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.
Labels: cold compressofloss, Darkweb of Loss, Debut Novel, fight offstage, Four A.M., Hegel as puppy, HR of Loss, inventory of loss, Kate Ofloss, mechanism of loss, Morning, philosophy of loss, PR of Loss
