small fort on an island deep in the woods where did
he know? there's a river. He didn't know and the
creek's ravine is satisfying and secret.
He has come here in a dream though that is a mistake,
it happening before so it is a memory but so fuzzed as
to make the friend this or that one perhaps not him or
him and the creek is a river is a small lake never big
and always hidden in thickets or groves and always a
wood deep and delicious in the size of memory (though
the road was not far).
A certain memory then, of objects that substantiate
his movements, these memories this nostalgia
incorporates into this doing of this exact moment. It
is this drumsong and this leather engraving on a belt,
this hat and this ravine.
After his divorce, he moves to Ohio, a small town. Now
it is late August in a mild summer. September will
begin soon, so will the cool season and boys come to
the field, play soccer while the light remains.
The lake. Several days will pass there. In his bag,
several sheets of paper. Each day in late summer in
dead calm but in evening sun, he folds a boat. Blank
pages all, each a letter. The drum marches distantly.
The accord set for whatever peace from battle. He
imagines brightly clothed soldiers, an American war,
thick and stiff clothing. Fields of battle shift and
the paper boats can be let go in swift if not precise
formation. Ringing the football field, the band's
march. Time passes.
Say this: was there some moment past in a rose bush he
as a small child small enough to travel in and under
this bush and meet with a boy, this among secrets.
Now, sitting at the lake, he thinks about what he has
done. One month before school begins where he has been
hired as a teacher. He has moved to a house. His
savings are ample, there is a smelly part of town. He
rents an entire house there.
He remembers also someone older on a celebratory day
on a hill poke holes in a tin can and place blue hot
coals inside, whirling it round on a string and
whooping whooping circled by light. He once played in
a ravine. Someone once gave him a hat; he speaks this
language and knows these words in another and these in
another and he writes with this one so he knows at
least that that he hears himself repeating tin can
poked with holes tin can poked with holes tin can tin
can tincan tincan tincan tincan tincan almost gone
tincantincantincantincan almost gone but turning away
from it, eyes closed to feel the wind off the lake, he
finds laughing that there it is ready to bite again,
tin can.
So he, beside the lake, with a preoccupation, boyish
admitted, of paper boats. He recognizes that he is
purposely creating drama and its accompanying
landscape to relieve. The picture wakes him to the
relevant fact. He has recreated, no-re-envisioned,
heroically -- a child playing alone. As the thought
finishes, the theater lights fade and he is again
beside the lake.
He feels a panic as he thinks about his new job. As he
eases out of it. She would have approved. A productive
waiting she would have called it.
His wife. The words beat twice, are the snares of the
marching band. Da dum, da dum, da dum.
She sent him letters, their envelopes containing blank
pages. He has been thinking about her.
And the other? Which one was it. Oh yes the dear
friend. Who came and we sang, what did we sing. Was it
that one. Oh yes it was him. Oh yes the dear friend.
When we sang. Which one. And the song. Which.
It must have been his birthday. You had arranged a
party for he was your friend and it was his birthday.
But they left the crowd because you and he could set
up a rosebush, large and filling out the street with a
strong flush of alcohol and there was the sun, not
set, and a spring day and there was talk. So with
thoughts, you think, there is not this man or that but
him once. Even now you can summon the warm face, the
blood thick in the face from the drinking, your
forehead and his meet and a shout throated and
released. The stone walls and bricks of the street
clear and empty, a chamber for his voice for his cry
of life. Oh deep sound. Put your hand to your face,
his forehead once there, so it is, you confess, not
this, that, but this, and that is memory, fear living
there.
There is the event of them in several habits of
conversation. At his house or his house, at the
restaurant, at the bar. And the memory arises of those
(that) occasions (occasion): Communion Communication
Fraternity. The words sway in his mind and as he
forces the remembering, he thinks those Historian
words, smoothing fact into theory. When it was the two
of them, sitting, discrete.
School begins but he is not there, asleep in front of
the class, a voice settling on the shelves and heads,
an addition to the room's dust and light. A friend
whom he saw in the past. For a while, daily.
He is the greedy horse starving between two bags of
oats, choosing between paradoxes, mind faltering to
know if one empty the other wise. In his brain, the
friend and his wife, standing equally on two opposing
lobes, asking of him.
After school he walks past the lake to his home. There
is a letter in the mailbox, another letter from his
wife so she is still there, she has found him and is
living somewhere new again, so he takes the time to
reply, thinking maybe then he can rise from his chair.
It is only an accident, however, and the chair fits
just as well. He knows the sadness of the unraveling,
which not bitter, after all, begun some years ago, but
still the unraveling shows like the dust on the mirror
shelf. What to do with it, too gone for repair though
repair was cheap in every purchase save the doing.
The children ask him questions, it is difficult for
him to respond. Somehow the unlawed, the criminals of
Chester A. Garfield Public High school, acted with
mercy in the classroom of what everyone knew, adult
and child alike, to be an imitation.
Criminals of a type, flush they both had been in the
face, when they found the briar patch, a thorny
creature young and not thick but thick enough for the
hiding of them, had arisen in a lot they had never
seen. Examining it, they went under, the other
leading, tearing at the ground with their fingers
hoping to get to the center. It was there that they
did and hid their criminal acts: he had taken a bottle
of his father's whisky there, so their drinking
partnership was early established, and he had brought
cheese and bread.
They started early on a Saturday and were sick by ten
in the morning. They dug holes in the earth for their
vomit, and were scared of dying and whipping both so
sat there eating the cheese sandwiches. Their minds
were soft and liquid, the branches netted the sky
above them, he thought he wouldn't mind the dying and
someday he might bring a girl here and do the same and
perhaps that was what love was and sobering by evening
went home to a scolding, of course, triumphant.
Was it him, truly, had they traveled away together, to
the city together, or was it a semblance of him that
he had later met in the city and put the two together
as they served the same purpose. This man or that
woman, accidents and coincidence were the substance of
his memories so what could those words possibly mean?
That his dreams had objects which he juggled and
slapping these objects into his palm and hurling them
without caution into the air, and he sat in his chair
studying at a distance the picture of this violent
juggler and watched the violence below nonetheless
spring into perfect arcs of motion above, listless
sitting watching.
And when he had gone away to another city, finally to
another language and another country, how he had met
his wife. And she was a coincidence also, yet he
thought that their combat fit his ideas of marriage.
They had stood at a museum in St. Petersburg and
shivered and they had both turned, he from an old way
that he had forgotten, and she in some-wonderful he
had thought at the time-auguring of his action and
each pantomimed the other so that they both turned and
plugged a nostril with a finger and voided mucus onto
the snow. He stood facing her and behind them both,
two snot blobs in the snow.
In San Francisco, he is in a hotel bed with his wife.
He thinks that he is hungry as they had traveled the
whole day to get here and only had one cup of coffee,
too excited or busy to have eaten. Well, the truth was
that circumstances had mismanaged his stomach. They
had gotten up, had the cup of coffee and there met the
man who was going to Las Vegas, half the way, right
that moment. So off they went and the same happened in
Las Vegas so now here they were, she tired and happy,
he anxious and hungry and happy.
Preparing for bed, a partial light from the street
lamp. The window open, the room is filled with a
coolness. His clothes are not twisted and his sheets
are straight. He is wearing cotton sweat pants and a
t-shirt and his mind is blank.
He has returned. An evening in fall he searches
through a wood and finds a river, now with a bridge.
He carefully walks down the embankment, making sure
nothing in his pockets comes unburied and stands at
the creek.
He felt conscious of taking the time after his
divorce, the sadness, picking that up like a roll of
dough and stretching it. He knew he did so with a
penitent's selfishness, the infirm pleasure that came
after the heart broke, reviewing the breaking.
Then after a while, it wasn't even the breaking, but
the sound of the action that he followed out, rode
upon to seek other similarities.
Going to sleep he notices the lamp light of this room
is almost the exact color of this other lamp light in
this other room, and he sickens with sadness and
desire to go to this other room with this other light.
In his dreams he goes there to find it is the same
room and wishes to wake to regain the former but it is
by then day and the night light and wall, so
inconsistent their ellipse of movement and so precise
his memory of color, never repeat.
*
The house is mostly clean, he is sitting in his
armchair watching the water evaporate off the floor in
front of him, where he has just mopped.
There are dreams he feels he must acknowledge,
problems whose resolutions are impossible yet he
cannot help dwelling on them. A hope says he just may
yet. Is that what it is? he wonders. A hope for an
end, or perhaps just a morbid fascination at the
structure without foundation, still standing. Each
limb cantilevering another and that in turn, another,
so that it stands on nothing but itself, an intricate
flower which defying gravity he rips apart to find
only an empty center.
There is the smell present, perhaps lingering from the
mop, of ammonia and mildew, outrageously together.
Perhaps in his imaginings, in his mental talking and
drawing of various shapes and constructions to
describe his problem, he is creating not models and
maps, but other problems, and so, stepping back to see
his progress, realizes all his efforts are simply
increasing the empty space which the answers would,
had there been any, occupy.
He had found the mop, grey dust colored, in the
garage. He had to clean the mop first before he could
use it and scrubbed it with bleach and soap.
Would a surgery of all that seemed unnecessary be
appropriate? If he pulled apart these constructions
and tried to only use what was crucibled down as
vital, the specific circumstances and situations,
stripped of all varnish and insight, would that
somehow tell him Why? But what was necessary? It was
another problem, also.
He had let the mophead just sit in bleach and water
while he went around the house and swept. First, he
swept, leaving little piles of pennies and dust
throughout the house.
If he divided all his constructions apart from each
other, cut and halved where the joints seemed weakest
so they were put in separate containers, and then
regimented his time and space to visit and explore one
per a set duration, was that the answer? Or was it
only, again, an artificial engineering that would, if
satisfying, do so falsely, from an incorrect belief in
architecture to conquer space.
After he was done sweeping, he got out the dustpan and
went through the house hunting for his piles. Sweeping
them into the dustpan when he found them.
And even now, wasn't the abstraction of it the final
complicity in failure. Shouldn't he name things? His
wife, for example. His marriage, his friendship. The
two losses. Or his house, this town, his armchair, the
lake which he sat beside. His job, the children, his
colleagues, the desks, chairs, school.
Finally he went back to check on his mop. It was still
grey. Perhaps cleaner but he couldn't tell. He
prepared a bucket of soapy water.
But he had thought this way before, perhaps he had
returned to it, perhaps he would leave and do so
again, but there was a progress. My thinking is not a
circle, he thought to himself, there is not a line but
there is a progress through some substance. At some
resting points between the murkiness there seemed
vibrations or pockets of (accidental?) harmonies and
he was either wasting or killing time in between or
progressing towards, or, that the pocket was somehow
also the murkiness in between?
Now, went through the house mopping. Occasionally
coming across a dustpile that he had overlooked.
Cursed, went back for the pan to sweep it away.
He is the greedy horse struggling between paradoxes,
questioning if one empty the other wise. Perhaps he
was, after all, thinking a circle, and only widening
the radius until large enough it seemed a line, so
distant finally in returns that he forgets, upon
arrival, that each is not a new destination and only
left: a faint nagging.
The last room, he uses the water generously. He
purposely mops himself into the corner where his
armchair is. Sat and smoked a cigarette, waiting for
the floor to dry.
A useless way of thinking, he knows. Yet so much time
is spent falling back into it. He will make his way in
time, he has said so before, but there was a Faith,
ascended to in powerlessness, that he was on the verge
of reaching for. Clutching? He remembers coming onto
this question, realizing the oldness of it, the wisdom
in keeping silent about it, but also, talking to him
about it.
It was then that he caught the smell. A smell of light
rotting, fungus. Maybe it was the mop. Ammonia and
mildew, the smell reminded him of cafeterias and
apartment building foyers.
The friend gently saying, Yes it is true, but I am
here, you see. And I am also, he had replied. And the
joy in the saying, not frail and not a cold centered
joke. There. was. that. But what of it? In the
religiousness of his thinking, in its very inception
there was also a heresy that it was not enough, so
that it was a equally a descent.
The floor was dry. He took the bucket of water and set
it out in the backyard. He made plans. Next weekend
the garage. The weekend after that, the back yard.
So silence then was an option, but also as was bold
faced lying. He knew it wasn't as bold as it seemed
nor silence as it seemed, that its surface held as
much shape as a balloon, pressured by air.
He showers. Stepping out of the bathroom, seeing the
light a little brighter off the floors, he allowed
himself a satisfied feeling.
There were other ways also, and he felt the need to
leave the house, to change the problems from shapes
and talking to muscles and ridges and water. He wanted
to walk to the lake, or perhaps to the woods again
where a small ravine carried a creek, drawing a shaky
line through the woods. He wanted to be there now,
immediately, that perhaps if he was, it almost felt,
then there would be a solution.
He walked through the house in his towel, dripping,
going upstairs to his bedroom, also, peeking into
other rooms. A luxury of space in the country he had
afforded a house much too big for one person so that
there were rooms completely empty of furniture. Just,
now clean floors and sunlight coming through undraped
windows.
He grabs clothes quickly. He may still fall to it
willingly, not helpless. Even now he knows a
destination, a fiction created from the abstraction of
a pulp plot made literal wherein he will 'solve' his
'problem'.
He puts on pants, slips socks and tennis shoes on his
feet, puts a T-shirt over his still wet hair, the
water darkening it in streaks. He leaves the house in
a quick walk through the cemented road now turning to
dirt, rising over a low hill. He begins to trot, jog
and then a full run to the lake.
He pauses to pant by the lake. He is holding the not
small fat around his belly, wondering how long it has
been in his adult life since he's actually run, even a
jog, much less a full sprint. His head looks up from
between his legs to the lake, which is still and
brown, and his eye sees a perfect skipping stone.
Holds the stone in his fingers, rubs his thumb over
its round eroded surface. Fakes a throw, practicing.
He wants to see it skip at least four times, maybe
even if he threw it just right it would make the other
side of the lake. Its beauty unique, here, where the
rocks are either crunched dirt or shale that brittles
and is too light to be thrown with any satisfaction. A
good weight in his hands, a perfect skipping stone.
He envisions the skips on the still lake. Every skip
causing noticeable ripples, several ripples from
several points along a line. He pulls back and
launches with a good flick of the wrist. It kerploops
directly into the water without a skip, a single
low-octaved splash.
Actually turns around to see if anyone saw him. The
ripples from his one splash are spreading through the
water and it seems to Fog like the group silence after
something embarrassing said. He even laughs aloud a
little. Picks up a cattail and strips it, letting its
cotton dirtiness litter the side of the lake. He moves
on topping another hill, going down, losing sight of
the lake.
The things were changing color and shape, the problems
were rearranging to account for the air, now outside
his house. Did he really carry them this way? like
some various organisms in a petri dish, microscopic
yet infinitely complex, reacting to light and action,
stimuli, so that they reshaped and chameleoned to
however he could look at them, containing multiple and
overlapping properties which, like the fable of the
equation, grew or shrunk by his observation in
certainty and uncertainty.
Walking, he continues over some more dirt roads, cuts
through someone's lawn, now, at the wood's edge. The
short time at the lake was to gather his thoughts, he
thinks, before he rushed into it. The speed was
something he was contriving, allowing his deeper
levels prepare the trick for himself to witness, be
surprised at.
Various trees covered the steep incline down to the
creek. He started down, soon more fast and faster.
Gravity was helping him down, pushing him actually, so
that he was taking larger and larger uncontrolled
steps, now beginning to fall, his legs staggering
barely in time to keep him upright. He remembered
games at night played in a pine wood, hunt and prey
games where you crouched behind tree shadows and then
sprinted through the woods over a floor of needles
silent and swift with your arms in front of face for
always the fear of being clotheslined, hung to death
or battered by a low hanging branch.
So that now he's doing the same, struggling to keep
his legs below him and his feet crashing through the
kindling twigs below but with his hands up pushing
through the small branches that whipped at his upper
body, unable to avoid them and hoping no force awaited
greater than his own gravity, to stop him with a
sickening crack.
He is wondering how long could this possibly sustain,
this gauntlet of branches and this vertical
feet-to-ground but airy falling, when he sees the
narrow clearing ahead which is where the creek is. His
mind switches instantly to wondering how long it will
last to wondering if he will be able to stop in time.
It is a shallow creek but with a rocky loose bottom
and if he doesn't regain control he sees himself
finally falling, really falling in his abrupt entrance
into the creek. His feet will splash, making the water
opaque enough to not see the relief of the rocks below
and, unbalanced, he will fall hard and finally
horizontal, into the water.
But the incline gentles at its bottom and though the
ground of loose dirt and twigs slip beneath him, he
efforts to make his steps smaller and smaller, more
control with each touch to the ground, so he finally
stops one sneaker dry on the bank and the other sunk
in water. He wades through it to the other side.
The other side of the creek is an even steeper
incline, a craggy rise directly up so that he realizes
in a way he had never as a child, that the creek must
have been once a true river, cutting away this valley,
mellowing in time or perhaps wounded up river, by
damming, as the town grew.
There is a way up the other side he knows. An
indentation of stone steps into the rise a half a mile
to his right. But he wants to be at the top this way,
so finds a nook with his now muddied tennis shoe. It
is a true climb of about four stories. He puts a hand
into another small jutting, knowing he is weary
already and unsure if he can actually do it.
There are crevices and footholds that make the first
five or six feet seem possible. This is maybe what
makes him do it. The beginning of the climb is
understandable, foreseeable, and he knows what his
first several moves will be. He has them already
envisioned when he reaches up and pulls himself off
the ground, beginning.
The next steps happen easily enough, like a cat up a
tree. He briefly notes that he hasn't seen anyone
since he's left the house. That he lives alone. That
it is a short but formidable uphill climb back out of
the woods. That if he fell and was hurt in any way no
one would look for him until he was missed, at work.
Notes this briefly.
He is now past the point of his initial envisioning.
His weight is on his left foot and he is scanning
upwards generally, left and right, for the next
handhold. It feels much steeper than when he had
begun. He is not yet scared because he knows if he
must he could reverse the steps, retreat back down.
Then a small swing onto a short ledge and a few quick
easier steps up. He is about nine feet up now and
pauses as he can't see where to put his right foot.
Now, he knows he cannot go back down and that some
foothold or crevice back in the immediate past
functioned as a valve, allowing him through but would
not allow him back again. Fear is held in stasis for a
few moments longer.
He is resting on one foot, the other not quite
placeable anywhere. The slope enough so that he can
lean his body into it with some comfort and stability.
He measures that there is an equal distance up as
there is down. He decided to continue and once again
looks up, sees another handhold and reaches across his
body to hold firmly onto this jutting. So that his
weight now is balanced on two separate parts of the
cliff: half on one foot and half on this other hand
from which he is hanging.
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