D'Madrugada

 

There's a kind of intractable mystery to four A.M. When you come to greet it fully awake you are one of the few, the proud, the astronauts, for it is alien country. There's dew, for one thing, or frost these days more often than not, the windows are all dark and empty, the streets are motionless. There's a desolation, a destitution, its really something quite inexplicably special. There's a brutal mystery unfolding in an alien tongue there in the last stretch of hours of night. The wild animals, of course, are at their wildest there, hunting, or finishing their hunting, which makes sense, since most of us are about as vulnerable as newborns at this time, even amongst this city's herds of drunks, the ranks still keeping the alcoholic flame burning have thinned considerably by three and that leaves four A.M. til about five-thirty for the ruminating spirits, like me, to leisure about. The disorienting scrum of winter nights resolved through perambulation. Somewhere something wails. The moaning freight of our negative emotions perhaps. No it's a train off east of Lincoln Avenue.

There is a light under their door. One wonders. One knocks. Other wonders appear. See I had that dream again where I buy all the groceries for Thanksgiving only to unload them into the wrong car in the parking lot, and it drives off while I'm standing there with an empty metal shopping cart with an ad for eldercare. Oh yes we are awake, no, no please, standing aside a sweetened smell of secret ripe interiorty, come in.

Do I know them? Yes. Well sort of. There was perpetual sorrow I recall, he fell off the deep end she grabbed him there near by bottom. Paratactic gobblets of moony fruit. Tall chairs. You must just lean into it.A stroke, for one and other tiny tragedies scattered like cold seeds in his memory buried by a warm lifetime of high horse pride. My lifetime, for they are both twice my age. Discomfort, like a sore tooth, uncertainty, she leans in to make me her conspirator. “Coffee, tea, or the green juice?” extra emphasis is on green.

She is tall but not emasculatingly tall, and thin, but weighted gracefully by soft curving concessions to gravity in all the culturally acceptable places. Crowned by an unruly mess of hair, long and sensuously wild, the greying auburn color of a flustered hawk. He is round, he is the earth, he wheels around her and settles into the pocket between the table and the computer where he lives.

He loves her, one can see, because I we are all going to die.

I stutter and bob, not wanting to be a bomb but also not yet quite human this early. “I hope you weren't busy.”

“Why, what difference would it make?” she laughs, her full throated Rabelaisian laugh so unlike my own responses to things which are always delivered behind my mask of haughty New England Brahminism. “Occupied, perhaps.” I correct, amend.

“Preoccupied,” he says, his voice both hoary and bemused.

“We were talking about the potency of different kinds of magic medicine,” she says, sashayed as this topic is into being by their time together on Borneo, she tells me, as if her past was a pronouncement on twitter in all capital letters. My past speaks in small righteous whispers, chastened but still cynically cautious. I note baskets of junk mail on the chairs. “What do you make of this, stories of malignant tumors felled with a sad song sung at the perfect pitch?” Within my the echelon of my usual social strata, people won’t ask awkward questions of people who might answer them.

The old man laughs with his eyes. I can tell that his default mode is happiness, but my cynicism comes roaring up with such a vehemence that I feel conflicted between wanting to get him talking and preferring him self. But also he speaks slowly, choosing words like puzzle pieces or tiles in a mosaic. He doesn’t trust his tongue to categorize sound. And so what emerges is impoverished vocabulary emboldened and enriched by the harnessed energy of life ripped from the precipice of death. Some words come out better than others. “Reciprocity” and says and after a few false starts “Composure.”

And so they converse this way, up and down, back and forth, like morning vespers, hers the oratory call and his the sturdy response.

She has that uncommon ability to make eye contact while speaking, and to show you that she has seen the good there within you, down in your inner recesses where you yourself haven't yet even discovered it yet.

“How are things at home?”

There is no good answer to this and so I add some dark spice to the aging rum of omissions and withdrawals. They know this drink well, for every choice has had its outcome.

“I'm not the man she wants to live there.”

“Why? Can't you just be yourself?”

“No.”

“If I can be myself then you can be yourself.”

“You mean like you?”

“No, not like... well yes, like me I guess.”

“I can't be like you because I am me.”

Insecurities bunched up like so many ill-fitting shirtsleeves. Keep going until we get it right, keep doing it, don't quit. I leave them with their toast and coffee then. The east is a promise and the western sky is still writ with the connect-the-dots of elusive heaven. I am aware that it is artifice, all. Artifice, artifice, artifice blah. I just want to sink my hands into the glob and muck and pull out a damned diamond but the distance between here and that diamond is some vast depth, some insurmountable height. I imagined that taking a morning walk would be like looking down at the mountains from th'bove as if they were flat incumbitions, looking at the city as if it is my self. But I am an whilom, not doomed to conformity nor solidarity but aimless. Or this is not that kind of morning and I am dazed by the slope insistent. Text coming back. Sometimes all we can see is what is only what is possible and not what is.

In my mind it works of course. The contingent and the eternal converge in the sand between her toes, remember, like spilling coffee on the counter, the memory of her favorite hairbrush, the way our mouths would drink each others breath. It's a kind of abandonment, but not the bad kind, the way she let herself bend back sweetly towards this tomb of time and the dripped nectar of life's luscious cravings. I’m not doing enough. There’s not enough done. Or maybe time isn't what I think it is, because what about her time? What am I going to say to her?

Then here I begin, as the sun brushes away the morning clouds and the night stars puff out like snuffed candles into the brightening blue, dark night's silence feeling it's way forward into dawn's crimson flames, the trees all trembling. Now the sun pitching toward me in full. The light slams my heart. It is right, this, where we're going, where we're not yet done.