Four for a Quarter: Fictions

Tessera

ACHILLES SPEAKS OF HIS DECEPTION IN THE COURT OF LYKOMEDES

I couldn't stand the blood. The forty daughters of the king had lived so long together that the visitation of their monthly bleeding had synchronized before I got to Skyros. Preparing to hide me there, my mother, as she shaved my body, had rushed to tell me everything. How the brooches worked and how to comb and pin my hair, the way to look at a man and how to squat and pee. She had wheedled from Hephaestus, as she would later for my armor here, prosthetic hips and breasts made of gold and ivory, fragrant balsam and elastic willow, the minted nickel nipples. Whispering all the while, she wove the dyed fur of the codpiece into the scruff above my cock. The steps for the dances, the register of the dirge, goddesses I'd never heard of, all the ointments and unguents and where they go, the way I should let a man's hand slide over my rump. But she neglected to tell me how each month, beginning in ones or twos, then in greater numbers, the girls would leave their father's court and secret themselves outside the walls of the acropolis in the tents pitched on unpure ground to bleed. I taught myself to wait and follow the last clutch of girls from the palace. I imitated them as they gathered up their kits. We took dried figs and raisins, olive oil for the lamps, wool to spin, a flute or lyre, and the wad of cotton rags.

Blood, I've seen. I learned the stitch that knit up your wounds, Danaans, from those girls in exile. The needle, lathered in blood from my sewing, draws its own blood with its work, red pips on the stems of black thread. My spear too does its mending, pulls ropes of gore through my enemies. But men, you don't know what it is like to bleed the way the women do. To sit and seep like that. I watched them, a spot or two always in the folds of each crotch. The stains would slowly spread and soak through until one of the women would stand and unwrap the girdle sopping now on the inside. She'd toss it on the pile to be burned, and her sisters would wash her wound and sponge her dry and hitch a new sheet around her waist and legs. The smell was something. It exhaled each time the dressings were changed. Then the sisters would turn to help another. It didn't seem to stop. And the girls went on about their business, talking mostly like we are doing now.

I have never seen my own blood. Even as my mother's razor scraped the hair from my body, the blade whetted on my hide. Honed, the edge still dully slid over my thick skin, not a nick. I faked my fake menses, smearing jam on the cloth when no one was looking. At night in that stinking tent, I'd dream. Wrapped in sleep, I could not remember who I was. Reaching for myself, my hand burrowing in the rags between my legs, I'd feel the sticky puddle of what I took to be my bleeding. How could I be bleeding? In my mind, the jam had turned into the body's own syrup. I felt the stump of my cock nested in the fur sheath, everything smeared with blood. And I could also feel a cock, not mine, cut off stuffed up inside me. I told you I was dreaming. I forgot what I'd become. I kept bleeding.

Men, we rape. That is what we do. Who hasn't drawn his cock bloody as a sword from some girl no older than the daughters of King Lykomedes? You strip the frothy coating off yourself and then pin her down to let your buddy have his turn. But for a moment, before you wring it clean, you hold it in your hand, this core of blood. It makes you think.

And there was the moon that night. Of course, there was the moon. I watched it slip out of the sea, red and full, into the black sky saturated with the smoke of smoldering rags. The moon tinged the water with its own diluted hemorrhage. My mother is a Nereid. I've seen her melt into a puddle. She dressed me up as a girl and never wanted me to suffer. I knew I was fooling no one. Though for a while, I wanted to be fooled. Now I know. Men, I am a man, like you.

DRINKING BYRON

“I was never bled in my life — but by leeches…. Perhaps the tape and lancet may be better.“

— Lord Byron, in a letter to Hobhouse, 20 April 1824

St. Valentine's Day, 1824. Messolonghi. I fell seriously ill with some manner of convulsive disease. Had it lasted a moment longer it must have extinguished my mortality — if I can judge by sensations. I was speechless with the features much distorted — but not foaming at the mouth — they say — and my struggles so violent that several persons could not hold me — it lasted about ten minutes and came on immediately after drinking a tumbler of cider mixed with cold water in Colonel Stanhope's apartments. Leeches applied to my temples — the aim to break the high fever. Once removed — I bled — profusely, continuously. Doctor Bruno in terror called for Doctor Milligen when he could not staunch the blood.

A week later I was much relieved. Prescribed resinated wine, flavored by the sap leeching from the barrel staves of unseasoned pine, I drank to my health. We all did. Epilepsy — perhaps — we thought then. We sat and waited — for the Turks — whose sappers mined day and night, around this forgotten city, the Evzones retreating before their siege works. It rained and rained. Stanhope and Gamba complained. I no longer write poems. So I wrote, drunk on blood red wine, a Patras claret, this—

Seek out — less often sought than found

A Soldier's Grave — for thee the best

Then look around and choose thy ground

And take thy Rest

April. The spring come. I have seen a swallow today — and it was time — for we have had but a wet winter hitherto — even in Greece. I rode in the rain with Gamba to the olivewoods. Returned sopping, chilled. The doctors say I labor under a rheumatic fever. They want to bleed me again. I resist at first. The servants already wading in the flooded streets look for leeches. No, not leeches. The tape and the lancet this time.

The blood was wine red. They took twenty ounces. The bowls emptied in the garden, stain the thyme, the sage. Another bloodletting. A third. Later still the leeches once more — to the temples, behind the ears, along the course of the jugular, a kind of jewelry.

The red was wine blood. I compose my last words which will be the ordinary “I want to sleep now.“ Death will apply pressure to the meanings of sleep, drain sleep of all but its poetic potential. How Romantic!

I will be shipped back to England, bled dry and lung-less — the Greeks kept them, not my heart, steeping in a cask of disappointing port, decanted on deck of a third-rate frigate, riding on the neap tide of the Thames. Some devoted readers who've come to mourn are there to blot up, with the pages of my poems, the spilled preserving spirits to preserve me, the capillary action, the way paper drinks ink.

A PERIMENOPAUSAL JACQUELINE KENNEDY, TWO YEARS AFTER THE ASSASSINATION, ABOARD THE M/Y Christina OFF EUBEOA BOUND FOR THE ISLAND OF ALONNISOS, DEVASTATED BY A RECENT EARTHQUAKE, DRINKS HER FOURTH BLOODY MARY WITH MRS. FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT JR.

The barstools' seats are covered with the foreskins of whales, Ari loves to tell his guests, and it was at this bar that Jack first met Mr. Churchill, but you know that, you've heard that before, as I am in the habit of wading through the historic, an archipelago of scattered captions, a sign myself, as I allocute, droning through the landscape of vetted plaque language, appositives and modifiers and subordinate and restrictive clauses, the constellation of the museum label, your tour guide tape, who sooner-or-later says the barstools of the Christina were upholstered with the foreskins of whales, baleen, and on them Jack who would be president sat drinking Bloody Marys, with the former wartime prime minister of that precious stone set in a silver sea, that other Eden, that England, two sailors they fancied themselves, their fannies parked on the tooled foreskins of whales, cetacean.

The right whale got its name for being the right whale to kill, and off the Cape we chased them chasing a panicked pod sounding and sliding down beneath the launch like sleek needles sliding beneath skin. The cows are each as big as an island and sleep like reefs, lolling; the rookery of birds along the rocky spine started every time a calf breached, leaping up on a mother's back, slipping off and into the water and breaching again and tumbling back, again and again, trying to wake her, it could be days, a wake of waking.

The Christina is itself a big white whale making way with its trailing catalog of chase boats, though this flotilla appears thinned, anemic compared to when we cruised off Ithaca after Patrick died, remember? They thought they caught me then, broadsides of telephoto lenses. Now they lag. They stall. Chips off the ship, it seems, they grow smaller in the distance, wreaths or buoys, wallowing in the troughs of waves, our own towed islet chain, a random map.

Cyclades, Dodecanese, Ionian, Sporades — the island chains. Skiros, Skopelos, Alonnisos, Skiathos are the Sporades we are steaming to, we are steaming to the Sporades, sporadic in the northern Aegean. Spores. You should see the charts. Someone has cast the joints of bone like die, not so much a chain these islands but a broken and scattered string of trinkets, and now the dice-like houses on those dice-like islands have tumbled down the dice-like chockablock basalt acropoli, the Hora horribly tossed and tossed into the agitated sea, new peninsulas of chunky ruin, deltas of limey whitewashed dust. Ari says we will all give blood, our blue, blue blood when we get there, and the Christina's hold holds vats of water, pallets of blankets, bushel bags of sour trahanas, and egg crates of bottled gas — a dry goods convoy to another powdered and pulverized disaster.

I always heard it said that George Jessel invented the Bloody Mary, half vodka and half tomato juice, the after drinks drink, a sober drink to get you drunk the first thing after the last thing you remember, the transfused eulogy. All the blood in the world could not save Patrick, who died drowning in the liquefied air in which his lungs came packed like a surplus jeep in cosmolene. He was early. It is late. We island hopped too through that mourning. One tragedy after another. The syrup of tomato is just what the doctor ordered, an elixir, a tincture, a kind of plasma. To my blue baby. To the Toastmaster General, our contemporary Pericles who works blue.

To avoid the circling bulls, the she whale rolls over on her back, and it's a sight to see the males attempt to mate that way, climbing, scooting up the beach with all that now not buoyant tonnage, up over her underbelly to the peak of the breach of her and her, just then, rolling over to take a breath before she rolls back over again on her back — a shoal, a hostile jetty, an unnavigable bar. This too goes on for hours, for days, as everything with whales runs in whale time, in whale space.

Whale-shaped Eubeoa hugs the shore of mainland Greece it fractured clear of eons ago in some strike-slip quake that shook the big island free. At Halkida the channel narrows to the narrowest of cuts, and Aristotle himself spent time there on and off through the years observing the tidal flow through the strait first one way, then the opposite, a river reversing itself, ass-backward, plum plumbing there. All that motion to no end, an ecstatic static.

But in the veins there are baffles of valves that eddy the spent blood flow upstream, fish ladders, toward the heart. The cells, those dimpled mauve lozenges, lining up like shallow draft coastal tankers en route, convoying oxygen away from the spongy anchorage of the lungs.

Around here somewhere the Greeks becalmed and beached, a thousand island chain of triremes in irons, no way to be made on the way to Troy. It was that headland, or that headland there, where they kited Iphigenia into the sea, a debt owed to some god or other, to wake the breeze, to make it freshen. Troy would be thataway. Telling that story over and over, the tellers want what happened to happen differently like running a length of film back and forth, seesawing the eye, the eye hopping from one moment to the next, island frame to island frame, hoping that this time it will all be different, that other gods will intervene. As one did in Iphigenia's fall, intercepting her midair and turning her flesh insubstantial, her blood into aerosol, and transporting the mist of her beyond the Aegean to some sacred steppes someplace where the history of history one steps into is never, never the same twice.

Oh, let's blame the bloody sun, the bloody, bloody drink. Hell, it's hell, this body in this in-between. The hot, you know, comes at you in waves of layers, molten lava sandwiched between melting glass. The blood, what there is of it, boils and pools, rises to the thinning skin, the blush shedding sheets of heat; I shimmer in my own juices, evaporate, another order of being, state of sacrifice. How did it go, Winnie's witty turn of phrase, the eulogy's eulogy? Not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. The end of the beginning, then. The end of the beginning.

I never see. I can't look. I won't watch. I'll turn away when they stop up my arm, bend the elbow to tap this other drink. I am so wan, I wane, not enough of any humor in me to fill a flute let alone a liter. I am empty, empty enough. I am all out of going all out. I will clench the rubber ball and focus on the horizon line out the porthole, and, afterward, peel and eat the proffered orange orange. And if they ask, I already know my type. O, I will say, O. Negative. Donor. Universal.

THUCYDIDES AT SYRACUSE

I carry a shield-shaped ostrakon, a fragment of some vessel, with me wherever I go. On the empty side, my name, Thucydides, is scratched into the blank black back of a wine amphora. On the reverse, a red-figured head — all curly curls, laurel leaf— crowned, glazed and unblinking almond eyes — vomits at someone's feet. A symposium, I suppose. A document — evidence of Socrates himself corrupting the flower of Athens's youth. He's dead now. Pericles too. The plague. I survived it somehow. The dying leaking blood from their eyes. Alcibiades, Nicias, Demosthenes, all, the whole lot of them gone. The Athenians gave me a bag of these ballots when they bagged me, sent me packing after my less than stellar performance at Amphipolis's defense. I also have those other shards, the sack of cracked pottery that made me a general. Democracy, a bunch of speeches, then a vote. It keeps the potters in business. I keep the more interesting scraps on my desk as souvenirs.

Lame soldier, I am a writer now, writing what I call History, my own and this endless war's. More often than not, I draw a blank and must make up some great oration or debate or detail, the Persians always just over the horizon, yet another conspiracy or betrayal, and when I'm blocked, I fidget, try to fit the bits of crockery together, imagine I can make all these cracked pieces whole again or patch them up enough to hold water, or no, a cup of disappointing pinot noir, or, better yet, a bitter dram of bile, pushing the memories around on the empty battlefield of parched parchment.

I was in my cups. I am a writer after all. And — here's a good one — banished from Athens, I fled back to goddamn Amphipolis where I first hit bottom to hit it again. My people had some land hereabouts — a rotting olive grove, a spent vineyard, a played-out silver mine. So I have a front row seat to compose my own narrative of fucking up. I am in recovery. One day at a time. Sure, I work the program here. I go to meetings down at the Dionysion, a Doric ruin on the south side. My name's Thucydides. Hello, Thucydides.

The shield is the not-so-secret weapon of this war, the most important part of the whole panoply. I hang mine on the wall. The little owl's two big owl-eyes look like shields on the shield. You strap the thing to the forearm instead of holding it in your fist. Heavy with all that hammered bronze, its rim has a curved lip to rest on your shoulder. Big enough, it covered the guy to your left, and the guy to your right covered you. All together, rushing at the enemy's phalanx — the ash spears splintering on the shields. The clatter. Sophocles puts that in all his plays, that thrill. The shock, then, of shield on shield, and then the leaning into it, the othismos, the rank behind you pushing forward with their shields, the aspis cold on your ass, and the rank behind the rank behind you, now, smashing into the back, and the whole massed mess slowly beginning that pivot, a drunken herd stumbling over the litter of popped-off greaves and the mud of men who have stumbled under the scrum, stomped upon, finished off by the lizard killers on the reverse end of the pike. The agon. All of that. And then one line or the other breaks, and the first thing you fling is your thirty-pound hoplon, chuck it at the guy behind you who is unsheathing his sword to run you down now that you are running, no armor on your naked back. With the shield or on it.

So much of what has happened hasn't happened yet in my History. I lag. I rehearse each trauma at the meetings as I draft it — this battle, that skirmish, the siege here, the slaughter there. Fall off the wagon. Invoke the muse. Lubricate my tongue. At night, after I have wrestled with a passage, the massacre at Syracuse, say, I retire to Phoebe's on the plateia, overlooking that wine-dark sea, and toast the German tourists, drinking Jagermeister, with burnished retsina in my super-glued ostrakon. I dance, a regular Zorba, smashing plate after plate on the paving stones beneath the plane trees.

I have been stuck at Syracuse for a long time, the nineteenth year of the war. Last spring I made the trip, a scudding trireme under Hermes's protection. The banks of Assinarus, I stood there. The Athenians there pelted, pressed on all sides for days. Missiles, javelins, harassed by cavalry. They made for this river, thinking they would breathe easier once they crossed, driven on by fear, by exhaustion, by thirst. Thirst. They rushed in here, all order gone, each wanting to be the first to cross, the enemy now on each shore making that impossible. Huddling together, they trampled each other, some killed by arrows, bolts, darts, others tangled in the baggage, drowned. Missiles rained down on them (I can see that), most drinking greedily, heaped together in the hollow of the river. The Peloponnesians followed, butchered the Athenians in the water, now instantly fouled, running red, but they went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, most even fighting each other to have it.

How to write that?

Recovery. They tell you, and you are to repeat, that you are powerless — at the mercy of nature, the universe. The disease metaphor allows one to abandon free will, self-control. There are plenty of higher powers — all the goddamn gods and goddesses, the nymphs and spirits. It's a crock. Impossible to give oneself up, to get over anything. I dip my hand into the cloudy Assinarus, drink and drink and drink. Always, there's never enough, too much.

Back in Amphipolis, still ostracized, old Thucydides (that's me), must suffer random drug tests. He pisses history into a cup.

Four Corners

UTAH

So the temple maids had me cornered on that floating platform where you are made to look at the mural of the universe and the white life-sized statue of Christ Almighty at the end of the tour of the temple grounds when I asked them why, in God's name, does everything represented in art here have to be done in this illustrative realistic style when maybe another style a bit more abstract, say, or distorted by emotion, even, could represent the enormity of the things you want to represent, because Christ and all the angels might be real but might not fit best into a realistic frame or might not even be perceived by our puny visual apparatus, you know, might be invisible or perhaps warped in some way, in shadow maybe, and anyway the Impressionists showed us that, hey, yellow haystacks are sometimes purple, like at night or when the sun is behind a cloud, and the temple maids looked at me utterly bewildered, not being able to begin to see what I was driving at and saying to me, again, this is what He looks like, like don't you see, so how, in God's name, can He look any other way than the way he looks.

COLORADO

So we turned a corner in downtown Denver and they all stopped me, grabbing my arm and pointing off into the distance beyond one of those glassed-in skywalks crossing the street up ahead, up in the air, and said, look, there, that's where the mountains are and they are just beautiful, you should see them, and I said, where, I don't see anything and I didn't because, once again, it was all hazy, it's always all hazy anytime I'm in Denver, the sky a kind of white sheet backdropped behind all the buildings of Denver, and they said well you should see them and I said again, yeah, I should, but I don't see any mountains and every time I come to Denver people tell me there are mountains here but I never see them even though they point and say there are mountains there so I am beginning to think there aren't any mountains at all, that there never were any mountains, just this funny primed canvas sky waiting for an artist, any artist, to fill in all the details for a picture you all say you can see.

ARIZONA

So out of the corner of my eye, I catch this glimmer of something sparkling off in the distance, out in this painted desert and immediately I think it is some kind of mirage, so I don't look right at it because, I remember from someplace, you are never supposed to look at things square on but kind of off to one side so as to focus the thing better on the curve of your eyeball as if I could even take a look as I am driving like a bat out of hell on this interstate between Phoenix and Tucson, surrounded by a herd of shimmering cars and trucks all going at least a hundred, and I remember that the not-looking bit has to do with stars in the sky, I think, not mirages in the desert, and so I look and it looks like this mirage out in the desert is an airport like the one I just flew into and out of in this rental car like a bat out of hell, but this, that is, this airport, is a kind of mirage, since what it is is one of those graveyards for bombers and fighters and airliners parked out on the dry and preserving desert, so in other words, it isn't an illusion but it is not really what it seems to be either as this airport isn't going anywhere and in a second or two, going like hell, it's out of my range of sight.

NEW MEXICO

So, that night, this Navajo drops me off at a filling station, closed, on the outskirts of Truth or Consequences after giving me a lift from Las Cruces and he gives me a buck for a cup of coffee and points out this diner, catty-cornered, where I go in and I get to telling the guy behind the counter about the trip and the Navajo and the buck for a cup of coffee and the place goes silent and it seems I have stepped into the old story about the ghost driver and the hitchhiker and the guy gives me the coffee and says I can keep the buck since it was given to me by a ghost in a pickup truck who died swerving to miss a stalled school bus or some such and he said it sure must seem to you like a lot of things aren't what they seem around here, like the name of the town which was the name of an old television game show, like the ghosts at White Sands or Roswell, where it seems like every corner of the state is filled up with these squared patches of ground that are off-limits so who really knows what is really happening here, and, by the way, what brought you here, and by that I don't mean an Indian in an old pickup but why did you come here to this or that place in the first place, I bet for no more reason than to verify the truth of some story you'd been told by the talking heads on the TV or some ghost voice that is drifting between the white spaces of some old book you read, you see, you came here to see it with your own eyes.

The Blind: A Blues

LIGHTING ON A BOXCAR

He said, hopping a freight is easy. He said, leaving town is a breeze. He said, you have to wait beyond the yard limit, beyond the sign that says “yard.“ He said, you watch for the highball. He said, you wait for the hog to pick up steam. He said, you wait for the drag to pick up the slack. He said, you walk in the other direction from the direction the train's going. He said, you walk back. He said, you start watching for the boxcars. He said, you start watching for the rungs on the sides on the boxcars. He said, there are rungs on the head-end and the back. He said, take the rungs on the front. He said, always take the rungs on the head-end. He said, the rung in the front. He said, so when you swing on you won't get hurt. He said, so when you swing on you'll swing into the boxcar's side. He said, so if you swing on and can't get a hold you'll bounce right off. He said, you'll bounce right off and light into the ditch. He said, don't you swing on on the ladder in back. He said, you swing on on the ladder in back, it'll likely take you on over in between the boxcars. He said, you'll just swing on over between the cars. He said, and then where will you be? He said, you'll be lighting on the ground; you'll be lighting on the ground between the wheels. He said, there's no place left to go. He said, that's no place to be.

EMPTY REEFERS

He said, half the time the reefers are empty. He said, half the other time they are full. He said, when the reefers are full they are full of meat. He said, when the reefers are full they are full of dead meat or fruit, fruit or lettuce. He said, the reefers got iceboxes on both ends. He said, when the reefers are filled with meat or fruit or lettuce or what-have-you, the iceboxes are filled with ice. He said, the ice is ice they cut from frozen lakes and rivers. He said, they pack the ice in sawdust in the iceboxes of the reefers. He said, it keeps the reefers cold. He said, but half the time the reefers are empty. He said, half the time the reefers are empty, and the iceboxes on the empty reefers are empty too. He said, now here is a fine ride. He said, here is a fine ride especially in winter. He said, you can get out of the cold and wind, hunkered down in the empty iceboxes. He said, the doors for the iceboxes are on top of the cars. He said, you can get into the iceboxes through the doors on top of the cars. He said, be careful about the latches on the icebox doors. He said, there are latches on the doors of the iceboxes. He said, you have to hold the doors open when you're inside the iceboxes. He said, no way to open the latches from the inside. He said, you get in those empty iceboxes and the door closes shut, there's no way out. He said, who knows when you get found. He said, the empty icebox on the empty reefer you found won't be empty. He said, you know what you find. He said, meat. He said, just meat.

SOMETHING HE'S BEEN TOLD

He said, he's heard everything. He said, he's heard this before. He said, he's heard this a hundred times. He said, do you want to hear it? He said, he's not sure he believes it. He said, the way I hear it, it always starts the same. He said, what they tell goes like this. He said, a conductor or a brakeman is switching cars in the yard. He said, the conductor or the brakeman switching cars in the yard gets caught between two cars. He said, the cars are moving slow in the yard, and the yardman or conductor doesn't get out of the way. He said, the story goes that he gets caught between the cars. He said, the cars couple right through him. He said, the cars couple so quick and so clean right through him, he's still alive. He said, the cars couple so clean, it stops all the blood, stops all the pain in the nerves. He said, the nerves get all crushed. He said, he is alive above the place where the cars have coupled so cleanly through him. He said, he's alive, can you believe it? He said, then everybody gathers around to figure out what to do. He said, he can hear them talking about what they can do with him. He said, sometimes he talks to them about what can be done. He said, sometimes he just listens to them talking about what to do. He said, it always turns out that there is nothing to do. He said, it always turns out that they will uncouple the cars, uncouple the cars that are coupled through him. He said, he will die. He said, he gets that he is being kept alive by the thing that killed him. He said, he gets that he is already dead. He said, then they always say that they go and fetch his wife. He said, when they tell the story, they always tell about the going to get the wife. He said, it could be the wife or it could be a girlfriend. He said, but she is always close enough by. He said, they tell you that they get to talk. He said, they tell you they talk, but nobody heard what was said. He said, they tell you they saw him talking to his wife. He said, whispering really. He said, they tell you about holding her up as she is like to faint at the sight of her husband coupled between the cars. He said, she gets taken away. He said, she gets taken away and you go with her. He said, she's walking away stepping over all the rails in the yard. He said, she is stepping over all the rails in the yard. He said, then you hear the switch engine whistle. He said, the switch engine whistles twice, a warning. He said, the switch engine whistles twice, a warning. He said, that means it's time to move. He said, you hear the whistles, and then the engine moves. He said, the engine moves, and then the whole train moves. He said, then you know what happens then.

THE BLIND

He said, first there is the engine. He said, first there is the engine and then the tender. He said, the tender's where they keep the coal and the water for the engine. He said, the blind's between the tender and the baggage car that comes next. He said, the blind's the doorway on the baggage car. He said, the baggage car door is locked but you can ride in the doorway. He said, riding in the doorway of the baggage car is riding the blind. He said, he liked to ride the blind. He said, a passenger train goes three times as fast. He said, in the summer there is nothing better. He said, in the winter you have to think twice. He said, in the winter you have to think twice because those trains take water on the fly. He said, those flyers take on water on the fly. He said, they don't stop for water. He said, they have to make up time. He said, they don't stop for water, they get it on the fly. He said, what that means is the water is in a trough between the rails. He said, the water is in a trough between the rails and the tender scoops it up without stopping. He said, the tender has a scoop that drops into the water. He said, the engine doesn't stop. He said, the engine doesn't stop when picking up water on the fly. He said, the water flies when they pick up water on the fly. He said, the blind gets soaked by all the water flying. He said, he's been soaked by all that water. He said, you don't want to see the blind in winter. He said, you don't want to see the blind in winter when the train is picking up water on the fly. He said, the whole head-end of the baggage car is covered with ice. He said, ice from the water spilled back from picking up water on the fly. He said, the water freezes when it hits the cold metal of the baggage car. He said, I've seen them hacking at the blue ice with axes. He said, I've seen them melt the blue ice with steam. He said, riding the blind in winter. He said, riding the blind in winter, in the night. He said, riding the blind in winter, in the night, when the flyer takes on water on the fly. He said, I've seen that.

Four Ironies

NOT IRONIC

You know the scene. A great ocean liner is about to depart on a transatlantic cruise. The ship's orchestra plays “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.“ Passengers lining the many decks dockside wave and wave flags, throw, toward the mass of well-wishers stories below, brightly colored streamers that stream through the flurry of confetti falling through the cold air. Without warning, the ship's horn warns of the impending departure. The vessel trembles, then drifts free of its moorings, begins to slide forward and away from the dock. The band blares over the overdubbing of the plosive hubbub of the throng. Bon Voyage! You regard the illuminated ranks of the passengers as each animated face searches for one last glimpse of a loved one or ones on shore, your own gaze panning the panoply of people packed along the brilliant white railings. Then the crowd parts, and you peer deeper into the ship's graceful superstructure. Revealed there, suspended, it seems, floating even, on the white wall of the bulkhead, a wreath-like orange life buoy, the stenciled name of the ship orbiting the rim: SS Orizaba.

SLIGHTLY IRONIC

You know the scene. A great ocean liner is about to depart on a transatlantic cruise. The ship's orchestra plays “Anchors Aweigh.“ Passengers lining the many decks dockside wave and wave flags, throw, toward the mass of well-wishers stories below, brightly colored streamers that stream through the flurry of confetti falling through the cold air. Without warning, the ship's horn warns of the impending departure. The vessel trembles, then drifts free of its moorings, begins to slide forward and away from the dock. The band blares over the overdubbing of the plosive hubbub of the throng. “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.“ Bon Voyage! You regard the illuminated ranks of the passengers as each animated face searches for one last glimpse of a loved one or ones on shore, your own gaze panning the panoply of people packed along the brilliant white railings. Then the crowd parts, and you peer deeper into the ship's complicated superstructure. Revealed there, suspended, it seems, floating even, on the white wall of the bulkhead, a wreath-like orange life buoy, the weathered stenciled name of the departing ship orbiting the rim: SS United States.

IRONIC

You know the scene. A great ocean liner is about to depart on a transatlantic cruise. The ship's orchestra plays “Rule, Britannia.“ Passengers lining the many decks dockside wave and wave flags, throw, toward the mass of well-wishers stories below, brightly colored streamers that stream through the flurry of confetti falling through the cold cold air. Without warning, the ship's steam whistle warns of the impending departure, the ship's big bell tolling. The vessel trembles, heaves forward, then drifts free of its moorings, sliding away from the teeming dock. The band blares over the overdubbing of the plosive hubbub of the throng. “God save the…“ Bon Voyage! Bon Voyage! You regard the thick ranks of the passengers as each bright face searches in a slight panic for one last glimpse of a loved one or ones on shore, your own distant gaze panning the panoply of people packed along the delicate white railings. Then the crowd parts, and you peer deeper into the ship's shadowed superstructure. Revealed there, suspended, it seems, floating even, on the ice-white wall of the bulkhead, a small wreath-like orange life buoy, the matte-black stenciled name of this departing ship orbiting the rim: RMS Titanic.

NOW STRANGELY IRONIC

You know the scene. A great ocean liner is about to depart on a transatlantic cruise. The ship's orchestra plays “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.“ Passengers lining the many decks dockside wave and wave flags, throw, toward the mass of well-wishers stories below, brightly colored streamers that stream through the flurry of confetti falling through the cold air. Without warning, the ship's horn warns of the impending departure. The vessel trembles, then drifts free of its moorings, begins to slide forward and away from the dock. The band blares over the overdubbing of the plosive hubbub of the throng. Bon Voyage! You regard the illuminated ranks of the passengers as each animated face searches for one last glimpse of a loved one or ones on shore, your own gaze panning the panoply of people packed along the brilliant white railings. Then the crowd parts, and you peer deeper into the ship's graceful superstructure. Revealed there, suspended, it seems, floating even, on the white wall of the bulkhead, a wreath-like orange life buoy, the stenciled name of the ship orbiting the rim: SS Orizaba.

You wait as this final ship shrinks in the vast distance, sinks over the horizon with a sanguine southern sun (setting or rising, you can't be sure) steaming over its starboard quarter, the ignited sky a kind of stained wake, and this illusion of perspective, the vectored strata of clouds, the lapping waves and the wrinkled ocean beyond, creating in you the sensation that you, you are the one in motion, bobbing, moving further away from the once massive static ship, now mere punctuation, shifting with its cheerful and optimistic manifest of passengers, now a smudge of smoke, a quotation of exhaustion, on the vast yet retreating horizon. You sense that you yourself are sinking, or so it seems. You are shipping water, floundering, adrift even, and cast about for any buoyant jetsam within your reach, its stenciled letters awash, washed out, unreadable, an “S“ maybe and another “S“ on the water-logged lifesaver, the only “O“ the one you mouth, “O“, in recognition. Oh, you tell yourself, you get it now, though you can no longer name that ship-shaped vessel that has been launched with such choreographed fanfare or (to tell the truth) tell among the various ways of telling: what is happening, what will happen, what you know will happen, and what (at last) you know you know will happen.

Harmonic Postcard Captions

The USS Atheneum. The hermaphrodite-rigged brigantine, the USS Atheneum, plied the waters of the Wabash River during the Quasi-War with France. In 1798 the ship ran aground near present-day New Harmony, Ind., where local salvers inhabited the wreck their descendants still occupy to this day. Today, the sun-bleached hulk of the former man-o'-war, its gaffed-rigged mainsail tattered but still visible, decays pristinely at the foot of North Street just yards from the river.

The Restored Eyeglasses of Philip Johnson. The distinct owl-eyed eyewear the American architect Philip Johnson (19062005) donned in homage to Le Corbusier is placed in a glass casket reliquary housed in the Philip Johnson — designed Roofless Church of New Harmony, Ind., by Manolo Blahnik, whose Prada eyewear line underwrote the enshrinement. The congregation attending the ceremony was treated to the premiere of Philip Glass's “Requiem pour Le Monocle de Mon Oncle.“

The Lighting of the Tuning Forks. The citizens of New Harmony, Ind., illuminate the Tuning Fork Forest south of the city with strands of electric lights. First planted by the Owenite utopian community in 1825, the forest, in the right breeze, is known to “sing“ a sustained haunting note that is also said to produce an amplified sound wave capable of shattering the glass bulbs of the electric lights, throwing showers of sparks in algorithmic patterns that have been known, on occasion, to ignite the sycamores along the Wabash, themselves made famous in song.

Main Street, Old Harmony, Illinois. Founded by distraught European serfs attempting to find property that would own them, Old Harmony's streetscape features the unique asymmetrical traffic light. Out of focus in the middle distance, the water district's ovoid tower oscillates randomly in concert with the prevailing wind and the constant seismic activity generated by the nearby New Madrid tectonic fault.

The Production of the First Xerographic Copy, Recounted by Chester Carlson, Its Inventor

October 22, 1938, was the day. We were turning lead into gold. I hurried to the lab, where Otto already had a freshly prepared sulfur coating on the zinc plate. Otto took up a glass microscope slide and asked what he should write. “Anything,“ I said. “The day. The place.“ And he printed on the glass, in India ink, the notation 10.-22.-38 Astoria. We pulled down the shade to make the room as dark as possible, and then he rubbed the sulfur surface vigorously with his red handkerchief to apply the electrostatic charge, laid the slide on the surface of the sulfur-coated zinc plate and placed the combination under a bright incandescent lamp for a few seconds. Oh, it was like eggs rotting in the sun. “Remove the slide,“ I ordered Otto. “The powder, now the powder,“ and he sprinkled the lycopodium on the sulfur surface. By gently blowing on the surface I removed all the loose powder. My mouth was dry. And there, there in the light of the bright bulb, there was left on the brilliant golden surface a near-perfect duplicate, in powder, of the notation that had been printed on the glass slide. Astoria. “It's alive!“ I said. Otto was crying real tears. Both of us repeated the experiment several times to convince ourselves it was true. We made some permanent copies by transferring the powder images to wax paper and heating the sheets to melt the wax. Then we went out to Spiro's for a lunch of grape leaves, olives, and feta with oil and oregano. To celebrate, we danced, shouting over the music, again and again and again as we got tighter and tighter and tighter, the steps we had taken to make out of the invisible, out of light and static, a copy of a copy of a copy.

October 22, 1938, was historic. Not the golden age of inventors for sure. Not Edison or Ford, but nothing to sneeze at either. We rushed to the lab that morning, where we had a freshly prepared sulfur-coated zinc plate. On the glass microscope slide we took from the drawer, we printed the notation 10.-22.-38 Astoria in a rich India ink that caught the light. The window shade made the room as dark as possible. See, we were the inside, the mechanical workings of the future machine. So then we rubbed the sulfur surface vigorously with a silk shower to apply an electrostatic charge, laid the slide on the surface of the sulfur, and stuck the combination under a bright incandescent lamp for a second or two. We took out the slide, sprinkled lycopodium powder on the sulfur surface. We gently blew on the surface, and all the loose powder shimmered and flew away. And there we saw what was left on the surface: a near-perfect duplicate in powder of the notation, 10.-22.-38 Astoria, which had been printed on the sparkling glass slide. We repeated the experiment several times to convince ourselves it was true. It was as true as it was going to be. Then we made some permanent copies by melting wax paper to imprint the image. And then we went out to lunch, where we toasted ourselves and our little experiment quietly with ouzo, which is distilled from grape stems, I believe, and is clear to begin with but turned a cloudy silver when we mixed it with water before we drank.

The sun just up. October something. Thirty-eight. The sky all nickeled over. I'm on the way to the lab. Otto had a fresh zinc plate, sulfur coated. On a glass slide he printed 10.-22.-38 Astoria in India ink. We pulled down the stained shade to darken the room. He rubbed the sulfur surface with the handkerchief. That creates the electrostatic charge. He laid the slide on the surface of the sulfur. He placed the mess under a bright incandescent bulb. A few seconds. It was hot. I didn't get my hopes up. Nothing comes of nothing. Took the slide out of the light. Otto sprinkled the lycopodium powder on the sulfur surface. He gently blew on it. The loose powder blended into the dust in the air. There, on the surface, a near-perfect duplicate in powder of Otto's notation, the one he had printed on the glass slide. Close enough. Enough enough. Only alchemy, at best, I thought. A cheap trick. We tried it again to convince ourselves it was true. It was true, more or less. All that glistens is, you know. We made some permanent copies, burning the powder images onto wax paper. I've got them around here someplace. Then, lunch, a Greek place. The neighborhood was lousy with them. I got drunk on wine, retsina. Tastes like turpentine steeped in turpentine. Never drank it again. It's the color of piss.

October 22, 1938, was a historic occasion. I went to the lab that day and Otto had a freshly prepared sulfur coating on a zinc plate. Otto took a glass microscope slide and printed on it in India ink the notation 10.-22.-38 Astoria. We pulled down the shade to make the room as dark as possible, and then he rubbed the sulfur surface vigorously with a handkerchief to apply an electrostatic charge, laid the slide on the surface of the sulfur, and placed the combination under a bright incandescent lamp for a few seconds. The slide was then removed and lycopodium powder was sprinkled on the sulfur surface. By gently blowing on the surface he removed all the loose powder, and there was left on the surface a near-perfect duplicate in powder of the notation that had been printed on the glass slide. Both of us repeated the experiment several times to convince ourselves it was true, then we made some permanent copies by transferring the powder images to wax paper and heating the sheets to melt the wax. Then we went out to lunch to celebrate.

RPM

78

I start with the cashews. There're never enough. Watch this — how the waiter steps onto the turntable, off of the dance floor we're circling, a little skip. The DJ's got two turntables. Turntables too. The bar's parked around back behind. We'll come back around. The waiter has to watch it, stepping off of the stationary dance floor onto the moving floor at our feet. It's all relative. We are on a moving floor but when we are on it, it seems solid enough. The waiter negotiates the dimensions, bringing our drinks. We'll start with the Screwdriver. It should take us one revolution. Out there, over there in the shadows is Henry Ford's village. He collected houses, stores, outbuildings, even outhouses, and such from before there were cars. I've been there. Here's the thing about cashews — they're never in the shell. Why is that? Poisonous, I think, the shells. It's better after dark. We'll see the lights come on all over the city below. The sunset's behind us. We'll pick it up again as we head to the west. There's downtown Detroit. The downtown's a ruin. Of course, I felt safe. Nobody's down there downtown. They have this train. It's fully automatic. I was by myself. I rode from stop to stop. It's all automatic. The doors of the train slid open at each stop. The train has a canned voice. “Hotel Cadillac,“ it said. The place is a ruin. Not enough money to tear it down. Pigeons and other birds flew out the windows. “Step back from the doorway. The doors are closing.“ The train slides on. Stops at the next ruin. And so on. You want to dance? That floor isn't moving. It's Motown all night. Every night is Motown in Motown. Though that sounds like the Ink Spots filling the room. “Don't Get Around Much Anymore.“ Victor. His Master's Voice, the spotted dog hypnotized by the twirling disc. Up there's Superior. That's where they grow the famous cherries. You want your orange slice? I eat them by sections. You forget that you're moving. The trees, there, are turning. Here comes the sunset. Orange like the drink. Out there's the rest of Michigan. I bet that's Indiana. I do this a lot. Come to the top of tall buildings. That this top spins is gravy. San Francisco's tall buildings. A Hyatt. One panoramic window is all water. The elevators are glass. The cable cars there below. They turned them around right there. Another turntable. Everyone gets out and pushes. Cashews, don't you think, prove the existence of God? They're that good. Have the last one. You can't even feel it, the moving. But you know you are moving if you just pick a point in the distance and stare. Before you know it your whole head has been turning and you are looking away.

45

Next come the filberts. There're always only, never more than, a few, and you have to poke around among the peanuts and almonds for them. Hazelnuts, filberts — I think they are the same. Whose idea is this anyway, to have this saloon keep moving? It seems so 70s, so disco, and, look, there's a disco ball there over the dance floor, and it is moving too, or is it rotating the other way, against the way we are going? Or the mirrored ball standing still goes backward as we go forward, not fast enough to throw its sparks. It's as if the lights are being plucked off, square by square, plink, plank, plunk. Silent wind chime. I swear the DJ must be spinning old Platters' platters. “Twilight Time,“ “Only You,“ “The Great Pretender,“ “My Prayer.“ They have that sound. Mercury, Mercury Records, a red diamond. There was that plastic gizmo you popped into the big hole in the center of a 45 so the record could be played on the long-play spindle. It looked like legs running after legs. The waiter has mastered his sea legs, steps on to the scuffed dance floor after leaving this moving one moving but not moving at our feet. Bringing our drinks. Let's stay with vodka but change the juice, Cape Codders this time around. My urinary tract is fine, thank you very much. The museum down there is meant to look like Independence Hall, but I don't know, twenty times as big, another one of Ford's big ideas. And they have it stuffed with railroad steam engines and everything, steam everythings, and cars of all sorts, of course. And hanging from the ceiling, the Spirit of St. Louis slowly rotates, but not the real one — or it is real, but a real fake, the one used in the movie. In the shadows is Henry Ford's village. Cars are prohibited except for old Tin Lizzies and Model As. There are wagons and buggies and surreys and carriages. And the horse manure is real too. I've been there. Hazelnuts seem oily and European. I think they grow on bushes. They are the same as filberts, but I'm not sure. You want the last one? It's all dark all the time now. The lights are coming on, and all the cars below are invisible save those pools of light the invisible cars sweep along the street. The streetlights show up the grid of the old townships, big squares that aren't square but seem to merge to triangle angles way off north. The sunset's set. And maybe we'll get lucky with a moonrise tonight. We'll keep an eye out the next time around. There's downtown Detroit. I was there for the riots in '67. I was on a field trip to watch the Tigers, Willie Horton, in my Little League uniform. I remember the endless bus ride out of town. Our bus being passed by trucks of troops and trucks with trailers hauling tanks and APCs. The downtown's a ruin now. Of course, I felt safe going there because no one else was there. They have this train that runs fully automatic in a big broad circle. I was by myself on the train. I rode from stop to stop. The doors of the train slid open at each stop, and this voice came on, a prerecorded voice, announcing the stop. “Hotel Cadillac,“ it said. The old hulk of that hotel looks like a wedding cake frosted with pigeons, the walls smeared white, and then the frosting flies up, a sheet of birds in one big flapping field. The door tells you it's going to close and then it closes. The train slides on and on. Every stop is a new ruin. The train makes a big loop. You want to dance? That dance floor isn't moving. The dance floor isn't dancing. It's Motown all night. Every night is Motown in Motown. Michigan's shaped like a glove. The dark lake, Huron, I think, outlines the shore all the way to Mackinaw, an island with no cars. I wonder if this cherry dotting the eye of my drink was grown up there. You want yours? I like them. They make every drink they're in seem more like a drink. Maraschino cherries aren't grown in any nature I know. Manufactured fruit. It's a kick to pull them off the stem, that little pop behind the teeth. You forget that you're moving. And you forget, way down below the earth is moving too, twirling and sliding like a dance. You want to? The fall is falling. The sunset set. You can see just a hint of it in those clouds beyond, the light bending and bouncing over the horizon. Out there's the rest of Michigan, Michigan ready to rest. But maybe that is Indiana or Indiana is over there on the other side of where the horizon used to be, invisible. I like to observe from the observation decks of tall buildings, to go up as far as I can. Baltimore has a restaurant downtown that turns like this one, and, as it turns, you can see the bay, and close by is this old clock tower that looms into view every hour or so and then retreats. Bromo Seltzer advertised around the face of the clock, the hands so big and always moving, it seems, in time with you as you drift by, constantly moving yourself as if you mesh, one gear into another. And then you're back to the panoramic window of water and toy boats and the factory with the sugar sign. The elevators there are glass and slide down the side of the building. And off in the distance is a roundhouse or two owned by the B&O, and the roundhouses are round. That's why they call them roundhouses. And now they are museums too. Filberts or hazelnuts. Hazelnuts or filberts. I'm not sure I know the difference. The last one is yours if you want it. You can't even feel it, the constant turning, the torque, the twist of the restaurant moving. It is pleasant, this journey going nowhere. It's a wonder how they do it, the smoothness of the mechanism, the gears. You hardly notice at all. It is all relative, the motion, depends on your point of view. If we remembered high school calculus it would help. We could plot all the points of all this pointing. X. And Y. And Z. The stars are out. And even time, that fourth dimension, is out. The time it takes for things to change and the square of that, the time it takes time, the time time takes.

33 1/3

The almonds look like arrowheads. Almonds seem to be as abundant as filberts. I like them smoked, but just what is artificial smoke? Imagine, the artificial smoke factory making artificial smoke. Its smokestacks belching the exhaust of artificial smoke or maybe even artificial artificial smoke, artificial smoke the waste product of the process. Still it's good, the taste of almonds. The tooth of almonds. I like their density, the dentistry. They look like teeth, incisors, incisive. And they have ridges like fingernails do. Aren't they a cure for cancer? No, that was apricot stones, peach pits, I think. Whose idea is this anyway, to have this saloon keep moving? Maybe it can't be stopped. They leave it on all night, constantly turning. Vacuuming the carpet would be a snap with the maintenance crew on the stuck-still dance floor letting the floor come to them to be cleaned. Hold still, this won't hurt at all. The janitor then would dance with the buffer, waltzing over and over the wood floor. He turns and turns over the parquet, revolving slowly, riding the gyro of the polisher, the circulation of shine. All the time, the outer rim keeps orbiting, the rings of Saturn, the custodian coiled up in the twisting coil of the electric cord. Checkmate, checkmate, it's the Checkmates now. “Put It in a Magazine.“ High-rise Records, an L.A. Motown Motown sound. I swear the DJ is seriously esoteric. The waiter is waiting on us. He is coming round the bend. You can take that and that and that, but we are still working on the nuts. The waiter waits with us. He is dangerously close to the joint in this joint. The fault line is slipping by. Let's go back in time this time around and order a White Russian. Enough with the fruit. Bring us the cream. Or, no, make mine black, a Black Russian, the coffee will wake me up. The museum building — here it comes again — is meant to look like Independence Hall but, I don't know, twenty times as big. A model bigger than the thing it models, and inside is every model of every model Ford ever built. The wax models and the models made of clay. Every Edsel too and even models of cars that were never built, just lists of their names. There in the dark is Henry Ford's village. The only light beams out from Edison's factory Henry had hauled in from New Jersey, the generator still generating. And he poached the shop from Dayton where the Wrights warped wings and attached them to the leftover parts of bicycles. And somewhere deeper in out there is the shed where Henry himself pieced together his first runabout. In the village only old Fords are allowed to putter around. And somewhere in there is the chair. Not the electric one, though that might be in the museum, a technology of the twentieth century. Did Edison invent that too? No, Lincoln's chair. The one that would fit him, in the box at Ford's Theater. No relation? I remember it velvet, all stained with blood. Ten after ten, the clocks all say, the moment when the shot rang out. Ten and two — that's the proper grip for the wheel Henry invented. Hand over hand steering, turning. I learned on a simulator in the basement of the high school, that scripted FORD on the hub, a button for the horn. There's the last almond, a raft on a sea of peanuts. Look, out in the dark another circle circling. They've lit up the test tracks. See the moving circles of light circle through the puddle of light, a roulette ball on the banked banks, black braking red black white. Endurance trials probably. In that tight little orbit are all the simulations they need to weather the weather. Let it rain and it rains. An endless stutter of bumps, a washboard scrubbing the rocker panels clean off. No moon as of yet, just the map of one spilled on the ground. There's Detroit reborn. I swear the buildings have grown since the last time we've looked, and all the windows winking on. Hard by there, there, is Greektown, where they are setting fire to cheese and those shanks of pressed meat rotate like we are doing now, tubes of flesh turning, twisting on an upright spit. Hey, I'm getting hungry. You want to dance? Cut a rug? Now there would be a collection for the museum in our wake, on our way. A gallery of cut rugs. The Lindy. The two-step. The fox-trot. The box step. The waltz. Yes, the shag. The shag rug. The dance floor doesn't move. And no one dances. We could lay some carpet. No, tile it in checkerboard squares. Your move. I liked the night. The knight. Up one, over two. Cha cha cha. Over one, down two. Cha cha cha. It's Motown all night. Every night is Motown in Motown. The Checkmates aren't Motown but they should be. Spilling off thataway, that big blank space outlined by lights would be the desert of Lake Erie looking eerie, black on black. I eat the ice. I eat it after I suck all the white out of it, all the black. No fruit with the Russians, but these cubes melt to a kind of fruit, a grape-shaped nougat, don't they? I know it's impolite to spit them back and let them bathe up another coating. The ice another product of Michigan. All that water, turning too to ice, to steam. You forget you're moving. Ontario is over there, and that's the best bar bet there is. Driving due south from Detroit, what is the first foreign country you run into? Folks'll say Mexico, the Yucatan, Cancun, or worse. Colombia. Panama. They are thinking south, mind you. When it was right there all the time. Canada creeping under the chinny chin chin of Michigan. Due south. In New Orleans the ground floor of the Hotel Monteleone has a carousel bar. The room doesn't spin like this one here, the bar a fixed center. There you ride the ring of the bar itself, stools and all canopied with old-fashioned circus gothic awnings, lots of brass poles. I remember calliope music as you ride it round and round, cantering past the big front window facing Royal Street and the circulating revelers of the Quarter short-circuited from Bourbon. Here we are above the water and there you are down below it. The pool is on the roof, and swampy and soaked and floating your turn on the rubber raft, you look out at the vast waterlogged delta on all sides and feel, in your steeped state, you are sinking into, going down this particular drain. Almondine, the slices shaved from almonds look like fish scales. The scales scale the fish. You know, if we went faster we would be thrown through the windows off into space. I feel like I am floating now — an object tends to stay in motion. Just keeps going. But space is curved and this merry-go-round keeps us rounded off, rounding us off. Centrifugal. Gesundheit. Our faces all distorted, all plastic, pulling Gs. Gee, I want to stick my hand out the window moving fast and feel all that is invisible push back.

16

The rest is peanuts. Henry Ford rebuilt George Washington Carver's slave cabin in the village. The father of the peanut. It's out there somewhere in the darkness coming up. I've been in some bars where you are encouraged to crack open the shells, pop the nuts in your mouth, and then throw the shells on the floor to be trampled into a fine mulch and create studied roadhouse neglect. These are chain stores, franchised bars pretending they are the honky-tonks they are replacing. Rough and tumble. The slave cabin's dirt floor has dirt flown in from the dirt floor of a slave cabin in Missouri. Says so. Mr. Peanut with the hat and spats, slumming groundnut all up in the canopy of the trees. My mother always said to wash behind my ears. Dirt enough to grow peanuts. No, potatoes. If the bar was stationary we would be buried up to our ears in all the crap we've hatched, but this place keeps moving so nothing settles, little accumulates, even the air is spun dry, squeegeed of smoke and the stale, leftover conversations. And the words all picked out of their shells, nutmeats, cute meets, a current of errors in the circulating air. That's why they do it — set this ship in motion. A slather of blather. A channel of chat debris. Keep the ball rolling. When the only way to go is down, it's nice to have this simulation of perpetual motion, this gyroscopic story, the top story of the building. Shush. Listen. It is Smokey now. The air's gone out of the room. Motown in Motown at last. Tracking tears. The M of the labels could be the silhouettes of tall towers, each with their crow's nests of restaurants and/or bars circling, circling. Do you even remember records? Records with the skips and pops as the needle tracked the tracks through the wax. It wasn't wax but vinyl, and that attracted the dust that caused the skips and pops. There was that old notion that each time you played a song a little bit of sound was lobbed off by the slicing stylus, the groove hollowed out by listening, the emotion of it dredged away, a deep channeled silence to follow. One last drink? One for this endless road? The waiter has a bowl of popcorn, the kernels turned inside out. Look closely, that's what happens. Mix it in with the peanuts and you have a poor man's Cracker Jack without the sugar coating. And since we are being so healthy, how about this round a Bloody Mary? The museum building — here it comes again, there — is meant to look like Independence Hall but, I don't know, twenty times as big. It is a hulk in the night, a wrecked ruin. The night out there is vinyl black, all swallowed up, turned inside out. The museum has galleries of appliances — washtubs and dryers, TVs and radios, vacuum cleaners, vacuum tubes, and all the gramophones and phonographs, stereos and eight tracks, and quadraphonic components hooked up to turntables, tape decks, reel-to-reel. One of the houses in the Village is the Robert Frost House, the poet of walls and roads, and when I was a kid on the tour I needled the guide about its history. Had he written those poems there? The guide had about enough of me, W. C. Fielded me to the side. “Look, kid,“ he said, “Ford was just collecting houses. He needed an example of Greek Revival and found this house in Ann Arbor.“ It did look like a little temple. Ford found out later that Frost lived in it for a year when he taught at UM. It is all a black hole of memory. The cheap Cracker Jack peanuts offer no surprises. They seem to be dividing, multiplying. The miracle of loaves and fishes. You can't eat just one. Never enough and never ever over with them. There's Detroit reborn. The lights in the towers are all lit up like crosswords, but the dark squares are winning out. The towers look like they are burned out, like the light has escaped into the night, leaving behind an empty husk. Hey, I'm getting hungry. You wanna dance? The dance floor doesn't move. And no one dances. It's Motown all night. Every night is Motown in Motown. It's a miracle, that music. Made for the night. This town. Pulses of it heading out into outer space, a kind of throbbing beacon in the night, that rhythm records made when the needle made its way to the end, that endless hiss, the needle skating back and forth and around and around that final margin of black ice. Down below, my favorite lake, St. Clair, a dollop. It is a great lake all right. I eat the celery. I can appreciate the utility of it, the celery, consuming the utensil used for consuming. It's good, all sopped, a science experiment where you can trace the gravity-defying osmosis, the juice sluiced up the straw of the stalk, stalking. You forget you're moving. Over there is over there and up there is up there, all space. And I have taken a turn in Seattle, geared inside the Space Needle that looks like a spaceship going nowhere fast. It creates its own gravity, a kind of saucer hovering above the clouds that coat the city below. Those same clouds seem to levitate the whole Cascade Range, off in the distance. They float, all of them, a few hundred feet off the floor of the forest. We seemed to be worming our way through space in that needle, a Phillips-head screw biting into the air, the atmosphere. This is where I get off. I am getting dizzy. Stop the top. As the record winds toward its finish, it has to go faster. Circles inside of circles. Until. Space. Silence. An empty empty place. And you. You, away, way over there, drinking all this, all of it, all in.

The Third Day of Trials

INTAKE

In the back of the motor home, the men played euchre loudly, trumping quickly and tossing in the hand after the first two plays. Phil and Bill Erhman looked like bowers themselves, one full-face, one profile. They were not partners at the table and argued over a loner and the number of points allowed. They were in the asphalt business, entertaining clients today, contractors mostly or state highway inspectors. Whenever the motor home hit a new patch of pavement or a new stretch of concrete on the interstate, they would all start up, and listen.

“Shhh. Shhh. Shhh,“ Phil would say, concentrating on the pitch of the tires. “Marion. Marion, Indiana.“ And someone would look out the window, and there we would be, passing Marion, Indiana.

My father, sitting across the tiny galley table from me, was explaining something about football with coins, all heads-up and vibrating from the road.

“The belly series,“ he said, “depending upon everyone doing the same thing every time, every play. Faking is the same as carrying the ball. Always covering the belly.“ My father had played football with the Erhmans on the 1952 mythical state champion team of Indiana. Father had been the quarterback of the full-house backfield. The Erhmans were the halfbacks. The fullback, A. C. Russian, was in prison.

“One game I started limping after each play as I carried out my fake,“ Father said. “Watching the end every play, sooner or later, I lulled him to sleep. He forgot about me. He thought I was really hurt. And on the next play I kept the ball, put it on my hip, and rolled right around him.“ He scooted the dime toward me with his index finger.

We traveled down the interstate from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis. We hit a bad bit of road and a hollow ringing bridge. “Muncie,“ Phil shouted from the back, and there was Armick's Truck Stop. Its lights were gravy-colored through the tinted window. Many trucks squeezed together in the lot, lights out, exhausts idling. It was still early.

This was the second weekend of time trials, the third day of the Indianapolis 500. Father took this trip every year with his friends. They started with a party the night before and left early in the morning. They continued to drink, tell stories, and do business. The Erhmans like to sell asphalt at night, when the patching and puckering of the road was invisible. We had to stand up in the motor home every time we passed over a section of the road they had paved so that we could feel it through our feet. “Take your shoes off. Walk around.“ After last year's major accidents at the track, they hoped to place a bid with the management to resurface the whole course. Father had nothing to do with the business but went along for the ride. To see the trials.

“On the third day of trials someone is on the bubble,“ he said. “That's why I like the third day, because of the bubble. That means, usually, the whole field is filled up and the bumping starts. The slowest qualifying time from the first weekend is on the bubble. If someone goes faster, his bubble bursts. He gets bumped out of place just like that. You want a beer?“

It was barely light by the time we reached Indianapolis. We took the sweeping banked curve with the John Deere dealership nestled behind it. The green and yellow tractors became visible. The ground around showed black, recently disked — a demonstration. The one banked curve on the straight highway anticipated the city.

“A two-stroke engine has a baffle. Have you ever heard an unmuffled engine?“ my father asked. “Really?“

I had lived in Indianapolis for a while. In those moments when the whole city became quiet in the late afternoon, when the various oscillations of noise matched their pulses of hills and valleys, in the small depressions of silence I could hear the yawn of an engine coming from the track and the tatter of a loudspeaker voice drifting after it. That would be the tire tests. Spring.

“I taught you your left and right in a car. The left hand was where the steering wheel was. The oncoming traffic messed you up again. All the daddys were on the wrong side. Fooled you.“

The motor home eased on to an exit ramp, kept left and looped over the top of the highway. It then descended upon and merged with 465, belted around the whole city. Going east. The wrong way. The long way. The track was on the west side of town. This was done every year, too, a trip taken every year all the way around the city. A parade lap. The motor home wallowed back and forth between the four lanes, jockeying for no reason, responding slowly as things came up. The Erhmans lapsed into a spiel on slurry and expansion coefficients. We swayed by the first Steak 'n Shake drive-in, black and white, a shadow in the bell of a trumpet exchange. The striped awnings of the restaurant were already down in the new light, and a boy in white was on a ladder changing lightbulbs in the sign that read dimly, In Sight It Must Be Right.

“When you were little I took you to every one of Don Hall's drive-ins,“ my father whispered. “Each time he had a son, Don Hall put up another drive-in. He gave them all names. His sons and his restaurants. Both the same names. Trying to get both of them right. The Hollywood next to the Roller Dome. The Stockyard. The Old Gas House. The Factory. The Prime Rib. Imagine, Prime Rib Hall. The Lantern. You had one of those car seats with the little plastic wheel. It had a little mousey horn. The parking lots were flocked with pigeons pecking crumbs.“

We panned around the sun and slingshot to the south, snapped north again. The sun was on the other side of the motor home. When I lived here, I walked in Crown Hill Cemetery, the third largest cemetery in the country. John Dillinger is buried there. Most of the land is still unused, bounded by the old canal on one side and brick walls that disappear on the other extremes. James Whitcomb Riley has his tomb on a hill, the highest point in Marion County. From there I could see most of the cemetery, the plots and tokens. At times I could catch sight of the few deer that had been walled-in long ago and continued to reproduce, living in the wooded areas. A few other people would trudge up the hill, some stopping occasionally to read the legends on the stone, pulling on the sleeve of a companion and pointing. The ends of the cemetery blended into the neighboring houses. Deep in the city someone tended the flame on the War Memorial. In a plaza, the flagpoles that raised and lowered state flags automatically using an electric eye did so every time the light changed. When a cloud closed off the sun. Clouds streamed from the east over vaults and tombs and pillars, giving the impression that the day was being manufactured just over the horizon and distributed above the city and, then, dismantled behind my back. Behind my back, I could hear the engines.

“Do you want something to eat?“ my father asked. Memory interrupting memory. “Once you get inside, it will cost you an arm and a leg.“

COMPRESSION

Seen through the binoculars, the sunlight streamed up from the grill and bumpers, strapping itself across the hood like wet paper. The guardrail blurred. Unmagnified, the car drifted into the banked curve, leaking light, a bearing in a roulette wheel. Trimming itself as the curve unwound, the car wedged into the shallow pool, splayed out wings of water, emerged, hit the brakes, slid until the drums dried out, then locked and skidded parenthetically 180 degrees, shifted into reverse, y-ed around, took off again through the pylons and stuttered over the railroad ties, geared down, ground and took the hill. Father and I watched International Harvester test a new model Scout. We alternated, passing the binoculars back and forth while eating French fries from a cardboard box. From where we sat among the wild carrots, we could see most of the track, the factory, and the lots packed with Transtars and army-green two-and-a-halves.

“That's right out of your future,“ my father said, handing me the glasses, “by at least two model years.“ I watched the old guard stumble up the hill toward us, one hand on his gun and the other pulling against the long grass for balance. He had come back to chase us away again.

My father was limping. Half-circled around him the freshman team he coached looked on. Central Catholic had been his high school, too. The practice field was behind St. Vincent's Children's Home. I watched him limp. I sat up on the shoulder of a giant statue of Mary that capped an outside altar. Beyond the field and the cinder track, the old New York Central tracks wound into Levin and Sons Junk Yard. In the yard, bodies and frames of wrecked cars fit inside one another. Flattened. The usual fires burned. The trucks moved in and out of the yard, over the scales by the gate. Coming in full. Going out empty.

“Hey, kid,“ someone yelled from below, “come on down here.“ He was with a group of orphans from the home. They were about my age. I climbed down. They wanted me to do them a favor. I was to go beg for a football from the team's manager. The orphans already had two or three helmets, kicking tees, and whistles. “Tell them you're an orphan,“ one of them insisted. “If you do that they'll give you anything you want.“ Chin straps dangled from their belts like scalps. “Yeah. Yeah.“ The rest now agreed and smiled, showing me the white gummy mouth guards, preformed, over their front teeth. “Yeah. Yeah,“ swallowing their words.

After the heats and the feature, workmen start taking apart the indoor oval, shoveling the dirt off the raked planks in the curves, and pitching the hay bales on the wagons. The scoreboard, hanging over the collapsing track, winks out and gathers into a solid black cloud suspended in the haze of dust and exhaust. I hold my scarf up to my mouth, filtering my breath through the wool scented with unburned gasoline. In my head, I conjugate the winners with the races as I trot beside my father through the corridor to the ramp, descend, detouring through the exhibition hall downstairs, makeshift pits, where the midgets are being loaded on the trailers. Some are being pushed up ramps; others are running up on their own power. The trailers are hooked up to pickups with their engines running, blending together in an anxious idle. Someone touches a butterfly and then lets go as we turn. He still wears a sooty balaclava and metallic fire suit. One-third the size of the old front-engine Offys, the midgets pack up like grips, a roll bar no bigger than a handle, the decals on the cowling like those old travel stamps on steamer trunks — Champion, Monroe, STP, Goodyear, Hurst, Fram, Borg-Warner, Bell. Chains ratchet through axles. Tailgates slam, and lights come on. A truck guns and stalls and starts again. They will drive all night tonight and race tomorrow in Kokomo. We head for the doors.

Outside in the dark parking lot, the air is cold and empty. father revs up the car and goes on and on about the way they turned into the skid, coaxes the car into gear and slips into the nearest street. As we slow for the first light, a pickup with a trailer coasts by. It enters the intersection as the light turns red, hits the bump at the crest of the cross street, and gives a little flip, like a fluke, as it eases down the grade on the far side and is gone in the night. Once more, because we are not moving, things begin to thicken, and the car closes in. Everything that usually escapes invisibly draws together in steam and smoke, finally heaves into a body, takes another breath, and disappears.

POWER

In the trunk of my father's car there was a Polaroid camera with packets of black-and-white film, striped with bands of gray to distinguish them from color packages. There was chalk in boxes marked like crayon boxes but pale and faded. The chalk dust powdered everything, messed in with the grease of the folded tar and feathered jacks. There were tape measures as big as plates, with foldaway handles, purple snap lines in tear-shaped canisters, rolls of masking tape, black tarry electrician's tape on spools, and white medical tape in unopened tubes. On the first-aid kit was a green cross, and Father used an identical but empty kit for his toolbox, which he also kept in the trunk with jumper cables and two spare tires. A bright-red cartridge fire extinguisher for A, B, and C fires, and flares in red paper, rolled orange warning flags and reflectors. And a twenty-five pound bag of lime. “For the weight,“ he said, “in winter.“

Once, when I was little, we went to a Hall's drive-in, and I used the ledge above the backseat as a table. I spilled my drink, and it drained into the trunk through the rear radio speaker. The speaker shorted; the voice gargled out beneath the paper napkins and foil I was using to blot up the mess. Father was already outside, the trunk lid up and the car rocking up and down gently as he slid the things around with a hiss that was transmitted by the metal of the car. I watched him through the crack left between the body and the open lid. He wiped up the drink as it dripped down and mixed with the chalk dust, smearing the floor. He checked his equipment and then rearranged it. Satisfied, he slammed the trunk lid back down, and it caught on the first time for once and did not spring back up again as it usually did. He even hesitated, expecting it to pop up again. He tapped the trunk once and looked up at me in the rear window, surprised by his own strength. The car still rocked gently up and down. The pigeons circled and settled back to the ground.

Father worked as the director of safety for the phone company and used the camera and the tape measures to investigate traffic accidents involving the company's trucks. He spent part of every week taking pictures of wrecks, visiting accident scenes, and reconstructing what had happened. At night on the dinner table, he would unroll his schematic drawings of street grids. Colored rectangles stood for cars and trucks. Sometimes he would use tokens from board games. He penciled in vectors and numbers, all done on pale-blue veined graph paper. “I know that corner,“ I would say. He frowned as I put a glass of milk down on a parking lot. I told him, as I chewed my sandwich, of this great crash on Spring Street or how the coral color of Jim Musbaum's Chevy at Baerfield Raceway matched the color of that car there. I pointed and smudged the picture. Father frowned again, answered that this man overdrove his headlights. Staring off, he recalled conversion tables, following distances, and reaction time. This man couldn't see and forgot about a blind spot. “He didn't honk his horn at the alley opening.“ Those types of things. “Don't spill,“ he warned.

The rest of his job concerned prevention and education. He distributed drivers' education films that always culminated in a fatality, gave tests, put warnings on windows of trucks. He modified mirrors to magnify, came up with catchy slogans such as “Look alive in '75.“ He also kept a black briefcase in the trunk of his car, up by the seat. Every now and then he would simulate accidents to test first-aid skills and response times of police and fire units. He used the briefcase then.

I went along one time and watched him. He had arranged for a smashed-up car to be left in a certain ditch by our house. After putting on special blood-smeared and torn clothes that he kept in his kit, he added splashes of fake blood for fresh wounds and lacerations. He put on a medical-warning bracelet that said he was allergic to sulfa drugs. To see if they would check. He then threaded a rubber tube up his sleeve and taped it to his arm. At the other end of the tube was a rubber bulb like a perfume atomizer. He held the bulb close to his chest and with his free hand pumped more blood from a plastic bag he wore suspended from his neck. The blood went through the tube and out the other end, where it spurted like a severed artery at his wrist. In his kit, he had plastic casts he could strap on a leg or arm which approximated simple, compound, or complex fractures. He had ACE bandages that had been treated to look like burns, first to third degree.

He wedged himself through the broken windshield of the car, careful not to cut himself on the exposed sheet metal, and tucked his legs under the collapsed dash. Appearing to be pinned, he affected the shallow breathing for shock. His hand out the window, he tried a test beat or two from his wound and it squirted, a trick plastic flower on a lapel.

“How do I look?“ he asked.

“Pretty bad,“ I answered truthfully.

“Good, good. Go call those numbers.“

I left him there and went to a phone booth to call the police and the company's own emergency squad. By the time I returned, I could hear the sirens coming up the bypass. I stood a little way off and looked at my father slouched and unconscious. A red trickle bled down the car door. The shadow his hair cast darkened his forehead. A rear tire had sprung a leak, and the car was settling slowly. His finger twitched.

Passing cars slowed down. Some stopped, pulled off to the side. Passengers got out and ran up to the car. There were sirens now. Someone was directing traffic. The police and the ambulance pulled up. I went closer and saw some police clearing the area, explaining to those who tried to help. The police thanked them, but there was nothing anyone could do. The emergency crews cut away the door with a gasoline-powered tool that shook the car and sounded like a chain saw. My father's head rolled back and forth in the seat. Someone bent over and yelled in his ear. Someone else held the bleeding wrist. On the other side of the car, they broke out the window, trying to free him that way. There were more sirens now, summoned by passing motorists, and a television crew that must have been in the area, listening to the police band. Father was on the ground, and they could not stop the bleeding. They were bringing blankets. A man's hand was streaked red between the fingers. There was a scratch on my father's earlobe just flushed with blood. A piece of glass must have caught him when they broke the window. I could see him stretched out on the ground through the legs of people standing around. A wrecker pulled up. Its brakes coming on and a radio playing. Another man stood up from where he had been crouching over my father. There was no more blood. Someone pronounced him dead and laughed shortly, pulling back the blankets and wiping his hands on my father's shirt.

EXHAUST

When we passed the sign near Penalton which warns against picking up hitchhikers because the penitentiary is so close, the motor home slowed and pulled over. The Erhmans led everyone out the two doors, and we lined up along the drainage ditch and faced in the direction of the prison. The prison water tower was silhouetted now and then by sweeping searchlights. Low to the ground and this far away, not much else could be seen. The men started to shout.

“Come on out, Russian,“ and “Now's your chance.“ Between each chorus, they would pause to listen, then huddle, deciding what to say next. Lining up again, my father would pace them, “one, two, three,“ directing with his hands.

“We're waiting.“

A Funk Seed Hybrid sign was on the fence by the road. The cornfield was empty. There was not even an echo.

“He's not coming,“ someone said, and we got back in.

Starting up the road again my father said that it was a shame I had to see trials in a year when turbine cars were entered. “I miss the sound,“ he said. He waved his head as if following an imaginary vehicle from left to right and pursed his lips together to imply a sound, because that was what the new engines did. Imply a sound.

We stopped once more that night. A few miles from home we pulled off into a closed weigh station. I got out and climbed the ladder to the roof of the motor home. The siding was cold as I sat down under the TV antenna cocked like a cafe umbrella. Across the highway was an identical station. It was Closed, too. Beyond that was a barn. Visible in the circle of the mercury light was the name of the place, Belle Acres, painted below a smiling image of the Good Sam Club that spotted the dark barn, a hex sign. Good Sam smiled broadly, eyes bugging, his halo tilted back out of the way.

My father and his friends were running races up and down the driveway. They ran heats, two or three men at a time. Someone sat at the finish line with a folding TV table and campstool keeping score. As they ran, their shadows spiraled around their feet, scooting between the pools of light.

Father ran easily, won his heat, slowed down way beyond the finish line, and then turned and limped back up the apron. I applauded alone until I was interrupted by a car honking its horn as it went by on the interstate. I turned to wave. A new race started. Father, passing on his way back to the starting line, looked up at me and jerked his head from left to right performing the first half of a double take, pretending to hum along as the silent racer paused before his eyes. He hobbled back up the drive toward the hut, where his friends were jumping up and down on the scale. He bent over now and then to catch his breath.

They ran a few more heats until the man at the TV table fell asleep and put his head on his hands. The Erhmans led a walking tour north, toward home, examining shoulder material. As they began to sing, they disappeared into the night.

Father and I went back inside the motor home and started up the engine, waiting for them to return. More and more trucks appeared on the highway. The sky paralleled the black field, leaving a space in between. He listened to a horn blasting down the road and to the engine beneath our feet. “Something's missing,“ he said, swiveling in the captain's chair. He talked until the engine died, out of gas, fitting word into word until I finished sentences he had started. I could no longer tell where we were by the sound the night was making. But by then it didn't matter; we had been carried on, by the dead center, to where it already was the next day.

The Deaths of Modern Philosophers

1.

One philosopher, while eating a piece of bread, steps into a street in Paris and is run over by a bread truck. It is said he looked both ways. He had torn a bite-sized piece of bread from a baguette, placed it in his mouth, and begun to chew. He stepped into the street. He stepped into the street either with his left foot or his right foot, and it is always a street, not an avenue or boulevard. There, he was run over by a milk truck. Or he was run over by a bread truck. It depends upon which version of the story one hears. That it was a truck seems to be important, and that it is some kind of truck is important also. For a long time, it seemed to be a “milk“ truck, but now it seems to be some other kind of truck, “milk“ trucks being rarely, if ever, seen on the streets of Paris and, thus, an inaccurate detail. So it became a “wine“ truck instead for a while and then a “bread“ truck when it was remembered the philosopher was eating bread when he was run over by a truck in a street in Paris. It was at this moment, when the moment was remembered fully, that the truck that ran over the philosopher became a “bread“ truck.

2.

Another philosopher was killed while smoking on a veranda. It was after the war. Or it is thought the philosopher thought it was after the war. Or that the war, recently not over, was now over and the precautions one takes during a war, such as staying out of sight and not calling attention to your position by the glowing ash tip of your cigarette, were, now that the war was over, not as pressing as they had been only days before. I should mention that this philosopher was not a combatant, not a soldier, but an ordinary civilian albeit a modern philosopher of some notoriety. And it was night. And the war was over. It was a pleasant night, warm, not humid, comfortable. An air of sadness attaches instantly to this incident's gesture of joy. The act of smoking in the open after the war is over! Lighting up under the stars after years of smoking in blacked-out interiors. I imagine, as he was shot on a veranda, that the philosopher emerged onto said veranda by means of large French doors, the glass of their mullions miraculous survivors of the same said war. The opaque curtains billow in the doorway as the philosopher strikes a match, drawing the attention of a nearby nearly invisible partisan sniper. However, we can never be sure. Some would argue the recklessness of the act, that though the philosopher knew the war was over he would surely also know that not everyone would know the war was over. There was still a risk at showing oneself. And there is this final mystery: One survives by one's wits for so long and then survives only to the moment of one's not surviving any longer.

3.

In the movie we will be making about the deaths of modern philosophers not all the deaths we hoped would be of the nature above. Not all deaths of modern philosophers can be the results of freak accident or chance, can they? Not all can be hit by milk trucks while crossing the street or be shot while smoking on verandas a few days after a war is over. Some must die of natural causes or, at least, diseases that, in a way, are natural and, in a way, are not natural. In our research we have asked living philosophers how dead philosophers have died. Invariably the living philosophers tell only the stories of the deaths of the dead philosophers that dramatize these ironies or paradoxes. These anecdotes are certainly visual, which is a necessary ingredient as we are making a movie, but we would like to have uncovered a death of a different sort to give relief to the pattern of deaths that was emerging. There was the report, mentioned by several philosophers, of the philosopher who was preserved and stuffed after he died, and kept in a closet at a college. But this, strictly speaking, wasn't so much the actual death of a philosopher but the way death, for this particular philosopher, was being spent. There was a question also as to this philosopher, while he was living, living outside the range of what we meant as “modern,“ though his body, in death, has definitely survived into the period we are now calling “modern.“ We did see the potential in the possible scene. The camera panning around the perfectly still philosopher. He has been posed seated and affixed to a wheeled chair. The antique quality of his clothing is, perhaps, a shade more bizarre than his own taxidermy. Perhaps, too, we could, during this moment of contemplation, add to the film another level of contemplation, i.e., the filming of the filming of the dead philosopher, the two cameras using the same track circling the body and in the final shot, the one shown to an audience, employing footage from both cameras. There would always be a camera in the frame with the stuffed body. We haven't ruled this out yet.

4.

A third philosopher thinks he dies on the operating table. An arthroscopic instrument has been inserted into his body. He has been lightly sedated for the procedure so that he might watch the progress of the camera through his gastrointestinal tract, which he now contemplates as a single hole coring his body. A television monitor floats overhead. His doctor has encouraged him to watch. The drug administered to the philosopher is categorized as an amnesic. The immediate discomfort of the operation will never register in his memory. The doctor tells the philosopher what he, the doctor, is doing, what he, the doctor, is seeing on the monitor. The philosopher, though he is there for those moments, forgets them instantly as the drug scrubs away the arriving memories. This philosopher, the one who will think he has died, finds himself, at first, thinking of another philosopher, a colleague, who did actually die while he, the philosopher now forgetting what he has seen of his slick colon, watched the philosopher, his friend, die of pancreatitis there in a hospital bed. That philosopher's diseased pancreas secreted its enzymatic fluids indiscriminately. His body was digesting itself. That is what he said. “My body is digesting itself.“ All of this was happening on the insides of the philosophers who looked, on the outside to all the world, as if they were lightly sleeping. This is death, the philosophers think, or this is what death is like. One philosopher wants to remember the way it feels. But then he dies. The other wants to remember the way it feels. But then he forgets.

Four Susans

LAZY SUSAN

Susan took him home to meet her parents. Her parents had kept her bedroom exactly the way it had been when she was in high school. He was lying on the four-poster bed looking through her yearbooks, The Cauldron. He turned to the back of one from her senior year. The freshman pictures were minuscule, cells in a hive. The pictures enlarged as he paged through the classes, sophomores and juniors. The seniors, finally, stamp-sized and autographed. Susan's portrait, an embarrassment of hair, a string of studio pearls at her neck. He could see in it the Susan he knew, though shadowed by age and an airbrush long ago.

“Susan,“ he said to her, “a lot of Susans.“

“Tell me about it,“ she said. “Just as many Michaels.“

She was standing at the foot of the bed watching Michael as he flipped through the pages. On every page three or four Susans at least. Susan, Susan, Susan.

Her parents had turned on the television in the family room. They had all eaten dinner together in the breakfast nook. The table was a round maple thing with heavy turned legs. The whole house was Colonial with milk-glass lamps topped by frilly shades, hardwood chairs with spoke backs and curving arms, talon feet and and pinecone finials. In the corner, a Franklin stove boiled over with philodendra. The television was shuttered in a cabinet originally carpentered by Jefferson. On the table was an ancient lazy Susan. Her father had made the same old joke about it and his daughter's name. It rotated slowly on its own as they removed and replaced the dishes and plates, condiments and seasonings. It was a function of gravity and balance, the frictionless slide of ball bearings, but it appeared motorized like a display at a grocery store or museum. After dinner, they did the dishes at the sink while her parents rocked in the glider on the porch. Susan spun the lazy Susan like a wheel of fortune, a spinner from a board game. It twirled and twirled.

Susan stood at the foot of her bed watching him skim through her high school yearbooks. They had been lovers for years now, though they were maintaining the illusion that they were not for her parents' sake. During the visit, he would sleep in her brother's room. Her brother was an actuary in Milwaukee. She looked around her old room at its clutter of souvenirs, every innocuous object emitting its own secret life. She pressed herself against one of the bedposts, the one she had used as a child. The post had been lathed, swelling and contracting, cut with channels, knobs, and grooves. The wood was stained and distressed on its corners, the cherry color worn away. It wasn't until she moved out of this room that she started to touch herself. This was always better, but she had thought, back then, that her rubbing right here, again and again, had worn off the paint, had smoothed it finer than the finish on the rest of the frame, its polish another kind of stain.

It had been years since she had done this, and this still fit, the knurl scored in the wood, the abrading layers in her clothes, her skin beneath, the prickliness of her hair, how it felt again as she imagined again how it had been before, how always before she believed she felt even the grain of the quartersawn oak. Coming this way, she never made a sound. No one should hear. It was as if Susan was somewhere else, and this Susan, who was coming, was here but not conscious of pressing against the smooth wood, that turned, rippling whorl. With her hands on the post, she steadied herself, forgot she was there. She hardly moved, only pressed deeper into the infinitely complicated template of the wood, subtly molding each organic edge, fitting into the scooped-out shell of her past.

BLACK-EYED SUSAN

Susan, naked but for her glasses. She keeps them on. Sometimes wears an adjustable black elastic athletic band attached to each earpiece to keep them in place. She lets me slide the rubber loops onto the curving plastic, cinch them tight with the tiny slides. She puts on her glasses like goggles, reaches behind her head and snugs the buckle tight. Her glasses. The frames. Black plastic frames for the top halves of the lenses, silver wire rims below. Silver rivets at each top corner and at the temples. The delicate clear plastic pads resting on each side of her nose. Men's glasses. The glasses of the Johnson administration. NASA glasses. Vince Lombardi glasses. Colonel Sanders glasses. Malcolm X glasses. “I want to see,“ Susan says. I like looking at her naked, naked but for those glasses. She lives in one city, and I live in another. We don't see enough of each other. And when we do see each other we are more than likely. We like to meet in hotel rooms, motel rooms either here or there. The smaller the room the better. More mirrors then, designed for the illusion of space. She sits on the sink counter, her back against a mirror, looking over my shoulder as I stand in front of her between her legs. She is looking into the mirror on the closet door behind me. I look into the mirror her back presses against, see my back, my ass flexing. See Susan, her chin on my shoulder, looking into the depth of the mirrors reflecting back and forth. Susan, Susan, Susan, Susan. I sit on a chair. She sits on me. She tells me what she sees in the wall mirror since I can't see. I take the elastic strap between my teeth. I pull it tight. I gnaw on it. On her hands and knees she angles a hand mirror between her legs. She watches me go in and out behind her, above her. On her back with me on her, she hovers the hand mirror above us. The silver of the mirror pools between her legs. As I lick her, I see the mirror fog and clear. Fog and clear. She catches sight of us, shadows reflected in the blank screen of the television. We are unfocused ghosts from another channel bleeding through. I watch her watch herself on the screen. I watch her as she comes. She doesn't close her eyes. I see myself focused on the surfaces of the lenses of her glasses as she comes. I see through those transparent images, my refracted face, its contrasts of planes and angles. I see through the lenses to the other smaller versions of me, motes, floating on each glossy pupil's black concave dilation.

SUE BEE

Susan, you call. Your husband is out of town, your kids in bed. I walk over. All your neighbors have cut their lawns. The evening steams. There is that chorus of locusts, a hatch this year, the sibilant sawn to fricative and back, the z's spent to s's. The s, s, s, s. You are sitting on the front steps, drinking from a cold bottle of beer. You touch my arm with it and lead me inside where it is cooler. The dinner dishes are still stacked on the counter, with the spice tins, the pepper mill, the spent mix boxes, the flour jar open, the pans and skillet in the sink, a very slow drip from the faucet. “The place's a mess,“ you lisp, “and I'm a little drunk.“ You don't want to go upstairs. The kids are restless in the heat. You want to fuck in the kitchen, half-clothed on the table, the chairs. On a whim you grab the almost empty plastic bear of honey, pull the cap free with your teeth, the nozzle sweet between your lips, and turn it on its head. Kissing me, you wait forever, for the honey to run down, coating the inside. You squeeze its belly, run a bead of honey along my cock, smearing it with your fingers, then spreading it with your tongue so that it coats the whole length. It takes hours to work my cock inside you. A drop of water collects on the lip of the faucet. A dew of honey clings to your hair. You rub your clit, tease your hair stiff, then lick your fingers and smell the resin of the rosemary, the tupelo, the tulip poplar, the alfalfa, the clover the honey was made from. We can hardly move, my cock caught fast deep inside you, our mouths stuck to each other, sucking the honey coming to our lips. We are still there. Why move? The children never wake up. The dishes are never done. Your husband never returns. The grass never grows again. The trees are studded with hundreds of cicada shells. All the bees are fossilized in amber. That drop of water trembles on the lip of the faucet always about to fall.

SUSIE Q

“Susan?“ I hear him whispering in the corridor. I have a roomette on the Lake Shore Limited from New York to Chicago. He is riding coach on the Boston section. In Albany, the two trains hook up, the electric power blinking on and off as the cars are shunted back and forth in the yard. The old Pullmans creak as they are eased into each other, a shudder ripples through the cars as they couple, then again when the new engines pull the slack out of the train and accelerate into a curve sweeping out onto the bridge over the Hudson.

He is looking for me. We arranged this meeting. We haven't been lovers for years, though we stay in touch by phone, postcard, e-mail. This is for old times' sake.

“Susan?“ he says. “Susan? Susan? Susan?“ he whispers as the train reaches speed outside of Schenectady. Now it is dark outside, and the tracks are running through a cut, the high banks a sheet of black smeared here and there by a smattering of luminous trash reflecting the moonlight. I have the shade all the way up. I've turned out all the lights except the dull blue night-light near the floor. The little fan whirs above the door. I love the old pre-war cars with their stainless and gunmetal painted steel, the coarse orange brown fabrics smelling like old theaters. The nickel-plated hardware of the vents, switches, and fixtures gleams in subtle shadows. And I love the ingenious efficiency of the space, the way the sink folds into the wall, the pocket doors and the cubbyholes for glasses and jewelry, the racks for luggage, the disappearing closet, the secret compartment for my shoes that has another access door in the corridor for the attendant who will shine them overnight and return them polished in the morning.

“Susan?“

“In here,“ I breathe. I have already unfolded the bed, collapsing the chair with its complaining springs and hauling the mattress, bedding, and pillows from the hidden drawer behind the once upright seat. I've done this already naked as it is almost impossible to undress once the bed is in place. So I undressed while the train rocked by West Point, folded my clothes away. I put in my diaphragm while balanced precariously with one foot resting flat on the clever scissored armrest of the lounge chair and my butt, cold, propped against the mirror affixed to the inside of the sliding door. I tried not to think how I looked as I eased the diaphragm inside me, past the ingenious folds of my vagina. It expanded into place, foreshadowing the contraction and expansion of the roomette I then set about to transact.

He finds me at last. I am stretched out on the bed beneath its covers and blankets in the dark, punctuated only by the flashes of light sweeping by the window. He immediately begins to undress in the tiny space left between the bed and the door, which he has locked, manipulating the many moving parts of the metal handle and latch. My eyes adjust to the dark. In the shadows I can see him contort, wrestle with his clothes as if he is shedding skin too soon, as if he is making love to somebody else. He drapes his clothes over the recessed hooks, balls them in the corner. His penis springs up as he shimmies out of his shorts. It is at my eye-level and, in the dull blue light, I watch it expand and arch upward, another ingenious design. Above me, his head catches in the collar of his shirt he is too rushed to unbutton. His taut cock inches from my face transmits the rhythm of the train's movement, quivers and twitches as the steel wheels stutter over the joints of the rail beneath us. I fight my way out from under the covers as he strips off his socks and toys with the clasp of his watch. I work my way up onto my hands and knees. We say excuse me to each other as we bump and lurch into each other and with the train. At last, I am facing the window, my knees on the edge of the bed, my feet flat against the door on either side of his knees. He stands with his back against the door. He fumbles looking for the spot. I reach back through, making a few jerking attempts to grab his flexing cock as it recoils against my thigh, my cheeks, and then I guide him in.

I wanted to do this, this pushing against the picture window, pushing back against him. The train is running along a wide flat river, the water level route, an advertisement of a smooth ride, no heavy hauling over hills, over mountains. The compartment leaves so little room that behind me he can only grind against me, pushing against me and then pulling my hips, pulling me hard against where he is pinned. Outside, out in the country illuminated by the natural light of the moon, the layers of distance emerge — the streaking pattern of things close by and the slow creep of outlined details in the distance. I follow the lazy meander of farmyard light as it falls away, a blazing billboard on a distant hill as it burns out. There are sudden bursts of red at the crossings, the Doppler of sound, streaking across the window like rain. “Susan,“ he says. I feel him come. I can't always feel it inside — the sloughing of the spasms, each less intense than the last — through the skin, but this time I do.

And later, after a series of intricate maneuvers, we have bent and twisted our bodies into this position of rest. He's turned on the reading light over his head by flipping a toggle by my big toe. Instantly, we appear, reflected in the window, tumbled together, entwined with each other, the bed, the roomette. He consults the national timetable, noting that we will gain an hour as we head west. He reads to me the names of the towns we will go through, through the night, passes time relating the nicknames of rail lines: The C&NW, the Cheap and Nothing Wasted; the Rock Island Line; and the New York, Susquehanna & Western, the Susie Q. He turns off the light and toggles my right nipple with his left hand. In the dark, I feel around for my vibrator I've stored above the folding sink, an old Sunbeam with the heft and graceful lines of a Lionel gauge toy train car. I connect it up to the AC socket by the reading light.

At the head of the train are three massive diesel engines powering generators creating current for the electric motors turning the driving wheels pulling us along at eighty miles an hour. I plug into a tiny fraction of that power, some spilled amperage. The vibrator hums like a toy train's transformer. The thrum of those real engines gets communicated through the metal of the cars, carried across the couplings where the gaskets kiss. I feel his hand wrap around mine on the machine. The steel wheels squeal on a radical curve that brings us back to that river. We can feel the inertia of all the weight as the train coasts down a grade. The timetable says we have hours and hours, and the trains are never on time. The hum of the vibrator harmonizes with the pitch of the engines throttling up, four cars forward. We can see the engines, their strobing lights as they wrap around another curve ahead. The current streams back through the train as the sound of the horn peals off like skin. I nudge the vibrator's nob along the water level route, tracing the contours of the terrain. We are in no hurry. We are taking the train. He whispers, a decibel or two above the purring running though our fingers, through our arms, into our shoulders, through our bones. I listen to the names of the stations we'll be passing through, our possible destinations: Sioux Center; Sioux Falls; Sault Ste. Marie; Soo Junction; Sooner, OK; Susie, Iowa; Susanville; Susanna, someplace; Susan, Susan in Montana.