M Train

  The Flea Draws Blood

  BY THE TIME I got back to New York I had forgotten why I’d left. I attempted to resume my daily routine but was waylaid by an unusually oppressive bout of jet lag. A thick torpor coupled with a surprisingly internal luminosity gave me the impression I had been overcome with a numinous malady transmitted by the Berlin and London fog. My dreams were like outtakes from Spellbound: liquefying columns, straining saplings, and irreducible theorems turning in a swirl of heart-stopping weather. Recognizing the poetic possibilities of this temporary affliction I attempt to rein something in, treading my internal haze in search of elemental creatures or the hare of a wild religion. Instead I am greeted with shuffling face cards with no faces mouthing nothing worth preserving and certainly no cowpoke spinning loopholes. No luck at all. My hands are as empty as the pages of my journal. It’s not so easy writing about nothing. Words caught from a voice-over in a dream more compelling than life. It’s not so easy writing about nothing: I scratch them over and over onto a white wall with a chunk of red chalk.

  Sundown, I feed the cats their evening meal, slide on my coat, and wait at the corner for the light to change. Streets are empty, a few cars: red, blue, and a yellow taxi, primary colors saturated by the last of the cold-filtered light. Phrases swoop in on me as if skywritten by tiny biplanes. Replenish your marrow. Have your pockets ready. Wait for the slow burn. Gumshoe phrases bringing to mind the low side-mouthed tones of William Burroughs. Crossing over I wonder how William would decipher the language of my current disposition. There was a time when I could simply pick up the phone and ask him, but now I must summon him in other ways.

  ’Ino is empty, as I am ahead of the evening rush. It’s not my usual hour but I sit at my same table and have white bean soup and black coffee. Thinking to write something of William I open my notebook, but a pageant of scenes and the faces that inhabited them is quietly paralyzing; couriers of wisdom I was privileged to break bread with. Gone Beats that once ushered my generation into a cultural revolution, though it is William’s distinctive voice that speaks to me now. I can hear him elucidating on the Central Intelligence Agency’s insidious pervasion of our daily life or the perfect bait for catching walleyed pike in Minnesota.

  I last saw him in Lawrence, Kansas. He lived in a modest house, with his cats, his books, a shotgun, and a portable wooden medicine cabinet locked away. He sat at his typewriter; the one with the ribbon so used up that sometimes only impressions of words made it to the page. He had a miniature pond with darting red fish and tin cans set up in his backyard. He enjoyed a little target practice and was still a great shot. I purposely left my camera in its sack and stood quietly observing as he took aim. He was somewhat dried and bent, yet he was beautiful. I looked at the bed where he slept and watched the curtains on his window move ever so slightly. Before I said good-bye we stood together before a print of William Blake’s miniature of The Ghost of a Flea. It was an image of a reptilian being with a curved yet powerful spine enhanced with scales of gold.

  —That’s how I feel, he said.

  I was buttoning my coat. I wanted to ask why but I didn’t say anything.

  The ghost of a flea. What was William telling me? My coffee cold, I gesture for another, sketching possible answers then abruptly crossing them out. Instead I opt to follow William’s shadow snaking a winding medina bathed in flickering images of freestanding arthropods. William the exterminator, drawn to a singular insect whose consciousness is so highly concentrated that it conquers his own.

  The flea draws blood, depositing it as well. But this is no ordinary blood. What the pathologist calls blood is also a substance of release. A pathologist examines it in a scientific way, but what of the writer, the visualization detective, who sees not only blood but the spattering of words? Oh, the activity in that blood, and the observations lost to God. But what would God do with them? Would they be filed away in some hallowed library? Volumes illustrated with obscure shots taken with a dusty box camera. A revolving system of stills indistinct yet familiar projecting in all directions: a fading drummer boy in white costume, sepia stations, starched shirts, bits of whimsy, rolls of faded scarlet, close-ups of doughboys laid out on the damp earth curling like phosphorescent leaves around the stem of a Chinese pipe.

  The boy in white costume. Where did he come from? I didn’t make him up but referenced something. Forgoing a third coffee I close my notes on William, leave some money on the table, and head back home. The answer is in a book somewhere, in my own blessed library. Still in my coat I revisit my book piles, trying not to be sidetracked nor lured into another dimension. I pretend not to notice After-Dinner Declarations by Nicanor Parra or Auden’s Letters from Iceland. I momentarily open Jim Carroll’s The Petting Zoo, essential to anyone in search of concrete delirium, then immediately close it. Sorry, I tell them all, I can’t revisit you now, it’s time to reel myself in.

  As I unearth After Nature by W. G. Sebald it occurs to me that the image of the boy in white is on the cover of his Austerlitz. Uniquely haunting, it drew me to the book and thus introduced me to Sebald. Mystery solved, I abandon my search and eagerly open After Nature. At one time the three lengthy poems in this slim volume had such a profound effect on me that I could hardly bear to read them. Scarcely would I enter their world before I’d be transported to a myriad of other worlds. Evidences of such transports are crammed onto the endpapers as well as a declaration I once had the hubris to scrawl in a margin—I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works.

  Max Sebald! He squats on the damp earth and examines a curved stick. An old man’s staff or a humble branch turned with the saliva of a faithful dog? He sees, not with eyes, and yet he sees. He recognizes voices within silence, history within negative space. He conjures ancestors who are not ancestors, with such precision that the gilded threads of an embroidered sleeve are as familiar as his own dusty trousers.

  Images hang to dry on a line that stretches around an enormous globe: the reverse of the Ghent altarpiece, a single leaf torn from a wondrous book illustrating an extinct yet glorious fern, a goatskin map of the Gotthard Pass, the coat of a slaughtered fox. He lays out the world in 1527. He gives us a man—the painter Matthias Grünewald. The son, the sacrifice, the great works. We believe it will go on forever, then an abrupt tearing of time, the death of everything. The painter, the son, the strokes all recede, without music, without fanfare, only a sudden and distinct absence of color.

  What a drug this little book is; to imbibe it is to find oneself presuming his process. I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself. It is not mere envy but a delusional quickening in the blood. Soon abstracted, the book slips off my lap and I am off, diverted by the calloused heels of a young lad delivering loaves.

  —

  He bows his head. As an apprentice to his father, his destiny is decided and there is nothing to do but follow. He bakes bread but dreams of music. One night he rises as his father sleeps. He wraps a loaf and throws it in a sack and steals his father’s boots. Ecstatically he distances himself from his village. He crosses the wide plains, winds through Hindu forests, and scales the white peaks. He journeys until he collapses half starved in a square where a benevolent widow of a famed violinist rescues him. She tends to him and slowly he regains his health. In gratitude he makes himself useful. One evening the young man watches her as she sleeps. He senses her husband’s priceless violin buried in the pit of her memory. Deeply coveting it he picks the lock of her dreams with her own hairpin. He finds the concealed case and triumphantly holds the glowing instrument in his two hands.

  —

  I place After Nature back on the shelf, safely among the many portals of the world. They float through these pages often without explanation. Writers and their process. Writers and their books. I cannot assume the reader will be familiar with them all, but in the end is the reader familiar with me? Does the reader wish
to be so? I can only hope, as I offer my world on a platter filled with allusions. As one held by the stuffed bear in Tolstoy’s house, an oval platter that was once overflowing with the names of callers, infamous and obscure, small cartes de visite, many among the many.

  Credit 4.1

  Tolstoy’s bear, Moscow

  Hill of Beans

  IN MICHIGAN I became a solitary drinker, as Fred never touched coffee. My mother had given me a pot that was a smaller version of hers. How many times had I watched her scoop the grounds from the red Eight O’Clock Coffee tin into the metal basket of the percolator, waiting patiently by the stove as it brewed? My mother, sitting at the kitchen table, the steam rising from her cup entwining with the smoke curling from her cigarette resting on an invariably chipped ashtray. My mother in her blue flowered housecoat, no slippers on her long bare feet identical to my own.

  I made my coffee in her pot and sat and wrote at a card table in the kitchen by the screen door. A photograph of Albert Camus hung next to the light switch. It was a classic shot of Camus in a heavy overcoat with a cigarette between his lips, like a young Bogart, in a clay frame made by my son, Jackson. It had a green glaze and the inner edge had pointed teeth like the open mouth of an aggressive robot. There was no glass in the frame and the image discolored through the years. My son, seeing him every day, got the idea that Camus was an uncle who lived far away. I would glance up at him from time to time as I was writing. I wrote about a traveler who didn’t travel. I wrote about a girl on the lam whose namesake was Saint Lucy, symbolized by the image of two eyes upon a plate. Every time I fried two eggs sunny-side up I thought of her.

  We lived in an old stone country house on a canal that emptied into the Saint Clair River. There were no cafés within walking distance. My one respite was the coffee machine at 7-Eleven. On Saturday morning I would rise early and walk a quarter mile to 7-Eleven and get a large black coffee and a glazed donut. Then I would stop at the lot behind the fish-and-tackle store, a simple, whitewashed cement outpost. To me it looked like Tangier, though I had never been there. I sat on the ground in the corner surrounded by low white walls, shelving real time, free to rove the smooth bridge connecting past and present. My Morocco. I followed whatever train I wanted. I wrote without writing—of genies and hustlers and mythic travelers, my vagabondia. Then I would walk back home, happily satisfied, and resume my daily tasks. Even now, having at last been to Tangier, my spot behind the bait store seems the true Morocco in my memory.

  Michigan. Those were mystical times. An era of small pleasures. When a pear appeared on the branch of a tree and fell before my feet and sustained me. Now I have no trees, there is no crib nor clothesline. There are drafts of manuscripts spread over the floor where they slipped off the edge of the bed in the night. There is the unfinished canvas tacked to the wall and the scent of eucalyptus failing to mask the sickening smell of used turpentine and linseed oil. There are telltale drips of cadmium red staining the bathroom sink—along the edge of the baseboard—or splotches on the wall where the brush got away. One step into a living space and one can sense the centrality of work in a life. Half-empty paper coffee cups. Half-eaten deli sandwiches. An encrusted soup bowl. Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work.

  —This is how I live, I am thinking.

  —

  I knew the moon would eventually rise above my skylight, but I couldn’t wait for it. I remember a comforting darkness, as when a night maid enters a hotel room and turns down the bedding and closes the drapes. I surrendered to waves of sleep, sampling the offerings, layer by layer, of a mysterious box of chocolates. I awoke somewhat startled with a radiating pain that moved through my arms. A band tightening, but I remained calm. Lightning struck near my skylight, followed by heavy thunder and punishing rain. It’s only the storm, I said half aloud. I had been dreaming of the dead. But which dead? Blood leaves covered them. Pale blossoms fell and covered the red leaves. I leaned over and checked the digital clock on the VCR I rarely use, never able to remember the necessary chain of commands to get it going: 5:00 A.M. I had a sudden recall of the lengthy taxi scene in the movie Eyes Wide Shut. An uncomfortable Tom Cruise caught in the flow of real time. What was Kubrick thinking? He was thinking that real-time cinema is the only hope for art. He was thinking about how Orson Welles had Rita Hayworth cut and bleach her famous red tresses for The Lady from Shanghai.

  Cairo was hacking a hairball. I got up and drank some water and she hopped onto the bed and went to sleep beside me. My dreams shifted. Trials of a person I didn’t know lost in a labyrinth of aisles formed by the immense filing cabinets of Brazil—the movie, not the country. I awoke out of sorts, felt under the bed for socks but found only a lost slipper. After wiping up traces of kitty vomit I went downstairs barefoot, stepping on a rotting rubber frog, then spent a disproportionate amount of time preparing the cats’ breakfast. The Abyssinian runt circling, the oldest and most intelligent eyeing the treat jar, and a huge tomcat, there by default, riveted by my every move. I rinsed the water bowls, filled them with filtered water, handpicked personality-appropriate saucers from a mismatched stack, and carefully measured their food. They seemed more suspicious than grateful.

  The café was empty, but the cook was unscrewing the outlet plate above my seat. I took my book into the bathroom and read while he finished. When I emerged, the cook was gone and a woman was ready to sit in my seat.

  — Excuse me, this is my table.

  —Did you reserve it?

  —Well, no, but it’s my table.

  —Did you actually sit here? There’s nothing on the table and you have your coat on.

  I stood there mutely. If this were an episode of Midsomer Murders she would surely be found strangled in a wild ravine behind an abandoned vicarage. I shrugged and sat at another table, hoping to wait her out. She spoke loudly, asking for eggs Benedict and iced coffee with skim milk, neither offered on the menu.

  She’ll leave, I thought. But she didn’t. She plopped her oversized red lizard bag on my table and made numerous calls on her cell phone. There was no way to escape her odious conversation, fixed on a tracking number for some missing FedEx package. I sat and stared at the heavy white coffee mug. If this were an episode of Luther, she would be found faceup in the snow with the objects from her purse arranged about her: a bodily corona like Our Lady of Guadalupe.

  —Such dark thoughts for the sake of a corner table. My inner Jiminy Cricket spoke up. Oh, all right, I said. May the world’s small things fill her with delight.

  — Good, good, spoke the cricket.

  —And may she purchase a lottery ticket and possess the winning number.

  —Unnecessary, but fine.

  —And may she order a thousand such bags, each one more splendid than the last, delivered and dumped by FedEx, and may she be trapped by a storeroom’s worth, without food, water, or cell phone.

  — I’m leaving, said my conscience.

  — Me too, I said, and I went back out onto the street.

  Delivery trucks were gridlocked on little Bedford Street. The water department in search of a mainline was jackhammering near Father Demo Square. I crossed over to Broadway and walked north to Twenty-fifth Street to the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral dedicated to Saint Sava, the patron saint of the Serbs. I stopped, as I had many times before, to visit the bust of Nikola Tesla, the patron saint of alternating current, placed outside the church like a lone sentinel. I stood as a Con Edison truck parked within eyeshot. No respect, I thought.

  —And you think you have problems, he said to me.

  —All currents lead to you, Mr. Tesla.

  —Hvala! How can I serve you?

  —Oh, I’m just having trouble writing. I move back and forth from lethargy to agitation.

  —A pity. Perhaps you should step inside and light a candle to Saint Sava. He calms the sea for ships.

  —Yeah, maybe. I’m off balance, not sure what’s wrong.

  —You h
ave misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are as dead.

  —How do I find it again?

  —Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.

  —Thank you, Mr. Tesla. Is there something I can do for you?

  —Yes, he said, could you move a bit toward the left? You’re standing in my light.

  —

  Roaming around for a few hours looking for landmarks no longer there. Pawnshops, diners, flophouses gone. Some changes around the Flatiron Building but it is still there. I stood in awe just as I had done in 1963, saluting its creator, Daniel Burnham. It took just a year to build his masterpiece with its triangular ground plan. Walking home I stopped for a slice of pizza. I wondered if the triangular shape of the Flatiron Building had triggered my desire for it. I got a coffee to go, which spilled over the front of my coat, as the lid wasn’t secured.

  When I entered Washington Square Park some kid tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and he grinned and handed me a sock. I recognized it immediately. A pale brown cotton lisle sock with a gilded bee embroidered by its edge. I have several pairs of such socks, but where did this one come from? I noticed his companions—two girls around twelve or thirteen—in a fit of laughter. It was undoubtedly yesterday’s sock caught up in my pantleg that shimmied down and slid to the ground. Thanks, I mumbled, and stuffed it into my pocket.

  Approaching the Caffè Dante I could see the murals of Florence through the wide window. I wasn’t ready to go home so I went inside and ordered Egyptian chamomile tea. It arrived in a glass pot and bits of golden flowers were floating at the bottom. Blossoms covering the dead where they lie, like a line from an old murder ballad. I finally placed where the images in my morning dream might have come from—the Battle of Shiloh in the Civil War. Thousands of young soldiers lay dead on the battleground in a peach orchard in full bloom. It was said that the blossoms fell upon them, covering them like a thin layer of fragrant snow. I wondered why I had dreamed that, but then again, why do we dream about anything?