Mama Willie tells your fortune

Mama Willie tells your fortune


It’s like if you were running hard through the woods, breathing heavy, and then like in a dream it all stops suddenly. Like hitting a wall you didn’t know was there. There’s always one moment when everything gets so still and that’s when things come to me. They just well up in my brain from god knows where and spread out like a blanket. And I say out loud whatever it is that’s come up. Some people call me a fortuneteller. Church people call me a prophet. Mostly because they need me to be. So I don’t disabuse them of that notion.

What would you do if you knew things you shouldn’t know? Or at least people expected you to know them. Wanted you to know. Would you go along with them? Make things up? How easy it is in the name of Truth or the greater good to tweak it just a little. To say, “God told me….” Hell, I’ve done it myself more than once. Nothing is easier. And then that yellow calm inside and out because God has spoken. And no one can argue with God. At least not and live. You just open up your mortal mouth and let out words and put the god-tag on like a sale tag and it makes everybody happy. You don’t even have to take responsibility for what you say. Just wait. And watch. Soon that little drip that dribbled out of the faucet of your mouth will become a rush of water. Then you can watch all that self-fulfilling energy running toward the nearest drain.

I think death must bring it on. Or the thought of death. You start to wonder what portion of all your words have been true. And what does that even mean? You wonder how maybe what some call the gift of sight and others call faith is not much more than you being determined to be right come hell or whatever. Being right is almost as good as being good. Some people don’t have any talent for being good. Maybe not for being right either. But one is easier to fake. You just have to be the loudest, most determined voice in the room. You get yourself a reputation for being strong. People flock to strong. There’s nothing wrong with being strong until it’s your time to be weak. To hurt and doubt and wrestle down the big questions.

Years ago, when everyone else was wrestling them down, you stood there looking pious and saying Just believe like a puritanical Gandhi. But one day you wake up and your loincloth of self-righteousness has slipped. Now it’s your turn. And then pieces of strength start flaking off like rust off a radiator. All your loud-mouthed certainty dries up like piss in the wind. But by then you don’t have the grace to admit defeat. To admit the possibility of weakness or wrongness. Being right is all tangled up with just being. And if one slips, the other just slides along behind. Your brain starts to feel like the Sunday crossword puzzle where most of the clues are tricks and most of the squares are blank and by Thursday you start to realize you’ll never get it all filled in. There’s been no habit of humility woven over the years to cover you when you need it most. You just stand out there exposed with all the nakedness of your need to be right. You have no pocket of quiet to dig your hands into and wait for some light. If you’re lucky, all your words dry up. If you’re not, they keep dribbling out of your mouth like so much spittle. You can stop the drool of words, but then you’d have to do something with them backing up in your head like a stopped up toilet. And the one who has the plunger is the one you don’t want to talk to. Besides, finding a plumber at this hour is practically impossible.

And don’t think Jesus is the plumber. Jesus is the crazy existentialist who stands on the corner and says The kingdom of heaven is here. Is at hand. Is now. Now—that strange word in a time warp. No promise of a future heaven or hell. And what are we supposed to do with that? Think about it later? There is no later. The kingdom of heaven isn’t later. It’s now. It’s black holes and plucked strings and beggars on the back streets of Delhi and cancer patients screaming heal me now, not now, now, not now. It is patient virgins. And a world being borne along by violent men. It’s a gift delivered like a grenade with the pin already pulled.

Un Mensaje

Hablé con el cielo, que respondió con las nubes.

Hablé con las nubes, que habló con la lluvia.

Hablé con el mar, que respondió con la espuma.

Hablo con los árboles, a mi, que sacuden sus hojas.

Hablé con usted. Usted habla en palabras.

¡Por fin! Algo que pudiera entender.

Bus

Somehow the call had never been made and Mandy--JR--had sat irritably in a corner of the bus station before standing up, walking across the long dully reflecting linoleum, and beating the small bald man with a newspaper. It was a Metro daily; a surge of NY loyalty stole across her and she stepped up the pace on the whacks simply out of outrage to have a sub par periodical as a weapon. Cheap ink formed erratic reverse text of the day's news story; a few moments more, and blood began to fleck across the re-print stories on the man's head and face.

No one's attention was aroused. A small boy, at the age where the top of the head comes just below the hip and there is unnoticed spittle from the lips, watched from over the top of his booth. The child's possible brother, at the age between hip and shoulder but no drool, joined him, but the sheer repetitiveness of her whacking was upended by the creaking and then slam of a newspaper stand door.

Mandy, too, was bored by her work, or really, the preemption of her work as there had been no call, and considered that all train stations, even this hovel in Oklahoma, were but reflections of Port Authority. If one could but suspend beneath the eyelids the movement from station/holding cell to another, all bus stations would seem a part of a subterranean network composed solely of electric lighting and linoleum.

She paused, wondering at that underground world partially created by her head, wondering if it was created by her head, or the underlying class distinction. She wiped her forehead, and sat down across the booth table from the corpse. There was few better ways to draw attention away from a corpse than to sit down next to it as a companion. To be fair, the bald man, despite the checkering of newsprint articles and blood across his broad fat head, might not have been dead. Mandy did not check his pulse or breath; it was in her style to be thorough, but beating the old man was more reflex than job. She knew, irritably gazing at the clock and wondering if Oklahoma was EST, that she would be compensated for her travels and there might even be some apology for the miscommunication. Knowing that, however, did not alleviate her from the moment, the series of moments, the monstrous miniature of eternity that now, that was the present of the bus station.

The drooling hip-height child passed, curious about the newspaper whackings, but not overly excited.

Author’s Revenge (Version 2)

With pencil in hand and hole in stomach I go to work. I sit at my desk and perform a slow, methodical erasure. I start with the ending and find my way from there.  I see two figures, very faint with long shadows. They are speaking in low, hushed tones. They have done this before, said these things before. I used to know what the words but memory fails, hearing fails, body fails, mind putters around hopelessly. I continue my work.

I stop. The two figures are slighter now, a pair of shadows against a blighted sky.

I stay up all night, I undo lines, I rewrite, I begin again. Your image moves further away, unrecognizable, unheard. You speak only in mouthed words. I stare at the page.

What was your name? And face? Hands, body, shape? Eyes, hair, scent? I don't remember but there, still, traces of an outline remains.  More to do, more to do. I work through the day and the following night. I write, rewrite, tell and retell. I put words in your mouth then just as quickly cross them out. In one moment of weakness I attempt to reform your image but I don't remember enough to complete the task. So I begin again, the long erasure, marked over, covered over, reformed, melted down, torn up and thrown out.

 I’m not done yet.

There is a Sickness

there is a sickness in you
and it grows
you bear it,
a gentle gun
against splitting skin
even as it breaks bones
you pull it closer, caressing

you curl and cry
to nurse your dissatisfaction
you shake and spit
your careful claws
snake across my heaving heart

You were a coward, you say
an unbearable booming silence tears across the line
jumps satellite to satellite
until it finds my quiet apartment
my bare white room
my mouth opens to speak
I shiver and shake
tucked in the dark bed, a pillow empty beside me

I remember your slender hands
a hank of raven hair, shining like oil on water in a ripping wind
under a white winter sun
we huddled in the car, the throaty rumble
bringing soon the miracle of rushing warmth

I would kill you if I could
even now,
despite your goodness
and explosive smile

Version 2, for MP

Revenge

Revenge of the Reptilian Brain

The first time is the strangest. Endorphins aside, you have to get over the whole self-protection thing and old-fashioned double-sided razorblades are hard to find these days. They’ve been replaced by disposable plastic things. Ridiculous to even try. Progress seldom thinks of the needs of those who occupy its underbelly. Our will to survive has kept the species going for millions of years. Or thousands, if you’re a Creationist. Either way, the conscious choice to take up arms against yourself means battling against all those superior genes picked out of the pool specifically for their ability to protect and defend the host. Like a Crusade of sorts. But the infidel is you. Then again, the mental process that brought you to this point has probably been going on long enough and generated enough loathing for the enemy (meaning yourself) that by the time you draw your sword, it’s all a moot point.

God knows we all need vices. But sharp objects had never been one of mine. When you grow up in a religious household with a mother who is the perfect embodiment of a saint and then at the tender age of eighteen marry a would-be preacher who spends the next twenty years roasting you slowly on the spit of his own guilt, well, you can expect a little scar tissue. After the divorce a counselor talked of the need to heal my wounds. For a while I tried using a little harmless flirting. Beautiful young men of various ethnic proclivities, invariably artists or musicians with large soulish eyes and sweet lips. My wounds proved harder to heal than I had anticipated. Later I added a couple of fingers of Bombay Sapphire and a few fat Vermouth-soaked olives.

Sometimes I have trouble sleeping. I get in my car late at night and drive around Charleston. Just to see if anyone else is awake. I like driving over all the bridges. Seeing the lights puddle in the water around the boats at the marinas. Wondering who owns them all. The bridge to Mt. Pleasant is on its third reincarnation since I’ve lived in the Holy City. This latest one is transcendent in its dimensions. Like a Retro-Post-Neo-Modern Cathedral. Mostly sky, held up with tiny threads of steel. Driving over it is a spiritual experience. Especially at two o’clock in the morning when my car is the only one occupying that particular air space. As I approach the apex I’m a supplicant holding out my hands for the wafer, or no, holding out my tongue. I’ll be Catholic and not touch the sacred host, but let it dissolve slowly as it mingles with the sinful spit of my mouth. Flying down the other side yelling Holy Mother of God in Heaven, I’m a new creation, forgiven, reborn for the rest of the ride. I sleep better after that.

I tried putting myself into a state of pre, semi, un-consciousness where I could live, write, create, without my neuroses always getting in the way. I wanted to get to that place where Henry Miller goes in the middle of Tropic of Cancer after he’s used the word cunt six hundred and ninety two times and has starved himself halfway to India and back and finally has an epiphany about how to live the rest of his life—with complete abandon, all out, like an animal trying to survive this moment. Not stopping to worry about tomorrow’s food or drink or fuck. It’s harder than it sounds.

So I go to the local hobby shop and look over the various Exacto-type knives. I finally choose a # 1 Light Duty. Surgically Sharp. Couteau de précision. La Manche guilloché, á la tete et au milleau du couteau, permt une excellante tenue. I’m not being pretentious. That is actually what it says on the package; although it was made in the U.S.A. Somewhere in New Jersey, I think. It takes days before I feel brave enough to slit the skin of the cardboard backing and take out my weapon of choice. And days more before I feel strong enough to use it on my own skin. Like I said, the urge to protect the self is the strongest thing we know—a bull in a china shop. All brawn and no brains. Just straight out panic no stops survival mode. Your cortex has to take a dart gun loaded with anti-anxiety chemicals to that ancient reptilian part at the base of your neck that says you’ll have to kill me first. Which of course is the point.

I guess that’s why people smoke weed. Isn’t it supposed to calm frayed nerves? Open up passageways to places inaccessible in normal circumstances? I’ll have to ask Andrew. He was one of the beautiful artists. We haven’t spoken in six months, since my mother’s death. It will be her birthday in two days and I’m contemplating a celebration that involves her ashes and weed and Andrew. Our first date was five years ago on her birthday. Strange coincidence. I don’t want to get back together. Just reconnect for old time’s sake. Maybe it will become a Neil Simon Same Time Next Year sort of thing. Every year on my mother’s birthday. I don’t even know if he’ll do it. I don’t know if I want him to. Maybe I’ll just go out to the beach alone. Let her ashes go and watch as they blow and scatter, mingling with the sand of a thousand years. Or maybe I’ll just roll them up and smoke them.

Author's Revenge

With pencil in hand and hole in stomach I go to work. Sit at desk and perform methodically, efficiently. A slow erasure of a long memory, getting longer as the sun sets. A blown out image where once you stood, rubbed out.

Two figures walk in distance, without color and speaking in muted tone.

Good for them. I don't care what is said, what is exchanged. I continue my work. They, now nothing, white blots, blighted landscape, nameless sky, moving further away. And still I work. You, like sky, nameless, sent away but not alone. I stay up all night, I undo lines, I rewrite, I begin again. Your image moves further, unrecognizable, unheard. The background, now bleached of color; bloodless.

I stare at page.

(Are those teeth marks around the edges?)

Your form, now diaphanous, translucent like looking through white rose petals in cold sunlight. What was your name, face? Hands, body, shape? Eyes, hair, scent? I don't remember but there, still, traces of an outline remains.  More to do, more to do. I work through the day and the following night. I write, rewrite, tell and retell. I put words in your mouth then just as quickly cross them out. In one moment of weakness I attempt to reform your image but I don't remember enough to complete the task, so I begin again, the long erasure, marked over, covered over, reformed, melted down, torn up, thrown out and I’m not done yet.

There is a Sickness

there is a sickness in you
and it grows
you bear it,
a gentle gun
against splitting skin
even as it breaks bones
you pull it closer, caressing

as you shake and spit
your careful claws
snake across my heaving heart

you curl and cry
to nurse your dissatisfaction
I am, as ever, your willing victim
and even as you crave comfort,
my soft white arms around you
you lift your head
to the soft shell of my ear
to loose a terrible poison there

which works in silence
until nothing is left of me
but a thick dark pool

You were a coward, you say
an unbearable booming silence tears across the line
jumps satellite to satellite
until it finds my quiet apartment
my bare white room
my mouth opens to speak
I shiver and shake
tucked in the dark bed, a pillow empty beside me
I imagine your slender hands
a hank of black hair, nearly blue, caught in a ripping wind
under a white winter sun
we huddled in the car, it's throaty rumble
bringing soon the miracle of rushing warmth

I would kill you if I could
despite your goodness
and explosive smile

The Misogynist, again

Women are disgusting creatures, JR thought, dropping the line of cord tied to the knob, and stepping through the door.

The bathroom stank, but not of urine, or not only of urine, or even sweat or body odor. Fecal matter was animal, was regenerative. No, here, reflected JR, pushing each of stall doors open with a baton, here were processes outside nature. A tampon, cotton swollen beyond recognition, lay like a ravaged rodent on the first stall's floor. Presumably it had been beached there; the uneven floors lead away from the door downward to the back wall underneath the sinks. Between the slope and uninterrupted flow from a faucet, the puddle had a tide of its own, the waves lapping at the body of the bloated sanitary napkin.

A girl stepped in, tall, with a vague post-goth cast to her wardrobe. She scanned harder at JR's cheerleader baton than the muck on the floor; possibly all the university toilets were this bad. Or not: JR could see the unraveling threads of the goth's knock-off bag. This wing, though not mandated as such, was unofficially all night students. JR watched as the girl walked into the last stall on the right with swagger and came shuttering out a moment later, dodging into another. By now JR had walked all the way to the end of the row of stalls and stood reviewing her own female visage. Possibly this job did not require the costuming, but she donned it anyway, with a certain glee. Thus the cowgirl hat, the designer hand bag, the pink high tops. Yellow hair hung down on either side of the face.

Women are disgusting, JR thought. What a shame to be one.

This can't come back to the clubs, or here, or to George Pfenning, Pfennigan, whatever the fuck his name is. JR had nodded, lackadaisically, in the office. By now she had already started sporting the cowgirl hat and though light-weight, she liked to allow the hat to bring her head forward as if with gravity, in a movement that eliminated all her features beneath the brim. JR liked the dim of the office; the agency had an aversion to electric lights. She sat on the other side of the desk, watching a line of ants busy about the leg, and reflected that only a handful of cases had needed to be traceable back to one of the clubs. The agency was never involved. But it was probably not bad, she thought, for there to be a public face, or the possibility of a public face, as certain situations called for it.

This job was not one. Jr knew details that led, train-track like to her standing in the flooded college bathroom, but that same line of tracks in her head was devoid of trains, absent of motivations. A dancer, Cheri, had lined up a champagne room with a client on the stipulation that there was no cum to be shot on or near her person. The client, drunk or dumb or both, had shot her face. Later in the evening she had feigned not believing his age, and getting his driver's license, memorized his address. JR's thoughts were diverted to the door. The goth kid had come and gone (with unwashed hands) and now a second vaguely goth figure, although a little shorter and broader with bobbed hair, cut came in.

JR suddenly realized that she was going to enjoy the job.

She had seen, of course, photos of Cheri (formerly Kitten, when her hair had been blond and longer and crimped) and recognized the pointed chin and blunt, flat nose. But looking at her now, JR could extrapolate on the girl's life, constructing connective tissue between the facts gathered in her research. The blond locks and silly name had been changed during her first French class. Nasal intonation, hovering half-breathed r, and unspoken ending letters had proved too tough for a kid in school part time and so a second and third class had not followed. Nevertheless, Cheri-Kitten (also: Becci Sparks) had felt inspired, alienated by the class room and confused by the teacher's chattering, but somehow still inaugurated into something ... else. Special.

Cheri had furtively glanced at JR, dropped her eyes, never saw the baton. JR grinned. What was it about the shy ones? The silly kid, who couldn't meet the eyes of another woman in a public bathroom, had reeked minor havoc with her desperate need to avenge her cummed on face.

JR pulled the cord, shutting and locking the door to the restroom. Cheri had stepped into a stall and startled by the noise half turned. But JR was already there, grinning.

Happens (again, but not final version)

The pair had been sitting somewhat motionless, somewhat austere. It may have been that the windows, ordinarily blacked out, had suffered both internal and external trauma during the storm. Now a fragmentary light filtered in, not lazily, but not precisely judging either.
The girl was somewhat still except for one finger striking the table like an agitated piano player. The man too moved, also only a finger, but his in a circle, the same circle, clockwise then counter clockwise, on her thigh.
“Shit happens, sometimes.”
“In storms.” She didn't add 'apparently' and perhaps it was unnecessary. His statement had been generalized commentary on the far side of the room with the upturned tables, the thirteen broken spikes of high heels sticking up from the one table rightly standing. The stage stretched between them and the wreckage, inserting a silence. His gloss, then, was intended in the excellent style of all glosses, as a blurring of that which they studied, but didn't see. But she had brought it back to hours and circumstance and un-abstracted smells.
The shit had come just when the wind howled less, after Candy had climbed monkey-like, wiry limbs scaling framed pictures of past beauties, to the window where she lost a nail but succeeded in peeling back the black paint. There had been a shrieking round of giggles, and Candy's head turned back, nearly three-quarters, grinning at her audience, when the glass shattered and the pile knocked her cold.
“Pig shit,” said one patron holed up to last out the hurricane, and while he was hardly more farmer than the rest of them, no one argued.
The broken window and the clumps which the storm hurled at the building drew the group together in the common goal of plugging the window.
From Candy's unconscious frame, not particularly sexually haunting, at least not to the other girls, it was only a matter of time before all the left heels (already broken off and affixed upside down to a table) were used as a broken open iron maiden to stretch her across. Still, Candy did not wake (it is possible her fra

Exploring (version 2)

            "I'm going exploring, " I said to the woman behind the desk.

            "That's nice," she said.

            "It is nice," I said, "and true. Nice and true."

            "Goodbye," she said.

            Later, I told a clerk that soon I would be in the jungle deep, exploring the undergrowth.

            He said, "Don't get malaria."

            "I don't want malaria, " I said.

            "Better not catch it then," he said.

            I was speaking to a girl in the library.

            "Are you familiar with the ocean? " I said.

            "The sea?" she said.

            "The ocean, the sea, yes. Do you know it?"

            "I think so. Why?" she asked.

            "I’m going there, to the sea. Soon. Tomorrow. Maybe, I hope."

            "Are you asking me?"

            "Asking you what?"

            "To go? To go to the sea, the ocean?"

            I shook my head, "No, I don't think I was. Did I? ask?"

            "No," she said sullenly. "But you spoke, you spoke to me and I thought we were supposed to go to the sea."

            "Together? or separately?"

            She shrugged. "Is there a difference?"

            I looked at her, working up my nerve. "Do you want to not go with me, then?"

            "Yes," she said, "I will be happy to not accompany you wherever you like."

            I stepped outside and saw the same city skyline I had seen so many, many times on so many different days. Days in rain, half-rain, sun and half-sun. The light was downcast and low. There was a man standing outside the building, talking low to himself. "Go, go, go, go, go," he said, more a mouth than a man, a mouth mouthing words. As he spoke, he walked several paces and stopped. "Go, go, go," he said and stopped again. He kept like this, heading south. I wondered where he was going and began to follow his stops and starts. After five blocks, he turned suddenly, lurchingly, and headed north. "Go go go go," he said, nearly knocking me out of his way. I also turned and followed. He walked precisely two and a half blocks and turned, almost violently, south once again and continued. After only one block he swung himself around. When he reached the middle of the block he stopped, facing out and said, "Stay, stay, stay, stay, stay." Then he closed his eyes and said nothing further. After a full minute I was convinced he had fallen asleep like that, standing stiff and in the middle of the street. Suddenly his eyes sprang wide and he walked west, right into the street and into traffic, I tried to stop him but he kept going, cars swerving around him as he went missile-like and determined. I stopped following and watched as he gained distance, moving down the opposite street. I was sure that it would only be a matter of time before he turned himself around and went east, then south then north, west and back again. I had grown to understand his pattern and in that understanding, boredom swelled. I grew tired of watching him like one gets tired of watching a clock tick, at first mesmerizing, then monotonous. I left him there and thought of the girl in the library. I wished I had not lied. There would be no trip to the ocean or the jungle or the desert for that matter. No exotic locales, just gray streets as far as the eye could see, stretching, stretching, horizon to horizon. Grey streets and ashen men moving like clocks, like cars, to and fro, to and fro. Go, go, go, go, go.

What terrible grief did I uncover there, in that long-deserted wreckage?

With the wisdom of long years and many failed expeditions, I observed silently your wounded smile, your careful laugh, your wild eyes. I found you beneath an avalanche of folly and plans long ago gone awry and forgotten.

I glimpsed, then your true self, unmirrored and true.

How quickly you built for me another life, unfolded a fantasy of a darkened cloakroom, moon whispering white across bare skin and warm hands.

You insisted I had found you, had rediscovered you. A cascade of bright longing and secret lusts sprang forth from a heart unstoppered for all the world like a champagne bottle. We laughed and were drenched and twisted in the wet.

I braved the tundra, the rocks and ice. I felt for the path beneath the terrible will of the fog, then grew parched beneath a venomous sun. All the while, looking for you. I waited for morning, licking dew from a few ragged leaves, and by nightfall was lost beneath a terrible seething jungle.

Now that I have lost you again, I only curse the path, look for signs and symbols in the sun and the burning green grass.

Without destination, I turn inward like a broken compass, wait in a willful silence for the phone to ring, for your voice, your key in the door.

Version 2

Delhi New Year

Delhi New Year

It was about noon on New Year’s Day when the elephant walked up to me. I was sitting on a tiny side street in Karol Bargh, a collection of tenements and tangerine stalls that sprawled just west of Delhi proper, a place where any tourist worth his salt wouldn’t know about—but should. I was flying out later that night, leaving India after a three-month stay. But for just these few minutes I was sunning myself on the steps of my hotel, recuperating from my New Year’s Eve overindulgence. I had spent the previous evening packed into a tiny nightclub called The Qasbah watching the frantic revelry of secular Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and probably a few atheists all squashed together in a room the size of a typical American laundry-room. The scene had all the color, smell, and drama of a war zone without the close proximity of death. As a child I remembering hearing my older cousins dramatically intone the phrase Take me to your kasbah. We all knew it referred to that point in their play when the man swept them off their feet and took them to the mysterious region that existed behind closed doors. As a teenager the word “kasbah” conjured up scenes of smoky rooms draped with saffron-colored silk redolent of cinnamon and myrrh where gypsy violinists played the opening strains of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini. But since I was raised in a subculture peopled mostly by Conservative Fundamental Independent Pre-Millennial Baptists, what went on behind the doors of the kasbah remained very much a mystery until my honeymoon. Twenty years later as a middle-aged divorcee with grown children, I was still intrigued by the word.
The literal Qasbah turned out to be somewhat disappointing. Everyone was attempting to have fun, attempting to drink, attempting to dance while attempting to avoid the pools of vomit--offerings from people unfamiliar with large amounts of alcohol. There was a frantic quality to their celebration, as if the idea was new and not altogether wholesome, and therefore had to be done quickly. It was unclear whether fun was being had. At one point I found myself waiting outside the women’s restroom. Instead of signs (what language would it be?) there were roughly carved wooden sculptures hanging on the doors denoting male and female. As the minutes ticked by and the women’s loo remained occupied, I took the female effigy off the door and began to study it. Small and stylized, a bust not more than eight inches tall with large Buddha ears, coiled hair, and bare breasts partially covered with a bead necklace. A crude copy of some rustic East-Indian tribal art.
A friend once told me that the best souvenir is the one you don’t buy and I had yet to find a suitable symbol for my three-month stay in India. I don’t know what puck-headed spirit possessed me at that moment. It may have had something to do with the reckless abandon that everyone around me was trying so hard to achieve. I had never stolen anything in my life. Okay, there was the one time in first grade when I lusted after Bobby Wilson’s ballpoint pen. So I waited until recess and pretended to tie my shoe, etc. But that was it. I had never shoplifted as a sulky teen thumbing my nose at the Bourgeoisie Establishment. I had never cheated on God or my husband or taxes. But for some reason, as the door to the restroom opened, I slipped the object into my purse. Back in the U.S.A. when I showed it to my grown children they were shocked to think of their middle-aged middle-class mother stealing this pagan idol from a shady nightclub on New Year’s Eve halfway around the world. I could see they were thinking, “God knows what else she got into.” But even stranger than my stealing it, is the fact that I have never experienced the tiniest tremor of guilt over the incident. My very respectable, very adult daughter told me that maybe I should think long and hard about guilt and my lack thereof. So I did. I can only imagine it has something to do with a life lived full to the brim with the false sort of guilt The human psyche can only take so much apparently. Everyone has a day of reckoning. A day when all the crazy shit our parents told us comes home to roost and we just kick it out of the nest. Or at least that’s what should probably happen. Otherwise, we’re just filling the coffers of headshrinkers. And I’ve never been a fan of organized religion.
The next day I sat on the steps watching the little minutes of daily life whirl around the street in hot dusty puffs. When I first arrived in Delhi this street with its glare and noise and swarming pockets of humanity had looked to me like the wrong side of Bagdad on a bad day. I crept into my hotel room and pushed a table against the door to ensure that India stayed well outside. But during the next three months I had managed to fall in love with the people and the neighborhood felt like home. Across the street I could see the telephone stall where I had made frantic long distance calls back to the USA. Inside the three-sided cubicle sat a wrinkled old woman in a dingy silk sari who spoke no English but still managed to convey an incredible amount of sympathy as I cried into the mouthpiece at those times when the craziness threatened to overwhelm me. Next door was the grocery stall hung with bags of chips and candy bars well past their sell-by date. There was the fruit stand where I bought my daily measure of tangerines. There was the Internet café that gave new meaning to the word grunge. And then there was the elephant. A creature larger than my hotel room. She had simply appeared and was standing beside me. She leveled me with one eye that had more intelligence than most people I knew. She seemed huge and spiritual, more event than animal. I lifted my hand hesitantly. She lifted her trunk. Our separate appendages hung there in the air. Not touching. I felt like Adam hanging from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel watching God’s finger as it reaches out into space, hanging forever in ethereal suspension. I’ve always wondered what would have happened if the paint and plaster had not dried so quickly; if time had not stopped at that particular moment with those two fingers so close, but never touching. I guess that’s why we have lightening.
I’m unsure who made the first move, but suddenly my hand was touching the hairy gray roughness and her trunk was next to my cheek. She felt like old leather, safe and familiar. The sun was hot and there was this comforting smell coming off her—clean and dusty like rain out on the desert of the Deccaan Plateau. The noise of the street disappeared and in its place was a silence that sort of sat down beside us. We made a comfortable trio. Somehow this act, this sitting beside the quiet and the elephant, seemed a summation of all that I had experienced in my short stay. It was the reason, formed in matter rather than words, for this longing I had to stay in this country for another three months, ten years. A lifetime would not be enough, I knew, to fill up the empty space I felt inside. Not empty as in existential angst, but empty as in a lack of the unnecessary.
We stayed like that until the owner appeared asking money for his services. Want a ride? How much you give me for a ride? The elephant’s big liquid god-eye held me and I wondered if climbing up onto that huge expanse of rug-covered wrinkles would be to commit some sort of sacrilege. I shook my head at the owner just as a father and his small son came to buy a ride. The owner said some words and tapped with his stick. The gray bulk knelt. The going down was slow and awkward, unhurried, and the child after much encouragement climbed up. But the standing up again was like a displacement of space, an earthmover shuddering into action. The elephant stood in the street swaying back and forth. The little boy squealed in mid-air terror that turned to delight as the whole miracle moved off down the street. Hours later as my plane lumbered down the runway and lifted heavily off the tarmac the miracle of flight seemed somehow a lesser thing.