Achaemenid Millions

 

The Achaemenid Billion

The New Year makes such a hubub about getting here, “oh the traffic, the weather,” and then rushes right in as if he owns the place. The streets, wet. The lights, dim. My feelings, well, my god they feel hurt. I want to draw in with the short days, curl up and weep, though I am conditioned against it. How are you?

Is asking too little, too late? A new year: think of it as he first chance we've had. Think of it as a story, only, I was hoping that this year you could tell the story, the story of my life, and this time make it make sense?

After finding a book in a box it occurs to me that I’ve been here for eighteen months and haven't got anything tangible to show for it.  My boxes only came out of storage mid-October, filled to bursting with drafts and notes, books and correspondence, a few pictures. I spent a series of long afternoons unpacking and sorting into the new (used) file cabinet that I bought at the thrift store after reading an article in the Times about how millenials don't know anything about file cabinets and I finally finished today, a full three shelves, A-F, G-L, and M-Z devoted to completions, and a further two to salvageable drafts and notes and the rest bound for the bin atop the bags of rumpled wrappings and a few fruitcake crumbles.  Then, there at the bottom of the last box, Momigliano.

“You can leave. You can go without me you know.”

It's five-thirty by my watch and my watch is right. These moments are best handled smoothly and delicately. “What?”

She marches over and stands braced in the doorframe, her cold hands the color of fish innards, her posture indicating a center a gravity vasillating precipitously out of my orbit. Her stare does it's best Oscar-nominated hostage situation close-up and then she stomps back to her room saying “you are absolutely fucking contemptible.”

“What?”

“Abs... o-fucking.... lutely ….. con... tempt.... ible!”

In November of 2014 I met a girl, Kelly, (friend, reader, beware the relationship that starts nearest the holidays) We went out twice, went to each other's year-end holiday parties at work, texted through Christmas Day and on New  Years' she came back to my place, it was this whole party that I had, and we danced around the living room and drank champagne and at midnight we went up to the roof dizzy and watched fireworks at the count of 10 and then held each other, shivering as the firmament of stars swelled back into view behind the explosive smoke and feeling flummoxed, flawed and final we realized that we were unable to continue because that was the end of it, there was no burden or obligation to continue, and to have done so would have been a ludicrous folly, we hugged in the stairwell, watching our breath clouds dissipate, and I got her an Uber home.

Why am I telling you this?

Because it doesn't usually work this smoothly.  We don't know that we don't know when it's curtains, and the marking of a new year can serve to help us break from the mold and be truer to ourselves, or, lacking that, our relationships.  Throughout the gelid, isolating month of January I often think, with an involuntary tear, of friends far away, even and especially those just a few miles proximate.

“How do we even know these people?”

She is trying to figure out how well to dress. I peer around the corner and see her in the bra and panties, applying deodorant, make-up.  Given the right light or pheromonic cocktail, on a kind of mammalian level, everyone’s body is beautiful, but also, on a much baser more bacterial level, everyone’s body is also disgusting.

“Ed is my friend Paul's brother, from work, and his wife Susan we met at the thing this spring.”

Silence. I am already dressed, perusing the year's best photographs in the National Geographic. I savor a thoughtful silence like she craves thoughtless noise.

“What thing?”

I try to remember the name. I know we had this exact conversation yesterday but to point that out would be asking for trouble.

Momigliano's thesis regarded the ancient Greeks and their failure to engage with their neighbors linguistically. Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Coptic, they not only did not bother to learn, happy to maintain their prejudice for Greek culture, but they often relied on false or erroneous understandings that led to thwarted military or political ambitions which would have been easily remedied.

I understand, a little too well.  Our neighbor, for most of this year, has felt the need to set off commercial grade fireworks, in a suburban residential area, long after midnight, and days proximate to major holidays, thus superceding any of our or our dogs needs for sleep.  After a day to simmer my tension I went out on for a little investigation on Monday, and, if my interlocutor is the honest-man I take him for, it turns out whomever is setting off the illegal fireworks is doing so from a vacant lot behind the (no longer) suspected neighbor's property.  When I asked what the deal is he says that that guy says that he's shooting them at the “drones that follow him” and apparently the “CIA sent them.”  Hard to rationalize with a man such as this.

It gives one pause.

I'm tired, something about the shorter days makes me introspective, and when I am introspective on long dark nights I get sleepy.  What is this even about? There's this darkness that resides behind my warm eyes and I can sense the cold soil wanting to wrap itself around me.  Do you ever stop and consider how little time we have left? What do we have to show for ourselves, for our time here? The transition was a little too smooth from young virile promise to calloused hands seized within the grip of poverty. I can't help but speculate that noble works have been wrenched from me by a daily churn for bread, and when quick stomachs empty and old backs ache, and we tire, those monumental thoughts as Sissman said, are the “great august canvases, now locked away.”  Having spent so much time rushing toward life only to find ourselves rushing away from it what can we do?  This corporate age rotates on a news cycle and there isn't any time to reflect, to feel, to respond.  There's just time enough to fear, and then move on to the New Thing.  We haven't evolved for this, this big empty life leading steadily, one CAPTCHA at a time, to a big empty afterlife.

I checked the clock on the dash, 7:25. She hopped down the steps in her heels and got in the passenger side. ‘Oh . . . shit,’ she said, and then she hopped back over to the doorway and disappeared again.

When I first moved in, and before that even, when I'd come to visit, I’d set up in the sun-room, with a beer or a soda to watch the evenings fall. A small, sunny-room with an old wooden desk, just eyeing the shadows out there to the east and the fiery oranges turning to purples in the west. In the summer you can hear the traffic sounds but it's never busy, even when it builds for the rush, I'd revel in royal respite, and if she was still at work I'd wait until she'd arrive, hair frizzled from the ride, wheezing slightly from the walk up from the corner. Sometimes if there was still enough light, and it wasn't rainy, and she wasn't too tired, we'd walk together to the park, holding hands. There we could rehearse our bird watching for that trip to the lake we've been talking about forever, delight in the debonair dogs, I would talk about growing up on the farm, playing in a vast country.  She liked to hear about me when I was small. On days where she was too tired, or it was rainy, or it was dark I'd hear her jangle the keys, hang up her purse clutched tightly under one arm, and on Fridays, set down the bottle which she'd gripped by the neck from the corner store, still wrapped tightly in its striped plastic bag.

I have to be careful. Lately I find she'll shout something I can't hear so I ask 'what?' in my normal voice, demonstrating my disdain for loud meaningless noises, and she repeats the same thing in the exact same tone and at the exact same volume making it equally as impossible to understand as the first time.  When she starts to talk to me and I'm not in the same room I find it best to get up, no matter what I am doing, and go to her, rather than expect her to bring her query to me.  This changes the medium, but I still have to be careful, because my snarky responses to her innocuous questions betray a deep and derisive disdain, often painting me more antipathic than I intend to present myself. One should always react to the words, not the tone, with the words, and not with a tone.

“Did you check the address?”

“Yes.” A technically correct but functionally useless response because she's not asking me if I know where we are going she's telling me she's nervous that it's taking so long to get there and we'll be late, and judged. It's 8:45 and we are slowly wending up and down a neighborhood across town with which neither of us have any familiarity in the daylight, let alone in the pitch dark.

“And you're sure it's this street?” When I find the house, and I'm sure it is the house, it must be, all the lights are off, street parking is readily available, “I thought you said it was a big party,” she quavers, so I offer to get out and check.

There on the door, a hand-written apology :

PARTY CANCELLED
COVID SUX
BE SAFE
HNY

Unlike their Greek forebears, turn the history books forward a few pages and the Romans had learned to not only read but think in Greek, and they used this knowledge to both advance Hellenistic conquest and consolidate Italy. Momigliano says that they also took time to learn about Parthians, Jews, and Celts, conquering the latter two and maintaining detente with the former.

Climbing the stairs at home at about 10, I untucked my linen shirt, feeling sweaty from the car ride, and, I confess, I flushed, watching the nice way her curves ascended the steps, her still- damp hair already starting to flatten out, her arms, coming out of the jacket, mmm. Sometimes it is a strange liberating relief to be home. Another day's bitter ending betrayed by lasciviousness. Happy New Year.

Today she stuck her head in while I was knee deep in paper-sorting.

“Hello,” she said, “what's all this?”

“Just detritus. I'm sorting things.” I stood up and took the trash out. She was still there when I came back, she had her gym clothes on, her mouth slightly open, mulling.

“Are you going to leave it like this?”

“No, I'm just puttering. I'll get it all up.”

“You should open a window in here.”

“I did, but it was too cold. You can open it, if you'd like.”

She high-stepped around me to permit in a bit of fresh air, but realizing it was cold she closed the window again and that's when she picked up the last box and leafed through the sheafs. One could ignore this, permit it, object. I, instead, inquired, “anything good?”

“I’m not really allowed an opinion, am I?” she said.

“Of course you are.”

“Allowed, okay, but my opinion’s worthless.”

“I never said that.”

“No. You're right. You didn't But you don't listen to what I say.”

“You don't tell me anything about them. What do you think of my stories?”

“Honestly?” she smirked, “I think they're all lousy.”    We both laughed. She reached into the box and found the Momigliano there in the bottom.

Thing is, there's a reference in there to the Achaemenid Empire, no footnote though, so I had to look it up. Turns out the Achaemenid was around for several hundred years, at least as long as the United States, and it encompassed a populace of some thirty million people, and I'd never heard of it. If those Achaemenid millions can go forgotten...

I got up and went to the kitchen to wash my hands, getting all the dust out from under my nails. Then I got us some drinks and we sat together in the sun-room, me in the chair, and she on my lap. The sun didn't ever really come out today, but we watched it set beneath the heavy clouds anyway, just kind of dawdling in the atrium of this new year while it decides whether or not to invite us in.

I clasped my hands around her waist. “ You smell nice,” I said.