The Friar's Lantern

Alopecia

Molly Fisher was fatigued.  Three days of pressing need followed by a few days of relaxation proved insufficient where it came to recuperation.  The memory alone of the faces and the bodies to which she had been exposed was enough to make her eyes burn and her posture to slump.  A few days in public, a week ago.  And still she could not release her vision of those flirtatious glances or the open legs of a come-hither stance; the sexual gestures of the strangers she encountered in her world.

 

Molly encountered these gestures without effort – they came to her because of her body and because of what expression she made of it.  But it was her own response that wore her out.  Because she returned the gestures, the glances that also caressed, the smiles that had no imperative, that made little suggestions of acquiescent thoughts.  What made her so tired of these calls to physical attentions is that she had no wish to follow through on a one of them.  Her personal life, which she spent in study or in toil about her home, was enough to keep her happily occupied.

 

The afternoon of her fatigue was a thing of beauty.  The air was filled with a pleasant humidity that promised days of unbearable heat to come.  Ms. Fisher’s eyes were heavy with a combination of remembrance and the doze of late spring.  The encounter in her recollection was one with a boy at the milk bar where she took her breaks.  He eyed her and asked, ‘How do,’ and they toyed, mutually, with their false prospects.  In that sunny spot amid the budding, Molly appeared to be languishing within a sort of youthful vigor, a glowing figure, perhaps, for the views of interested neighbors.

 

But what appeared to be an act of languishing was really nothing of that.  Only the curious and voyeuristic eyes of her neighbors had such a perception.  For these, Molly was perhaps never relieved of the public arena.  Even had she been suffering the crush of her remembrance indoors, it would be through windows that these eyes may have apprehended her most luxurious relaxation.  Only hidden by shrouds, as if some portion of her experience had best occur within some closeted inner sanctum, would Molly have escaped being as she appeared.  In her fatigue, however, Molly was unable to appreciate her performance and so gave her audience none of her considerations.  This was just as well for her insofar as she would have been all the more bored by the idea of her body as it was for herself and for others.

 

In her hand she held a little book, a popular volume, though one whose design had long been out of favor with the publishing houses, which seemed to prefer bulkier tombs as if a book were practically better suited for display than for reading.  In the beams of sunlight that Molly had conceived of reading, instead, she was falling into a doze.  The text in her had drooped away from her line of sight so that, though sleeping, she appeared to have set the story aside for a moment, the better to consider its content.  It was a pocket-book: as a display object, it acquired in her hands a certain femininity and harkened aesthetically to a different era that suited its bearer favorably.

 

Her time in the heat passed slowly, so that, for her, it seemed as though a long time was in the passing before the destination of sleep was actually reached.  The sounds of wind and insects encouraged this abstraction of her sense of time even as it accompanied her upon the curving paths towards sleep.  And so, whereas only a few moments had passed between them, it seemed to her as though many quarters of hours had been spent between the successive droopings of her head.  The very curvature of the path we have described was to be asymptotic in kind.  For, even as the fabrications of time stretched and slowed along her interminable approach, it was a place she would never reach that afternoon.  Indeed, just as the threshold of true rest was reached, her novel fell from her unconscious grasp and hit the ground with a soft and yet resounding shock that sent her back to the peaks of awareness, as if she had awoken from a nightmare.

 

Molly awoke and stood, exhausted and frustrated by the lack of an adequate solution.  Her hair, which was dark brown, long and without curls, breezed about her face as though the very summer currants were more active than she, and she spat a few strands from her mouth in a gesture to rid herself of the taste of her external beauties.  And, with this, Molly suffered a stroke of inspiration.  A strange new image of herself arose before her mind: a different creature altogether, an uglier thing, an object that lacked vast appeal for the public gaze.  That is, like a snake or some freakish though hypoallergenic cat, a creature devoid of hair.

 

Hitherto, though without much conscious effort in the attainment of this goal, Molly had endeavored to appear in such a way that her exterior should reflect a handful of her contemporary sexual ideals.  In her bad mood, she concluded that a change to her appearances had ought to effect the changes she desired: more ugly in the eyes of the beholder, therefore no longer forced to put up with the exchanges of amorous intent.  Instead, she figured, people would be content with themselves, would leave her to her own.  She had access to the things: shears, razor and tweezers.  Most suddenly, it was the case that Molly had all the energy she could need, had a project before her and a purpose to her work.  And what, she asked herself, could be of a greater importance than this?  That is, this task, of creating for herself a better life than the one she had already.

 

Inside, within the sepulchral confines of her bathroom, standing before the mirror with its light bulbs like those of a starlet’s vanity, Molly’s mind became active and excited, no longer attendant upon the problems her actions were meant to end.  And so it was in something like a reverie or a fit of somnambulance that her transformation took its place.  She thought, while the shroud of her hair fell from its special hold, of images she had seen of the planet Earth viewed from distant orbit and of the fixed gyration of its moon, related this image to that of pigeons in the city and the funny circles pranced by their males in the motions of courtship.  The razor, with the speed of its purpose, removed the strips of each of her delicate and supple eyebrows.  Ms. Fisher imagined a masquerade wherein anonymous dancers would fall into an embrace, only to discover in years to come that this amorous encounter had been with an unrecognized sibling.

 

The ordeal of her eyelashes, however, put her imagination to an end.  Every painful and grotesque pluck of these precious hairs, which pulled and stretched at the thinnest skin of her lids and revealed the reddish discoloration of her sclera, the spherical nature of her organ of sight, and the wet red underskin of the lid itself, was a gesture of commitment to the antipathetic ideal towards which she newly strove.  If she was having second thoughts about the matter, if she wondered whether the path she had chosen would really be an effective cure for what ailed her, these doubts could no longer have any bearing upon the act.

 

With the lashes, she began with the left eye and moved across the face, from outermost follicle to outermost, as though each hair were a letter spelling two words across the cryptic glossary of her face.  Molly, with tears and watering, was taking care to erase these words and so to create the tabula rasa to which she aspired.  Her face, which she had cultivated with what voguish means she was exposed to, which exposed to those who saw it an array of expressions from its suddenly erstwhile accessibility, no longer.  Her face, or the revocation of her face, pressed close to the glass, which nevertheless doubled the apparent distance between her head and its reflection.  Her eyes stopped watering before the job was done; she became so absorbed in the details of the experience that her sense of time had been lost.  But, when she realized that it had all been done, she withdrew her gaze from its most microscopic examinations in an attempt to gain the grand perspective.

 

What appearance stepped away from her in the reflecting glass was nothing Molly knew.  But the moment in which Molly knew not was but the briefest.  Even for her to make the claim of unknowing she required a quick retroflection that carried her from one bodily image into the next.  Thus, it was not that she was no longer her self but that it was a new self, still her own, that she embodied.  But there was one difference that she discovered between the old image and this new one that, despite its novelty, she nevertheless recognized.  The change that, at this initial forthcoming, simultaneously shocked and pleased Molly well, was that Ms. Fisher could no longer read her own reflection in the mirror.

 

She attempted, as though to explore the extents of the unfamiliarity with her own terrain, to repeat to herself one of the gestures that she habitually practiced upon her mirror image, a sort of partial wink in which neither eye closed at all, but performed the merest twitch, just suggestive of a proper wink.  This gesture, which had become habitual in its play across her features, which had successfully prompted both humor and curiosity in the past, now read more like that of the horse that flicks its musculature to rid itself of flies.  Molly was delighted to find even this, the most charming of her gestures, to be repulsive.  She smiled to herself and even this smile seemed to her but a baring of the teeth.

 

When Molly exited the tabernacle of her water closet, not without several lingering glances in the direction of her reflection, she discovered that the home was darkened with the falling of the night.  Her mates, with whom the rental was split, were none of them home.  Thus it was alone that she explored the chambers of her kitchen and hallways and bedroom, aimlessly although also with an excessive energy; with fluttering motions, her hands drew again and again across the newly exposed contours of her skull.  While she paced, however, she did not engage power to the light bulbs, but allowed her fine senses to adjust to the environment she was given as though she were a bipedal cat or, she fancied, perhaps a creature from a bygone age like Nosferatu.

 

It was the night and her senses were extended outwards to capture the gleaming contours of household objects that were exposed to an ambient light; Molly Fisher was in her element.  The night was a Friday’s, which lent some explanation to the absence of her living partners, who could be expected to run about town on weekend evenings.  Molly, unwilling to let her newfound powers waste themselves with her solitude, decided to join them where they went; she made swift contact with them and struck out at once, eager to see their expression of shock with regard to her metamorphosis.

 

Molly’s friends were at a bar called the Chicken House; she arrived one quarter of an hour after she left and the play of the balmy wind upon newly bared skin during her bicycle ride gave her a continuous thrill.  When she stepped inside, still breathless, her image drew the brief gaze of several members of the population.  These eyes, all of strangers alike, inspected her image with what seemed to Ms. Fisher to be indifference.  If this pleased her, it was not outwardly apparent.  Her housemates, who were expecting her, were to be found in the rear courtyard; she made her way to them.

 

This way was fraught with a series of sidelong glances, some more lingering than others, committed by the creatures who occupied the booths and crowded about the standing room en route to the courtyard, which presented the real draw behind the Chicken House.  These glances did not linger upon her features, as though they were perhaps undaring or else really the polite gestures of subtle aversion.  Both of these suited Molly Fisher just fine.  Just before the backdoor entrance to the courtyard, however, there stood and sat about a small group of individuals who, by their appearance, were unlike the rest of the crowd.  These, who sported leather and a generally antisocial demeanor, were a bunch of punks.

 

This series of looks, as contrary in themselves as the crew was to the rest of the patrons, was settling across her with obvious attraction.  These looks, disturbing to her as they were apparently inwardly disturbed, did nothing that would prompt in her a desire to reciprocate.  If anything, however, her lack of interest only heightened theirs, which seemed to intensify as she drew in close.  Two of these insistent looks in particular, despite herself, her tastes, caught her attentions.  The first of these emanated from the figure of a male with gauged ears and black eye shadow and spoke to her of disgusting sexual possibilities, harmless to themselves, but of some horror to whomever should witness their act within the closest darkened alleyway.  The second, drawn from the pale blue of an individual whom Ms. Fisher considered a sapphist, bespoke of pleasures Molly had few imaginations of and which, for their mystery, Molly helplessly considered.  As she passed them by, she was blushing and sensitive to the probably accidental brushings of the jackets and chains they had, despite the heat, slung behind their shoulders.

 

The courtyard presented her with a different, more average array of faces, well dressed for summer and alight with the glow of lamps suspended from wires and strung from one wall across to the next.  In opposition to those of the crews inside, not a glance was spared for Molly, so apparently were all of these small groups heartily engaged in private socializations.  As a result, it was only those fervent gestures that Molly failed to observe that caught her form and lingered across its most alien surfaces.  Her friends, who showed no signs of having caught her sight, were seated in the rear, some distance through the weave of young strangers.  Unnoticed, as she started her course towards the ones she knew, two brilliant punks stepped into the fresh and for a smoke in Molly Fisher’s wake.

 

It was then that Molly realized that she had no intention of sitting down to table with her friends empty handed.  She stopped and began a series of gestures that were intended for nobody in particular, one finger raised in the air, as though telling somebody to hold a moment, something like a quizzical expression upon her unreadable face, and snapped her fingers, ‘Eureka!’ as she spun about so to fetch a beer.  But she had not gone two steps when she was confronted by the two punks, the bodies of the lesbian and of the roguish male.  One or the other seemed to say, ‘What’s the matter, honey, to rush in and leave so soon?’  Molly could not discern who had spoken and who had remained silent and so addressed them both in saying, ‘I…excuse me, I,’ and shouldered her way past them to the bar.  She left them smoking and found the bar with no more interruptions.

 

At the bar, Molly waited for a distinctly longish time for service, as though the keeper had failed to notice her amongst the other customers.  This was, to her, simultaneously a disconcertion and an appeal.  The bartender, after serving several persons before her, seemed to notice her at last and said, as though this were the service she could expect, ‘What would you like?’  She ordered a shot of whiskey and a bottle of Fin du Monde, and removed herself from the bar in a casual way, a dollar bill pinned beneath her emptied glass.

 

The two special punks were found waiting for her return.  The one that made himself out a male extended to Molly a cigarette and the one with the characteristics of a female brushed a little against her belly, which contact was a given within the crowded closeness, as she offered a burning match.  Molly, who smoked only when she drank, looked for long and unnecessary moments into the eyes of the other.  Although they did not give any names, they talked for a while of nothing much.  At last, Molly suggested that she had best to go and meet her friends, that she would see them around.  Molly’s erotic punks agreed, ‘Yes, perhaps later in the night;’ they had no intentions of leaving soon.

 

When she sat beside her friends, Molly was almost finished with her beer and she felt socially attentive, alert and absorptive of every nuance.  Her friends seemed simultaneously to recognize and to ignore her as though, catching her sight, they were merely reminded of Molly Fisher.  But then Fred, who occupied the seat beside her, gave a drastic double take, his eyes widened in an expression of, ‘Oh my gosh!’  He said to her, “Egad, Molly, what happened?”  To which Molly shrugged her shoulders and said that she had cut her hair.  Jessica and Amanda exchanged a look of dismay and of trouble, sharing their combination of disgust and concern for what should be the matter with Molly.  Maurice, who always took a while to decide, said that she looked, ‘Rad,’ and Fred, recovering, agreed – though his term for her appearance was, “Very Sci-Fi.”  Molly explained that she guessed she needed something a little different and told them she was glad they could still recognize her.  Still, Amanda and Jessica had little idea of what to make of it, for it was a concern of theirs, and soon both Maurice and Fred though nothing of it.  These responses, mused Molly, were typical of the sexes.

 

Molly, finished with her beer, departed to fetch another.  “Make that two, Professor X,” said Fred.  Molly, glad he had not chosen Lex Luthor, agreed.  She hoped to see her favored punks inside, but they were no longer present.  She felt then a strange longing, as though something either in the place or in her self had gone missing.  Perhaps it was the element of charm.  Again, she waited an extraordinary time for service.  Molly, bored, ordered two bottles of Anchor Steam, and returned to her table unnoticed by others and filled with disinterest.

 

Molly’s housemates were talking about almost nothing.  Nevertheless, their talk was lively.  It seemed to Ms. Fisher, who had nothing but sighs to give, that the topic was that of celebrity romance.  She could not discern whether the topic was of fictitious romance, as the chemistry on-screen, or the tabloid sort by which the stars should entertain us in their spare time.  Jessica and Maurice both smoked cigarettes and she bummed from the both of them.  Fred finished his beer before she did and left to fetch them another round.  He returned in what seemed to her to be half the time it had taken her.  Fred had purchased two small bottles of La Chouffe.  He, who usually purchased beers of a less complex taste, had remembered the name of one of her favorites.

 

Fred said something to her like, ‘Listen, Molly.  I have to ask, you know, if something is the matter, right?  My experience is, nobody changes their hair unless something is the matter, OK?  So you can tell me, you know, if there is something you want to talk about, you can tell me, OK?’  The others seemed to be interested in a talk about whether or not the hardest crossword was the Sunday paper’s or was it really Thursday’s.  “Not that there is anything wrong with your new look,” added Fred, “Really, I think it’s smashing.  Real bad.”

 

Molly said to Fred, “Nothing is the matter.  Things better now.  Just that I was, you see, very tired of a certain kind of bullshit.”  Undecided as to the most difficult day for crosswords, but still on the subject of the papers, a more agreeable topic had been chosen, namely, the unanimous and heartfelt disdain for Family Circus.  “Not this sort of bullshit,” she said, “I still love this right.”  So, Fred rightly inquired of the sort of crap she had cut her hair off for and Molly said, “That of looking and being looked at.”

 

Fred wanted to know, ‘Well, OK, I think I get it.  But does it work?’  And Molly said to him, “No, it doesn’t work.  You don’t stop looking, you just look different.”  Then she sipped at her beer, which was very delicious, and listened to what everybody had to say.  Occasionally one of her friends would look at her as if suddenly remembering her difference in visage.  In these moments, their faces were consumed by blank looks of drunken curiosity.  Across the smooth and uninterrupted flows of her skin, inevitably, those looks were reflected in kind.  Presently, it was time for everybody to leave; the bar was at its closing and the whole mass of strange bodies that remained so long in the night went teetering to the sidewalk.

 

Ms. Fisher alone had taken a bicycle and, while the others trundled together towards the late night subways, she straddled her Peugeot twelve speed and felt the sobering grace of the winds.  Through the neighborhoods filled by different peoples, along the macadam alight with the orange glows of the quiet hours and with hardly a care for the rules of the road, Molly raced exuberant.  The simple physicality of the ride made her forget, for that extended moment, her social cares.  She imagined, rather, only the swift passage of her body, awake and unnoticed by the slumbering hundreds that swept behind her every city block.  When she pulled her bicycle indoors, home so well before her friends who were trapped by the passage of the slow and intermittent underground, she was hardly aware of her breathlessness or of the stinging sweat that flowed unhindered into her eyes.

 

She climbed up to the kitchen where, leaning heavily over the sink, she drank several glasses of water.  When she had finished perhaps three, she realized she was gasping and spent perhaps the next minute to control her body.  Molly Fisher, having mastered her body, gulped down what she could of one more glass, and went to her room, deep in the silence of the old and empty brownstone that she made home.

 

It was time, thought Molly, for bed.  But, before she got that chance for sleeping, she saw herself suddenly reflected in the little mirror she kept on her wall.  There was no shock, no moment of wonder at her regard.  Ms. Fisher saw, rather, only her self reflected and in just the way she had come to expect it.  It showed no expression and that was because Molly had nothing to express.  But she saw in the eyes of her reflection the same emotions that she thought were behind her own.  And she was pleased by what she saw and thought herself an attractive thing and that, given certain sensibilities, others would think the same.

 

When Molly Fisher went to bed that night, her housemates were just coming home and they  sounded a noisy mess.  In the darkness, Molly allowed their presence to dissipate, to join those constant sounds that fill the city so late.  The night was hot and Molly knew that she would awaken in just hours for the toilet.  And yet she closed her eyes to the dim lights and felt about for the soft suction of sleep.  As she did, the thoughts and dreams of Molly Fisher were on a pair of lofty rebels.

Copernicus the Boy

Copernicus had become an old man by then.  He was dead and gone – that is, his body had gone away.  The rest of him keeps on living in the way that it can, in we who know his name.  Kleos aphthiton, or by some other way of spelling it using that ancient alphabet that predates even the man of whom it now speaks, everlasting fame.  That is, eternal life.

 

There is a boy who was named Copernicus, alive, here.  Although he should be the hero of this one, the tale of his life will likely not live up to that of his namesake.  Our Copernicus, in this opposition, was as mortal as the rest.  But was still named as such, so we are told, by an old man, his father, who had a sense of its grandeur but not of its purpose.  And so who never really thought of the way this name was used before and will continue to be employed with no regard to its contemporary bearer.  Long after the death of the new Copernicus, his name will be said in an only tangential fashion, will signify our hero via the meager lines of coincidence alone.

 

So, a Copernicus lived within a body and in this world.  He attended a public school and lived with his sister.  They were orphans of a sort.  Whether dead or merely lost to them, the parents were absent altogether.  The sister was called Dorothy, but only because she chose to deflect her first, her given name.  A name that was forgotten in her as it was remembered, nevertheless, in history.  Such as the Queen of the Nile or the Goddess of Love, she knew, were not for her.  Therefore, she gave herself what belonged equally to her as to those individuals of great fame, those Parkers and Gales, whose identities required a coupling with a second, last name.  The last name, given to both Dorothy and Copernicus, was Stillwater.

 

Dorothy, being the elder, took care.  She provided the housing and the food that Copernicus, so long as he remained a boy, could not be expected to achieve on his own.  Therefore, especially during the summer, he had many hours to fill with something like leisure, given that he had faithfully completed his chores.  An independent child of eleven, he did what was asked of him without fail and with but the faintest reminders.  A very serious child was Copernicus, ‘an old soul,’ if the saying describes the thing.

 

Much of the time he spared himself was spent harvesting plants, for which he would go about his neighborhood on the hunt.  (Long since had the trees, weeds, flowers and grasses that appeared in his little yard ceased to hold his most expansive interest.)  He enjoyed the parks because these tended to hold a far better variety for his particular study; almost always a new and intriguing specimen had taken to sprout, if only he looked hard enough.

 

He would sit down in the secluded patch from whence he could observe, without interruption, his botany.  Everywhere he looked there were persons walking about, with and without dogs.  These walkers were all speaking, if to companions, if to telephones, if pets.  Copernicus could not bring himself to speak to the plants, however well he knew them.  Unable to understand why all these persons had so much to say, he was not distracted by words.  Instead, he sat and memorized the plants.  The tree beneath which he sat, for example, he knew well.  It was the ailanthus that grew in the hill in the park to the west.  It went so tall and stretched thousands of pointed leaves in all directions.  Slowly the line of the sun edged closer to his spot in the shade.  Squirrels seemed to be trying to knock him in the head with little rock from above.  There was so much to observe this day!

 

The line touched his leg and he went to his feet so that he could be taken home.  Dorothy would be expecting him to come home soon, he thought, and turned once to the ailanthus so that he could know, for a moment, what it looked like from a greater distance.  According to his memory, the tree looked always the same in this time of day and year.  Walking home, Copernicus followed the signs: the crawler along the power lines, a hyacinth, the gore with a conifer grove just after the third deciduous on the left, and so on.  Before sunset, Copernicus made his return.

 

There was Dorothy, sitting on the porch with her companion, who was called Mitchel.  Like so many others, they were talking.  They looked up with smiles when they saw that Copernicus was making his way.  When he had climbed the porch, Mitchel was smiling and then lighting a cigarette before he asked about where Copernicus had been, what had Copernicus seen?  This was easy information, there was little to be said.  Only a couple of names, in the end.  In seconds, Dorothy and Mitchel were able to begin to hold their conversation as before.

 

Dorothy said, “I think that it is all happening for a reason.  Like, this is a planned thing.  Or else why would it happen at all?”

 

To which Mitchel replied, “I don’t care about that sort of plan.  What does that sort of plan mean to me?  I have got to make my own plan, is how I feel.  Maybe my plans are a bit just like the big grand, out of control, plan, like.  Whatever happens.”

 

“I like to think of it as very special.  Like, there is a reason this is this.  Like my life, for example, taking care of Copernicus.”  Hearing his name, the child looked up at the conversation, as though he were involved in it.  “You can’t tell me I can’t take good care of him.  Don’t I have a life?”

 

Mitchel said, “For sure!  For sure I think you do, I really think you’re something, so why else would I be coming by all the time?”

 

“Reasons.”

 

“For many reasons, yes.”

 

“So, your reasons.  Or the reasons.  All amounting to the same, oh, here we are, here we are.”

 

“For now, yes,” said Mitchel.  “And something different to come, I suppose.”

 

“Like this ends.  This, we could end this right away and then what?  Then we would be there, some there or all new here that isn’t yet anything, right?”

 

“Which wouldn’t be reasonable.  Not reasonable.  I would say, ‘Not going to happen.’”

 

Dorothy said, “But it could happen.  Like, I could say, right now, ‘It’s over.’  And it would be.  And wouldn’t be reasonable.”

 

Mitchel told her, “Don’t be unreasonable.  Besides, it would be for the reason that you said it.  You said it’s over.  So one day you would have to admit to yourself that it was your fault.  You said it.”

 

“That brings you satisfaction?”

 

“That’s just the way it is.”

 

“You would be satisfied?”

 

“No,” Mitchel said, “But I would know that you were crazy.  I would know that you went ahead and called it off for no good reason, like on a whim, so at least I could say, ‘That’s why.’”

 

Dorothy said, “So, you’re telling me that I am crazy for saying that there was no reason, or that something happens for no reason of ours?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“But you call me crazy and say, ‘That’s the reason.’  But if the reason is that I’m not reasonable, wouldn’t that make you crazy also?”

 

“No.  Because I say the things that happen do for the reasons I say and you say that it happens for reasons that have nothing to do with either of us.  I say it’s pretty much the same, only I’m more empowered.”

 

Dorothy had so much to say about the topic, which was quite indiscernible to Copernicus, who watched Dorothy and Mitch move into the depths of his home while he remained on the porch.  Perhaps, he speculated, they were talking about something else and somehow started talking about this which, though it had no good purpose, nevertheless reflected upon the topic that was once at hand.  The sun was behind buildings but was still in the sky.  Upon a leaf that swayed beside the banister, a one belonging to a lily in the yard, strode a caterpillar.

 

Copernicus was inspecting the crawler very closely when his name was called from within.  There seemed to be something floral about its tiny motions.  Every limb seemed somehow independent of the rest, performing its small actions for the propulsion of the thing but so very unaware, from the perspective of the rear, of the needs or motions of the front.  So a tree will grow its leaves, which know nothing of the roots that feed them.  Copernicus, moments later, was sitting at the table with a plate full of lasagna.

 

Mitchel had a few more questions.  These were more difficult because they ranged in inquiry beyond experiences Copernicus had encountered, for example, that day.  Copernicus was asked, hypothetically, how he would feel about having a little brother or sister, which was impossible in any case, since he was, for all purposes, an orphan.  Mitchel also asked Copernicus how he would feel living in a different place.  Dorothy was paying a lot of attention to cleaning up the counter space before she sat to eat.

 

Copernicus had lived in only one other space, and at a time when he was not ready to give any thought to the space, but only to have it in his memory, like a dream.  He asked, “How would it be different?”  And Mitchel said that it would look and feel very different; there would be, for example, many different types of plants – there must be.

 

At this point, Copernicus became rather confused.  Had he not different plants where he was already?  How were different plants supposed to make a place somehow different?  “Like in the jungle or under water?”  No, said Mitchel, but different nevertheless.  Copernicus always hoped to be a polite person, and because he really did like all the different plants that were in this place, he said, “I think that another place would be nice.”

 

And then Dorothy interrupted by sitting down and eating, which was a relief to Copernicus, who was at something like a loss for words.  Mitchel was looking at her with a face that seemed expectant, but said that the food was, “Delicious.”  And then they started talking, using phrases like, “You’re not listening to me,” and, “You just don’t get it.”  Copernicus heard and understood these phrases, but not their conversation.  Their concerns were not the same as his, but it was still unpleasant company, so he felt.  When supper was finished, Copernicus cleared his plates and Dorothy said she was sorry to him when he left the room.

 

It was some hours later, though not long after Mitchel had left the house, that Dorothy visited Copernicus in his room.  It was something small and was furnished with a little bed and the desk where he was sitting, turning over the pages of his album.  When she interrupted, he was thinking of a remarkable species he had seen for the first time very recently.  This was the buckthorn, a bramble with long thorns, like spears, which present themselves at the ends of twigs.  The previous night, he had an unpleasant dream that was set in a grove of these hostile plants.  It had involved the threat of wolves and encouraged in him a feeling of loneliness when he awoke.  Copernicus had just decided to return to the grove where he had discovered the buckthorn when his sister sat on his bed and began to look at him with a curious face.

 

In looking, she was trying to tell what he was thinking and feeling.  She was trying to see in him what sort of person he might become.  But there was nothing she could see of that – only her little boy with the serious expression, which he turned to face her.  No, there was very little to see beyond their family resemblance, which caused people to mistake her for his mother, though that should mean that she had delivered at the age of twelve.  And yet it was true, she thought.  What was she if not his mother, whose sacrifice of a certain period of innocence, as she undertook responsibility for this other life, granted him his own.  What she had lost as a result of her protective spirit, she attempted to experience vicariously.

 

She had no passion, for example, for botany.  But she did understand that its significance, for Copernicus, was a big as his world.  Thus, this was the world that she preserved for him as though, by a strange force of logic, she had personified a mother of Earth.

 

Copernicus was talking to her about his dream and of his plan to confront this fearful place, to shed some light of science upon the shadows there.  And Dorothy listened, but with only the slightest of attentions, which she excused insofar as this was the way in which he always spoke to her.  She listened to him, but was thinking about herself, of her concerns and of how to balance the state of things as they were with the state of things to come, if they were to come, if she were to allow them to come.  It was terrible of Mitchel, she decided, to press the mind of Copernicus in any way.  He, who knew nothing of the world, should not be asked his opinion of it.  How was she to act as she pleased, how create some change in her own life without also deconstructing this other life, the one whose security it was her duty to protect?

 

Meanwhile, Copernicus had begun to tire and rubbed his eyes to push away the feeling that began to settle in them; Dorothy asked him if he would like to go to bed.  His words were that he would not like to sleep yet, to which Dorothy replied, “Copernicus, bed time.”  The child consented, provided she was willing to stay in his room for a little while because, if she were there, he would not have bad dreams.  And so a deal was struck between them.  Copernicus arose and scampered away to brush his teeth good.

 

Dorothy moved to his desk, where she leafed through a portion of his collection, from which she hoped, again, to discern some hint of the adult who might appear from within the confines of the child’s body.  She could hear, emanating from the toilet, the soft humming of the tune, “London Bridge,” which Copernicus faithfully sung five times over when cleaning his teeth.  Her gaze followed the order of his specimens, which was composed according to the date of their discovery and marked by a small note regarding the circumstance.  The children’s song settled across her mind while she read, “Cottonwood, a clear day near the river,” and “Copper beech, the Park, two kind of bird inside,” et cetera.  She imagined him out and about with his little notebook and felt proud of his steadfast nature and wondered, for neither the first nor the last, whether it was safe for him to go play so unsupervised.  She concluded, again, that it was neither safe nor wise, but that it was the case despite.

 

Presently, he made his return and beamed at her to show he had done it.  “You’re the best,” she told him, “Now get to bed.”

 

“OK,” he said, “Don’t look,” he intoned.  Dorothy stopped looking while he changed to pajamas.  That was a concern that had developed only recently.

 

Copernicus got in bed and read in his book, a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  But he did not get far along before he closed it and said to his sister, “You’re never afraid of anything.  I can’t wait to grow up and be never afraid like you.”

 

“Growing up doesn’t mean you stop being afraid.  You just start to be afraid of other things.”

 

“Like what are you afraid of?”

 

“Oh, you know.  Other people.  Life.  I don’t know.  Practical stuff, like being good enough to do what I’m supposed to.  Knowing even what I’m supposed to do.”

 

“I’m afraid of wolves.”

 

“Me too, I guess.”

 

“So, you’re still scared?”

 

“Well, I’m not actually afraid of wolves.  Do you know what I mean by that?”

 

“Yeah.  Like if I were being afraid of sharks, that would be silly.”

 

“Exactly.”  For a moment, Dorothy watched him.  It was obvious to her that what she had to say meant very little to him, that their concerns were too different for normal conversation.  Dorothy felt that she could essentially speak freely.  She sat on his bed.

 

“I don’t know,” she said, “What am I supposed to do with my self.  My time, my life.  How am I supposed to know what to do?”  Copernicus looked at her with compassion but without understanding.  “I guess you just do what you do.”

 

He said, “I like to look at plants.”

 

“I know you do,” she said, “You should keep doing that so long as you like to do it.  I don’t know what I like to do any more.  Maybe I’ve forgotten what.  Does that sound horrible?”

 

“I don’t know.  If you forgot, you wouldn’t remember what you were missing.  And that isn’t bad.  But still I hope that I don’t forget that I like plants.  But only because I like plants so much.”

 

“I don’t think that you will forget,” said Dorothy.

 

“Then how come you forgot?  If you forgot then why won’t I?”

 

“Honey, I didn’t really forget.  I just started to have other concerns.  I have all these responsibilities now and I don’t know how to take care of myself for them.  Or doing them has turned into the way that I take care of myself.  And so I am still doing the same thing.  Only now, instead of being with friends, playing sports and stuff like I used to do, I work and shop and cook or whatever.  Difference is, it isn’t so much fun.”

 

“Well, what about Mitch?  Don’t you like him and hang out and everything?”

 

“Mitch?  Mitch is fine.  But he is just a boy.  He still wants to have fun, and still can, if he decides to.  The fact is, I don’t have time to do all that stuff that he imagines.”

 

“You two aren’t having fun?”

 

“I know, so what’s the point, right?  It’s like, Mitch thinks that the life that we could have is a game.  Like a game of being grownups.  But we already are grownups and that is what he doesn’t understand yet.  He still wants to ‘be a man,’ but I don’t know what that means to him.”  Copernicus was not understanding again.  None of that had any meaning for him and so he had started to drift to sleep.

 

“Copernicus,” said Dorothy, retrieving him from the first starts of sleep, “I love you and I won’t stop keeping you as safe as I can.  But there might be some changes.  We might have to move to a new city, a new place.  Maybe we will start a new family, have a little home.  I don’t know.  That’s what people do, that’s what we might do, if I decide it.  But if that happens, I’ll still take good care of you, OK?”

 

Copernicus nodded his head in affirmation, but did not really understand what Dorothy was trying to tell him.  How did any of that change his life, which would be the same no matter where he went?  So far as he could tell, this life was not something that changed for anybody until it was the person that changed.  Dorothy was not about to change, and this stability of personality was what he found most comforting about her.  So, she was afraid that some change would come whereas there would be none, “Nothing’s going to change for us,” he murmured sleepily.

 

Dorothy did not understand and Copernicus’ naiveté did something to break her up.  She knew that there was a big change coming and that, however her protective opinions were inflamed by them, she perceived this change as inevitable.  Despite that it was her power to decide, just as it was hers to keep Copernicus from wandering, Dorothy understood that this situation would seem to enact itself in the way of a fate.  Her infant would come; Mitch would probably become a man; they would move; Copernicus, inevitably, would cease to be a little boy.  For now, however, he slept.  Likely, he dreamed of insects.

 

Feeling the loneliness of her relation to her fate, Dorothy left Copernicus to his nocturnals and left the light on in the hall according to his erstwhile fears.  This protective illumination, although he rarely desired it any longer, was what she could provide.  And then Dorothy went to bed to sleep; despite sleeping, she was responsible for the time to come.

 

The morning, in the fashion of the days, came.  Copernicus awoke and dressed himself in his summer uniform: three-quarter length corduroys and madras plaid button up tee.  His rucksack rested against the post of his door and Dorothy was in the kitchen over oatmeal, eggs and OJ.  They ate breakfast together.  Dorothy also drank coffee, which was her habit.  The morning was still early, which was not a conception that Copernicus had yet developed.  But it was Dorothy’s, who was readying for her work at the IGA.  “Your lunch is in the fridge, have a good day.  I’ll see you tonight,” she said on her way out the door.  They did not talk about the previous night.

 

And so Copernicus set out for the day, his brown bag tucked away and his boots laced tightly.  Though Orion had not yet showed his starry figure in the night, the season was reaching its end, reaching toward the cooler months.  And so the child, however it was of little concern to him, was comfortable as he walked to the bus.  There was nobody who paid him any mind and Copernicus was left to watch the familiar species stream along, to judge the quality of the morning’s light, which was clear and bright through dry air.  The day was remarkably ideal, he thought, for flowers.

 

The buckthorn grove was located across town, past the river, in a park called after Lafayette, who, in the service of the ancient French monarchy during the American Revolution, played the role of general serving beneath George Washington.  This much, and insofar as it recalled the excitement of the battlefield, was of historical interest for Copernicus.  The way there involved a path that would send the boy through a desolate section of the city which the park did little to revitalize.  Even on a day as beautiful as that one, it would be uncrowded.  As a result, the park itself tended to be unkempt, its fountains, for example, dry and filled by broken glass.  At night, it was considered a dangerous place to be, infested with unsavory types.

 

So, when Copernicus arrived on the scene, he found the place unoccupied.  The grove stood toward the far corner of the park, which was otherwise occupied by sports fields, tennis courts, walk ways, and a public latrine.  These Copernicus bypassed at an efficient rate until he arrived by the picnic area, which perched on the outskirts of the buckthorns.  There he discovered his lunch: a ham and cheese, an apple, a juice box and small cookies.

 

While he ate, Copernicus observed common Lepidoptera, the larvae of which feasted, he knew, upon the meat of the buckthorn trees.  He watched familiar birds winging within and without the few trees that scattered the grove about.  He tried, by glancing, to penetrate its shadows, seeking movement.  But there was nothing that stood out but for the sounds of the starlings and those of distant cars strumming down highways not too far.  One half or a little less of his lunch he saved away for later and then sat to observe once again.  At one o’clock or thereabouts, something startled the crows from their perches and they went wheeling and then settled once more.  Copernicus made a notation of the time, a brief schematic of their counter-clockwise motion, and an approximate duration of their startling: three minutes.  He did not make note of the sensation he felt in watching them for the reason that it was of private importance and a matter of no scientific concern.  And yet the trepidation aroused in him by the murder was the reason he was there.

 

Surely it could have been the wolf that had startled them from the roost.  That it should be a possibility could not be dismissed.  Although it was of the afternoon, the moon was up high, a visible gibbous waxing.  The wolf is a nocturnal creature, it is true.  But they do not, by this fact, disappear by the day.  And the moon, though it is associated with a kingdom of night, is not exiled by its popular reign from the space of the day.  The wolf, if just for its friendly association with the lunar surface, had every reason to be awake, therefore, and might have haunted the buckthorn forest that very afternoon.  Such were the reasonings of the child Copernicus.

 

About the table he sought and found several strong rocks and filled his pockets.  Although he was there to overcome his fears, he would not be going about unarmed.  Into to grove he strolled, hatching plans as he went.  Primarily, his thoughts were of himself in the role of Peter, minus the grandfather, the duck, bird, and the cat.  He hummed the tune and he imagined the worst scenario, in which he would be forced to take the refuge of a tree.  Entering the forest, he held Peter’s theme before him as a shield against certain possibilities of which he did not dare even to think.

 

Within the grove, the air was much cooler and held a damp.  At times, he would stop and peer about the space, but all that was revealed was the sudden appearance of mosquitoes, as though sprung from the invisible to pester his flesh.  Through the forest and brambles, small beams of the sun made odd columns, surrounding which the grove grew its darkest.  Copernicus crept through, working his feet to be silent within the scatters of sticks and dry leaves, watchful for what might come running from behind.  But there were no sounds but for those he was helpless to make.

 

Near the center of the grove stood a relic, likely killed by the encroaching buckthorns, a great oak long dead and filled by the crows, which began their calls upon the child’s approach.  This, if any place should be, would be the place where the wolf made its lair.  This was the place where, upon a time, the child began his fantasy of the wild creature.  It was the epicenter, not of the grove, but of a nightmarish topography to which Copernicus himself played host.  And so the oak was the true and inner destination of his travel, though Copernicus was unaware of this fate until he caught its sight.  His courage, however tried, did not fail.  He approached it with some caution, determined to spend some time there, and hunched down between two roots.

 

From this perspective, his back against the trunk of the oak, the forest appeared quite different.  It had become quieter, but this was due to his having stopped moving through it.  Somehow, in walking, the sounds he heard the most were his own, of his blood and his breath which, in sitting still, faded into a background against which the sounds of the place drew forward.  But the sound that was available just then was merely that of an arboreal quietude, interrupted by strangely electronic calls of the common birds.

 

Copernicus, relieved by this change in scenery, decided that it would be a good spot from which to finish his lunch, and withdrew from his pouch its remainder.  With his sandwich in hand and with this new perspective upon the buckthorn grove, the fear and the mystery of its wolf began to dissipate.  He did not begin to enjoy the time but did seem to gain, as he did upon the little forest, a new perspective upon himself.  And so, while his fear remained, it also acquired a new quality, an aspect of silliness or play.  The child did not, however, begin to emit something like nervous laughter.  Rather, he felt a certain satisfaction: that his mission had been successful, as though he had already conquered the legendary wolf.

 

But, as he sat within his satisfaction, beginning to admire the formidable brambles that held the place their captive, there issued the sound of a fearsome crashing to his rear, the noise of a thing of speed and strength somewhere behind the rotting oak.  At the sound, Copernicus was upon his feet and they, without conscious command, began to impel the boy in the direction opposite the creature of his terrors.  When he became aware of his situation, he halted suddenly, recalling the plan hatched through his association with the symphonic boy-hero, Peter, who had beaten a wolf.

 

Thus collected, Copernicus made a dash to the nearest best tree, which was a great honey locust with branches fit for good climbing.  Copernicus, in his panic and flight, had no recollection or remembrance of the species and saw in it only the form of his safety.  He leaped up to hoist his body to Peter’s safe spot and cried out with a fearful pain, his hands pierced and scraped by the nasty defense this tree had evolved for the purpose, once, of discouraging prehistoric megafauna like the giant sloth, and now, of preventing children from mounting its limbs.  The scent of his blood, thought Copernicus, would be in the air.  Pausing to listen Copernicus perceived the bounding animal to have paused also, (likely it had begun to snuff his scent about its oaken lair), and then begin to give chase his way.

 

Copernicus, again riding legs that knew no master, strove to flank the forest monster, and traveled in a dangerous arc that would, he hoped, lead him to the safety of the one tree he thought could save him – the one made a home of by his wolf.  The buckthorns that grew about the way to safety slashed and jabbed like botanical rapiers and their swordsmen, loyal to the beast whose home was their ward.  Their tugging and tearing at his clothes, but not the pains of the flesh that they inflicted, did their work to slow his progress.  The wolf, meanwhile, as though with the force of its instincts, had begun to redouble and was, therefore, in a race to the oak.  Safety had appeared before the fleet Copernicus, who had entered the clearing at full tilt.

 

There were, perhaps, another five yard to travel when Copernicus was bowled by the heave of the matted wolf.  The wolf recovered from its leap before the boy could from his fall and Copernicus had hardly the time to emit a shriek, perhaps the word, “Help!” ere the dog was upon his chest with its frightful bay, its victorious joy, snapping its teeth about the child’s eyes and ears.

 

In addition to the noise of the wolf, which was toying with its victim, amid the child’s pleas for aid, there came the sound of a crashing-tromping through the brier.  In his delirium of the beastly dripping gray muzzle, Copernicus could not help but to associate these crashes with the timpani of the hunters.  Who, arriving, drawn perhaps by the boy, perhaps by the wolf, came calling, “Hey!  Hey!  Ira!  Ira, come!”  The wolf, perhaps but moments from crushing the spine or the skull of small Copernicus, bounded off in response to the new threat.

 

Copernicus, through tears of pain and dismay, witnessed with horror how his cries had endangered another, after whom the wolf dashed.  And then watched with curiosity that the beast allowed itself to be leashed and secured to a lead, as though the creature and the hunter had reached a weird alliance, contradictory to their natural roles or else revelatory of a truer relation that they must undertake in order to perform the ritual deception of the hunt.  The child, still beside himself with his experience, saw both aspects of the relation of the hunter and the wolf at the same instant, as though the scene had been captured in a double exposure that produced a senseless composition, an arbitrary juxtaposition of the domestic and the wild.

 

“Hey kid, you alright?  Ira didn’t mean nothing by.  Just playing, that’s all.  Really, wouldn’t hurt nobody.  Hey, you OK kiddo?”  The hunter, with a firm hand on the scruff of the wolf called Ira, came near to Copernicus, who was wiping at his eyes.  “Kid, you alright?  Looks like the brambles got you pretty good.  Right?  Wasn’t Ira did that to you, no.  But sure he scared you good, right Ira?  Boy?  Sit!”  The dog sat when the man told it to.  “Ira gave you a scare, huh?  Hey, he was only trying to play, he thought you were playing.  You understand?  Got pretty scratched up back there, you know that?  Hey, what are you doing out in the brambles anyhow, right kid?”  Copernicus had nothing to say, but he sat up.  “Why don’t you get back with your family, alright?  You need your mamma to take a look at your scrapes.  Need hydrogen peroxide to clean them out, you know?  It stings for real, but you need it so that you don’t get infected.  She out in the park right now?  Hey, what’s your name kid.”  Thus spoke the hunter.

 

“Copernicus,” Copernicus said.

 

“It’s Miles,” said the hunter, who shook hands with the child by dragging him to his feet.  “Hey, I’m sorry Ira gave you that scare, I know he can be scary.  Hey, you want me to walk with you out of here?”  Copernicus gave his assent and they all began to march back towards the open park, Copernicus in the lead, pointing out the different plants and naming them for Miles as they went, Ira on his leash in the rear of their line, following them up with its strange docility.

 

Whether in the brambles or in the clear, it was somewhere that the man with the dog understood that Copernicus was in the park alone.  He, with his dog, accompanied the child all the way to the bus stop and, waiting alongside, aimless talking, passed the time for the proper ride to arrive.

 

Once on the bus, Copernicus regained an aspect of his self-consciousness.  He became aware of the sight of him, marked by dirt and leaves and little, painless scrapes.  He became aware of the weight of the rocks in his pockets and felt them with his hands.  They had been unnecessary, a hindrance.  Perhaps he should have employed them.  Copernicus thought about the hunter and the prey, the master and the domestic beast.  He wondered whether, if one role was being covered over by another, were the actors aware of both at once; whether one act was meant to imply the other; wondered if the hunter, like himself, only knew a one of his roles at a time.

 

It was late afternoon when Copernicus arrived again at his home.  Dorothy was still at work and was not due to be home for another three quarters on an hour.  Copernicus took the rocks from his pockets, a total of seven, all igneous in kind, and created a small pile upon his desk.  He then undressed and showered, emerging from his trial with but minor evidence of his scrapes and just a something of his dirt – only what one might expect of a young and amateur botanist.

 

And so, when Dorothy came to their home, she received neither shock nor worry regarding her child’s safety.  She was given no cause more than what her imaginations suggested to her for saying to him, “Everything OK sweetie?  How was your day in the park?”  However clean, Copernicus was not yet composed, (nor had he discovered a need for composure).  He ran to his sister for a big hug, of which Dorothy always had a plenty where it concerned her boy.  “Hey, C, what’s wrong?  Nobody hurt you, right?”  Copernicus was dumb but shook his head to negate her fears.  “Well,” she said, “Maybe you had a big old day, but my day was same way it always is.  You hungry for dinner?”  So saying, she went to the kitchen and started about.

 

Copernicus had no interest in the affairs of Dorothy’s life.  Having no content, so far as he was of concern, it was only sensible that every one of her days should be the same.  So, while she was cooking, Copernicus gave her a rambling and apparently fantastic account of his journey to the crosstown park and of his encounter with the wolf named Ira.  Because the things he had thought of had no bearing upon her question, Copernicus told her of everything that had happened but not of everything of which he had since considered – how was his day in the park?  He told her that he had an adventure.

 

At the kitchen counter they sat down to a meal of pasta, which was a favorite for the both of them.  Copernicus had set the table; Mitchel had taught him to set and use a spoon in the consumption of spaghetti.  Dorothy, who had nothing of interest to say about her day, began to talk about her thoughts.  “Copernicus, when you grow up, you won’t have any more games to play.  Everything will be for real.”

 

“What do you mean?  We play all the time – like remember when you said that you had amnesia and couldn’t remember anything and had me show you how to do everything like how to cook and what your name is?  That was playing…”

 

“You’re right.  I was playing then.  But there will be a lot of other things.  Like work.  Just because you won’t like it will not mean you won’t have to do it.”

 

“But I don’t like school but still have to do it.  And besides, when you are doing work, couldn’t you call it a game, so that when you are at home, that’s what real life is?”

 

Dorothy said, “I think that’s just the thing, C.  Suddenly, it’s like I’ve got a real life and a fake life, like I’ve got more than one life.  I remember from being a kid having just one life, and it didn’t change at all depending on where I went or on what I did.”

 

For some time, Copernicus remained silent.  It was true, he thought, people have only one life, there is no way for it to be split into easy multiples.  Copernicus ate his pasta.  And then he said, “But if there is a ‘real life,’ then aren’t the other ones pretend?  Like people who are actors in real life can be something else in a play but they still know who they really are.  Like, something lets them be another thing, like putting on a costume.”

 

“Sure, at first maybe it’s like that.  But, if you pretend at being something for long enough it’s like that’s what you turn into.  Or you forget that you’re pretending, so that suddenly everything you do is something for real, for life.  I don’t know, C, but there’s a difference between being a kid and being grown.”

 

“So it’s like a kid who is pretending to be something else is still a kid but a grown up does something and, even though it’s weird, it isn’t pretend any more.”

 

“Exactly, and so everybody takes grownups very seriously.”

 

“Why?”

 

Dorothy said, “What’s the difference?  It’s that the things that grownups do are about other people.  When what you do is going to change or make a difference for someone else, it becomes real.  That’s a big responsibility, so everybody takes adults very seriously.”

 

Copernicus, having finished his dinner, excused himself from the table and brought his dish to the sink and started to tidy the kitchen.  He tried to imagine a life that was fragmented by the activities it bore out, but imagining it was already like pretending.  He compared Dorothy at work with the man and his dog, playing at being hunter and hunted, enacting a totally different role from her one at home and yet, to her, living out a life at home and at work as though they were equally real.  He found, however, that it was impossible for him to relate.  Dorothy had started to help clean about and, when everything was back in its place, she said, “Hey, Copernicus, how about dessert?”

 

The brother and sister left the house seeking ice creams.  The shop was not too far away for walking and, ices purchased, they sat outside to pass their time.

 

Dorothy said to him, “C, I have decided that we should move.  That’s the only way we’ll be able to live for real.  The only way I know, for sure, how to make things change.  I think I can make them change for the better, too.”

 

“With Mitch?” asked Copernicus.

 

“With or without, C, whether or not.”

 

At last, Dorothy was talking in a way that struck Copernicus as having good sense.  Because that was the only way, according to his views, to talk about the future.  There will always be something else that comes about, thought he, we will always be up to something.  Of this, there was a good deal of certainty, and this is what guarantees that everything should stay the same.  The only question that remained concerned the details, the odd scenery that composed an eternal set.  It should all remain the same forever, just – with, or without; with or without.

Of Innocence & of Experience

Who is she, yes, who sits there so cool.  She will be mine, or so I’ll tell her in some words or more.  There; a seat for the sitting in, proximal.  A small place, you see, where one cannot be too offended in matters of space, where certain strangers cannot help but take some notice of the neighbors.

The spot is achieved.  At this distance, I cannot smell her, but just.  She has not yet glanced up.  If she has seen me already, she cannot yet know that the same has just taken residence beside her from.  That is, she is acting as though she in engrossed in a copy of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence & of Experience, a book I happen to be familiar with as a result of my private studies.  How beneficial: a commonality, outwards apparent to me, but with the potential to seem to be quite ‘deep’ between us.

She is only pretending to read.  I have caught her in that brief moment when she is being cognizant of my stranger’s presence.  “A great book,” I comment, by way of introduction.  “I am especially fond of the one called Earth’s Answer.”

She does not smile right away.  Perhaps I had interrupted too soon?  But she smiles, yes, the book is excellent, of course it is.  “Are you a Blake fan,” she asks, though she might already have known my answer.  It was by way of making conversation, then.  “This is my first time reading him, except, you know – The Tyger, The Lamb.  Actually, I’m not finished reading the Songs of Innocence yet, so I’m just only starting now.  So far, I don’t understand what the big deal is.”

Her teeth show while she speaks and look sharp and capable, like those of a good kisser, of drawing blood.  Her eyes angle slightly, implying perhaps an eastern European lineage.  Though it has nothing to do with Blake, I cannot help but wonder if these are what is meant by “Kyrgyz eyes.”  I am becoming distracted.  The topic is, of course, innocence.  “From our perspective, it is very difficult to grasp the significance of the songs of innocence without the aid of the songs of experience.”  While I speak, her eyes travel from my eyes to my lips and back.  I wonder whether she is distracted by something she sees and find that I am not speaking very well.  I am saying that there is ‘something about’ the songs of innocence that is important but that I am unable to say just what.

“They’re children’s poems,” she says, “They have no content.”  For the most part, what she says it true.  One might want to make an exception for a one like The Chimney Sweeper, with the chorus “Weep weep!  Weep weep,” this being an odd find among the hearty and glad little odes to children.  But I am not going to point this out.  She is, for the most part, correct in her assessment.  So I will agree with her.

“A daring critique to make,” I tell her, whose eyes smile from within what I consider to be a generally serious and very pretty visage.  “Given that the author is held in such respect and that the work has survived the centuries.  It would be as if Dr. Seuss were to be handed down the generations and ultimately become revered as a genius the very like of Blake, or Shakespeare before him.”  There, a challenge, an empty thing.  Now, I have to presume, she will knock it down.  Maybe this will only be the first satisfaction that I grant her, given a little time.

“What one culture finds value in is nothing for me to judge,” she says.  I think that this is a very smart reply and am impressed, and this feeling is probably evident on my face, which can be expressive when I so desire.  She smiles after my appreciations.  “I trust that some of his other works are of a more worthy character,” she says, “But I doubt that these ones, if they were to stand alone, would stand in something like the admiration of the masses.  As a contemporary, I would prefer Seuss.”

“Their value is not apparent, you are right, if they were to ‘stand alone,’ as you say.  But they do not, they stand always next to the songs of experience, which are full of content, but only due to this comparison.  That is, none of these poems have content minus the other set, or have no more content than a mere perspective.  Instead, it is by the comparison of those two perspective that a criticism arises, wherein the content.”  I could see that I spoke too well, too definitely.  Her pretty eyes were glazed a little and I understand that the conversation has reached an end.  “Anyways, I hope you end up enjoying them eventually, so long has you are giving him a try,” I say.

I get out my book, a copy of Salinger’s Nine Stories that I am reading for the second time, in selections.  It is my turn to pretend to read for a while.  She gets on as well, and eventually emits a small ‘hmph’ sound to indicate that she has found something.  I look up to see her looking at, or pretending to look at, one of the pictures from which she is reading.  “What is it?” I ask her.  She shakes her head a little, as though she were dazed by the transition between the world of her little poems and that of the café with the interesting stranger.  I decide she is definitely faking her read.

“It’s the one called Infant Joy,” she tells me.  “This one gave me something, a feeling of pity, like, or of happiness.  That feeling you get when you see that little smile that babies make, like melting.”

“As though Blake got something about innocence, right?  Something like sadness when I read that poem, as though I were missing something that the baby still has.”

“Yeah.  You are not able to say, ‘I happy am,’ in just the right way.  The infant has that feeling in a way that you have no access to except as a thing that has gone missing.”  She frowns and looks down at the surface of her book as though the object would give her words, or the courage to say the ones that she had already formed.  This dramatic pause in her oration I did not interrupt, but took to look at the way in which her neck disappeared into her loose collar.  “It gives me a feeling but I don’t know what it is, but there is something I used to have.”

I tell her, “Hmm, I know what you mean,” but am lying to her.  I paid no attention to what she was saying because I was trying to figure a way of talking to her in a different context, outside of this place, some way of meeting wherein a kiss would not be untoward.

She looks at my book and then at me and I blush a little for the sake of talking at all to this person.  I hope that she notices my blush and reads in rightly – that my body is saying what I am not with my words, cannot with my words, that I find her to be so that I have lost my ability to speak to her, really.  She says, “Always, when I read Salinger, I get this same sort of feeling.  Or something similar, in any case.  But with Salinger, it is easier to know what one is missing whereas, with Blake, that thing strikes me as being all the more intangible.”  She is looking down at my book, or perhaps at my hands, holding it, and I hope that it is the latter.  I hope that she is blushing a little because she is talking to me, but it is difficult to tell because I cannot look her in the face directly right now.  And so I shut my eyes and try to think a little about Salinger, about the comparison she is making.  But there are no thoughts coming.

“With Salinger, yes,” I say.  “The thing that has gone missing is lamented from this very specific point of view.  You might want to call it the viewpoint of the bullshitter.  That is, the person who knows very well that they cannot get to the point any more.  The bullshitter who can only stop when the world has become to terrible that he can only shatter, not change, but only fall to pieces.”

“But Blake believed that we aren’t so doomed, right?  That we can still have some access to the missing element that is only had by children and idiots or savants like the Glass family.”  She is looking at me with a gaze of such clarity, so earnestly that I feel that something has finally happened between us that would bring us out of this awkward start, something that could make an intimacy between us after all.  I wonder what I can do to make this expression a lasting one, to extend beyond the confines of the café and its intellectual conversation.

“Actually, I think that, regarding the issue of innocence anyhow, Blake and Salinger were really on a very similar path.  They both thought that we are pretty much cursed by the loss of innocence.  For sure Salinger read Blake, for sure the kids of the Glass family read Blake.  But what Blake saw as a metaphysical problem or a poetical one, Salinger saw as a more psychological one.”

I sill have no idea what her name is.  It seems to me that when people are going to meet in person or otherwise more than once, they usually know the names of the stranger-person.  Unless I am soon to learn her name, the situation should be considered a hopeless one, so far as I am concerned.

“Blake reminds me of the Glass kids, like.  Salinger seems to me more to want to be like that than he really was like that.  Maybe that is the real difference between them.”

“I don’t know,” I tell her.  “Sometimes it seems to me that they are both very similar.  Salinger couldn’t be giving us the feeling that he does if he weren’t really conscious of these issues.  They just had different ways for dealing with their problems.  Like, Salinger is more interested in pathos and affect than Blake, who was full of it, but who could have no real way of naming it as such.  In a way, you could consider Blake simply the more ‘innocent’ of the two of them.”

She is casting her eyes from side to side in the air, as though reading what I had just spoken, or as though comparing physically this difference between Blake and Salinger.  To me, it seemed as though this would likely be as good a moment as any to make my necessary interruption.  “Hey,” I say to her, “What’s your name?  I’m Paulie, I say, and hold my hand out for shaking.  She is jolted by the interruption and she holds my hand for a moment and thereby I forget what she calls herself when she does.

What is certain is that she calls herself something.  But what is unclear to me because I realize that I have lost it, she has lost interest in me.  I gave myself away when asked for her name, which is impossible for me to know any more.  She said, after she told me her name something like, “Anyhow,” or, “You know,” or something else with an ellipsis at the end of it to indicate that she wants to get back to her reading, to her personal life, into which I am not to be invited.  I told her my name, and that is where I went wrong.  I had tried to extend my fantasy, and she had suspicions written with her expression.

I get back to my reading also, as though to perform a mutual and polite retreat from the situation.  I am reading Salinger and she reads William Blake and this has, in itself, something of a romantic appeal.  But this appeal was an impersonal one, like  a picture or a little story, having nothing to do with my desires nor my experience.  Instead, it was to be the story of two strangers of similar taste, like passers-by.  I drink my coffee and she finishes hers and looks at her watch to indicate her time and her intentions, not to me, but generally, as though gesturing to herself.  At this time, I am honestly trying to pay attention to what I am reading, thus indicating to her that her rejection is acceptable, as though she had been rejected in kind and with equanimity.

“I’ve got to head out,” she says to me, “Maybe I’ll see you here again some time.”  She is really quite beautiful, or so it seems to me; she is being friendly to me.  So I give my affirmative nod: perhaps so.  “What’s your name again, hey?  So sorry I’m terrible with,” says she.  “I’m Paulie, “ I say, “I hope I’ll see you around”  “I’m Molly,” she says to me with a smile, and departs.  For a moment, watching her make her way, I think to myself about the possibility, about some second and unlikely meeting, when something more would happen than happened today.  But such an event would likely not be so engaging as this one if ever we met again.

I return to my reading as though I were alone in the coffee shop, feeling relieved and content, as if nothing had changed at all.

Sounds and Places

The place is within the range of my hearing.  But this could be due to the tricks of the surrounding architecture.  It could be just around the bended corner or else much farther away but in a direct line, and appears to me like a call or a train at the far reach of a lengthy tunnel.  The place, one suspects, is creative of a most particular atmospheric density.  If this suspicion should hold true, then one would be justified also in some conclusions regarding the travel of sound.  As with the case of whalesound, which occurs always under water, perhaps the sounds of the place are able to travel the vastest distance with only the slightest of dissipations and degradations.  Localization proves difficult.  For example, even if the sound were directed from around the bend, it would seem to me to be coming from the fore.  And then, if it should not be a bend, but a crossroads, I would undoubtedly make my way as best I could, however wrongly.  And then, when the sound would reappear, it should seem to come suddenly behind.  I should think, then, that I had surpassed the place accidentally, as though I had been wandering forth in a daze of thoughts!  I should retrace my steps, redoubling my attentions upon my objective, the place.  And do so, redoubling until, once again, it seems to appear from behind.  Even if I were to guess correctly and have taken the proper turn at a given time or way, I would still have no right to consider my situation objectively closer, given the tricks of sound I have already mentioned.  There is also the following possibility – that the place in my hearing I am seeking does not rest upon the paths I have chosen, it seems, to travel.  And this possibility seems to stir simultaneous conclusions.  These are that the sounds I am imagining have their occurrence primarily in the locale of my experience alone.  And else that I am hearing of a place that is merely along different paths that cannot be reached via the ones I journey.  And yet it is clear to all that these I travel are those and those only which exist!  The soundest logical following gestures, in this case, that the place within earshot, also, does likely not exist.

Slow Glowing Mudslide

There is something moving slowly along the way of the sidewalk.  It is a viscous sort of slime that is drooling down the hillside.  Generally, the passers-by pretend not to notice the sparkling mud that is sliding along opposite their direction.  It smells of cleaning solutions.  It leaves behind it a trail of sickness and the swarm of new life.  Death and infants are its terrible effects.  Slowly it oozes from the earth to the surface, where it roils unseemly in the strange purity of the light of day.  It oozes from between cracks in the sidewalk because of the subterranean pressures that have been building up for so much time, perhaps days.  It cannot help itself.  Like the rest of us, it has no choice but to exist.  And it was produced just the way that the rest of us were, by others.  Produced and producing helplessly, like the rest of us.  It is the product of so many sexual encounters with the ground.  The soft wet peat of the early spring which so many of us found appealing.  Yes, we fertilized the world discretely in our back yards, around dusk, just when all the colors seem to blend together, when actions are the most likely to go unnoticed for the reason that so much seems to be the same.  That is, one body into the next, one state to another, all melded into an impersonal oeuvre just after sunset but before the night sets in.  There is a space of time but the space itself seems to melt away beneath something lacking distinction. 

This tide of incandescent gloop seems to me to be headed the very way in which my house sits, here at the bottom of the hill, where it is prone to floods and other natural disasters.  At its gaining rate and volume, it is possible that, within the hour, I should be walking through the soft sweet grass wearing my rubbers for protection.  By the time that we are cast in moonlight, the sticky gelatin will not merely be slowly stirring in clods and pools about the yard, but will seep also beneath the door and begin to wash the windows with its whitening caress.  The dawn will come after this sleepless night of physical rubbings, of the walls and windows, this night of seepage, within the basement and up through the pipes and drains that fill the house with its sound and heavy damp.  And the place will be called the site of an emergency, its occupants trapped and potentially suffocated by the mess that has covered their dwelling.  The strangers, relieved by my plight of their ignorance but not of their loathing, will look on with the look of idle curiosity, as though wondering, thankful, “What if it had been me in there?  What then?  This poor fellow,” they will think, “trapped by some irrepressible nature, has got what was coming to him.”

The Birth of an Idea

We have reached some conclusions.  The conclusions are sitting damply in the morning with pieces of egg cracked and red on the ground around them.  These conclusions that the birds have given to us.  We will be eating conclusions for breakfast today, fried or scrambled usually, but a little different this time.  For they are more usually just the shadows of conclusions, still and dormant where they were left by their feathered grantors.  This morning we have on our hands fully-fledged ideas.  At first, we were tempted to raise them and keep them fed, to see and to have what it is like to retain these useful pets.  There was something awkward and cute about their little moist bodies, at once ethereal and yet imbued with meaning such that they seemed real.  But it was not long before you suggested that they might be more trouble than they could be worth and we all agreed.  Ideas for how to cook them up were debated briefly but we all knew that spitting and roasting made for the most romantic of ways to go about.  Soon enough they were attached, pierced by the tines of long forks ideal for the procedure.  They bled a little – they were no longer sound conclusions.  Also, no longer cute, but, charred and puffed with the heat, they looked less like living things than good food.  Soon enough we had stuffed ourselves and then sat giddy with bright red cheeks, picking aspects of flesh from our teeth and laughing gutturally, my hearty friends and I.