Verses for the Dead

21

He stood motionless in the humid darkness, all senses alert. He was aware of the faint breeze, now at last turning cool, as twilight became night, drying the perspiration on the nape of his neck. He was aware of various smells, some sharp and close, others farther away: crushed grass, roasting pork, diesel, salt water, cigar smoke. His mind tuned in the fragments of sound that enveloped him: the blatt of a boat horn, distant laughter, thumping bachata from a discotheque, angry acceleration of a motorcycle, screech of brakes. Most of all, he was aware of the light: at night, it seemed rare, precious — more real. You didn’t notice light during the day; you were immersed in it; you put on your sunglasses and ignored it. But at night it was different. Darkness was like the setting of a gemstone, and the qualities of light were as numerous as its colors: soft, low, intense, gauzy, tremulous. The sodium streetlamps; the high-rise stacks of light that were the hotels; the yachts whose mooring lights gleamed out of the velvety darkness of the creek. He was most comfortable in the dark, because he could become safe, invisible, and unnoticed. This anonymity was a cloak that deserted him in the day, and he had to guard against the resulting exposure. He had learned this long ago, through painful experience and through the Lessons. It was the dark, and the nonexistence it conferred, that made it possible to do his sacred duty — to complete the Action that was as necessary to him as breathing. Action... this moment of being a nobody wrapped in the night was the best time, when he could forget the shame and regret and be in the moment, his senses heightened without fear. While preparation was meticulous, the Action itself could never truly be predicted. Always there were variations, surprises. It was like poetry in that way; you never knew where a great poem would lead. It was like a battle in which the outcome was obscured in fog and smoke — the “poem as a field of action,” as William Carlos Williams wrote.

The running lights of a passing boat swept through the tree branches, and he pressed himself against the trunk, melting farther into the whispering darkness. The approaching Action made him think of Archy and Mehitabel, who lived in the deep, reinforced pockets of his cargo pants. As a child, before the Death and the Journey, he had read and loved the little books about Archy and Mehitabel, their humorous verses and stories — Archy, a free-verse poet who’d been reincarnated as a cockroach, and Mehitabel, a scruffy alley cat. He identified with them both. They were nobodies, too; vermin, despised by the world. But they had nobility, and it was right that he named his tools after them. They were his only friends. They never let him down. And in return he kept them clean and sharp, just as he had been taught in the Lessons, honing them until they could cut a hair. They would have gleamed brightly in the moonlight if he did not take care to blacken them after sharpening. Action would dull them soon enough, the warm gush of liquid rinsing away the black. Mehitabel usually came out first, her lone claw cutting so fast and smooth and deep there was no pain, only swift and merciful sleep. And then Archy would make his appearance. His wooden handle felt as much a part of him as his own arm. Archy, lowly though he was, carried the power of expiation. He could forget almost anything with Archy in his hand, even the Journey. As he grew older, his truth had become clearer and more bitter — and that was good, because bitterness and truth were the only reality. Because it is bitter. Just as his own heart had grown bitter with remorse.

But this was not a time to dwell on the past, but rather to stay in the present, to be as keen as Mehitabel; to be conscious of the sweat drying on his neck and the cigar smoke drifting in the breeze and the strange mechanical conversations of distant traffic: because now he realized the waiting was almost over and the Action was approaching; he could hear it and see it and he would soon even smell it and feel it. It would happen so quickly. There would be the Action first, and then next would come the thing, the sole thing that, one day, could — he hoped — make the pain and guilt and shame go away forever:

Atonement.