M Train

  I sat there for a long time drinking tea and listening to the radio. Happily there seemed to be an actual human choosing songs with abandoned disconnect. A version of “White Wedding” by a Serbian hardcore punk band, then Neil Young singing, No one wins; it’s a war of man. Neil is right, no one wins anything; winning is an illusion, that’s for sure. The sun was going down. Where did the day go? Suddenly I remembered how Fred once found a small portable record player in the closet of a cabin we’d rented in northern Michigan. When he opened it up there was a single of “Radar Love” on the turntable. A telepathic love song by Golden Earring that seemed to speak of our long-distance courtship and the electric thread that drew us together. It was the only record there and we turned it up and played it over and over.

  A local and statewide newsbreak, then a weather alert announced another hard rain coming. I could already feel it in my bones. The song “Your Protector” by Fleet Foxes followed. Its melancholic menace filled my heart with strange adrenaline. Time to go. I put some money down on the table and bent down to tie my bootlace, which had been dragging as I crossed through some puddles in Washington Square. Sorry, I told my lace, wiping off traces of mud with my napkin. I noticed there was a funnel of words written on it and I shoved it into my pocket. I would decipher it later. While I was retying my boots, the song “What a Wonderful World” came on. When I sat up, tears were welling. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes, trying not to listen.

  —If you don’t have one, then everyone is your valentine.

  The morning’s Hallmark greeting, courtesy of that darned cowpoke. I felt around for my spectacles. They were wrapped in the sheets along with a beat-up paperback of The Laughing Policeman and a chain with an Ethiopian cross. How does he keep reappearing and how did he know it was Valentine’s Day? I slipped into my moccasins, shuffled into the bathroom, somewhat surly. Salt clung to my lashes and the lenses of my specs were cloudy with fingerprints. I pressed a hot washcloth against my lids and glanced at the low wood bench that once served as a daybed for a young villager on the Ivory Coast. There was a small pile of white dress shirts, tattered tee shirts worn thin through the years, and Fred’s old flannel shirts washed into weightlessness. I was thinking that when Fred’s clothes needed mending I did it myself. I chose one with red-and-black buffalo checks; it seemed a good choice. I picked my dungarees off the floor and shook out the socks.

  Yeah, I had no valentine, so the cowpoke was probably right. When you don’t have one, everyone is potentially your valentine. A notion I decided to keep to myself lest I be obliged to spend the day pasting hearts of lace on red construction paper to send out into the whole of the world.

  The world is everything that is the case. There’s a positively elegant wisecrack courtesy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico, easy to grasp yet impossible to break down. I could print it in the center of a paper doily and deposit it into the pocket of a passing stranger. Or maybe Wittgenstein could be my valentine. We could live in a little red house in cantankerous silence on the side of a mountain in Norway.

  On the way to ’Ino I noticed the lining of my left-hand pocket was torn and made a mental note to mend it. My mood suddenly lifted. The day was crisp and bright, the atmosphere quivering with life, like the translucent strands of a rare aquatic species with long, flowing tentacles, lappets flowing vertically from a jellyfish’s bell. Would that human energy could materialize in such a way. I imagine such strands waving horizontally from the edges of my black coat.

  —

  There were red rosebuds in a small vase in the bathroom at ’Ino. I draped my coat over the empty chair across from me, and then spent much of the next hour drinking coffee and filling pages of my notebook with drawings of single-celled animals and various species of plankton. It was strangely comforting, for I remembered copying such things from a heavy textbook that sat on the shelf above my father’s desk. He had all kinds of books rescued from dustbins and deserted houses and bought for pennies at church bazaars. The range of subjects from ufology to Plato to the planarian reflected his ever-curious mind. I would pore over this particular book for hours, contemplating its mysterious world. The dense text was impossible to penetrate but somehow the monochromic renderings of living organisms suggested many colors, like flashing minnows in a fluorescent pond. This obscure and nameless book, with its paramecia, algae, and amoebas, floats alive in memory. Such things that disappear in time that we find ourselves longing to see again. We search for them in close-up, as we search for our hands in a dream.

  My father claimed that he never remembered his dreams, but I could easily recount mine. He also told me that seeing one’s own hands within a dream was exceedingly rare. I was sure I could if I set my mind to it, a notion that resulted in a plethora of failed experiments. My father questioned the usefulness of such a pursuit, but nevertheless invading my own dreams topped my list of impossible things one must one day accomplish.

  In grade school I was often scolded for not paying attention. I suppose I was busy thinking about such things or attempting to untangle the mystery of an expanding network of seemingly unanswerable questions. The hill-of-beans equation, for example, occupied a fair portion of second grade. I was contemplating a problematic phrase in The Story of Davy Crockett by Enid Meadowcroft. I wasn’t supposed to be reading it as it was in the bookcase for third graders. But drawn to it I slipped it into my schoolbag and read it in secret. I instantly identified with young Davy, who was tall and gangly, telling equally tall tales, getting into scrapes, and forgetting his chores. His pa reckoned that Davy wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. I was only seven and these words stopped me in my tracks. What could his pa have meant by that? I lay awake at night thinking about it. What was a hill of beans worth? Would a hill of anything be worth a boy like Davy Crockett?

  I followed my mother around the A&P pushing the shopping cart.

  —Mommy, how much would a hill of beans cost?

  —Oh, Patricia, I don’t know. Ask your father. I’ll take the cart and you go pick out your cereal and don’t lag behind.

  I quickly did as I was told, grabbing a box of shredded wheat. Then I was off to the dry-goods aisle to check the price of beans, confronted with a new dilemma. What kind of beans? Black beans kidney beans fava beans lima beans green beans navy beans all kinds of beans. To say nothing of baked beans, magic beans, and coffee beans.

  In the end I figured Davy Crockett was far beyond measuring, even by his pa. Despite any shortcomings he labored hard to be of use and paid off all of his father’s debts. I read and reread the forbidden book, following him down paths that set my mind in unanticipated directions. If I got lost along the way I had a compass that I had found embedded in a pile of wet leaves I was kicking my way through. The compass was old and rusted but it still worked, connecting the earth and stars. It told me where I was standing and which way was west but not where I was going and nothing of my worth.

  Clock with No Hands

  In the beginning was real time. A woman enters a garden that is bursting with color. She has no memory, only a burgeoning curiosity. She approaches the man. He is not curious. He stands before a tree. Within the tree is a word that becomes a name. He receives the name of every living thing. At one with the present he has neither ambition nor dream. The woman reaches toward him, gripped by the mystery of sensation.

  —

  I closed my notebook and sat in the café thinking about real time. Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Are our thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by massive posters with repeating images? Catching a fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trin
ity of memory. I looked out into the street and noticed the light changing. Perhaps the sun had slipped behind a cloud. Perhaps time had slipped away.

  Credit 6.1

  The Arcade Bar, Detroit, Michigan

  Fred and I had no specific time frame. In 1979 we lived at the Book Cadillac Hotel in downtown Detroit. We lived around the clock, moving through the days and nights with little regard for time. We would stay up until dawn talking then sleep until nightfall. When we awoke we’d search for twenty-four-hour diners or stop and mill around Art Van’s furniture outlet that opened at midnight and served free coffee and powdered donuts. Sometimes we’d just drive aimlessly and stop before the sun rose at some motel in a place like Port Huron or Saginaw and sleep all day.

  Fred loved the Arcade Bar that was close to our hotel. It opened in the morning, a thirties-style bar with a few booths, a grill, and a large railway clock with no hands. There was no time real or otherwise at the Arcade and we could sit for hours with a handful of stragglers, spinning words or content within commiserating silence. Fred would have a few beers and I would drink black coffee. One such morning at the Arcade Bar as he gazed at the great wall clock Fred suddenly got an idea for a TV show. These were the early days of cable, and he envisioned broadcasting on WGPR, Detroit’s pioneering black independent television station. Fred’s segment, Drunk in the Afternoon, fell in the realm of the clock with no hands, unfettered by time and social expectations. It would feature one guest who would join him at the table beneath the clock just drinking and talking. They could go as far as their mutual intoxication would take them. Fred could communicate well on any subject from Tom Watson’s golf swing to the Chicago Riots to the decline of the railroad. Fred made a list of possible guests from all walks of life. On the top of his list was Cliff Robertson, a somewhat troubled B actor who shared Fred’s enthusiasm for aviation, a man close to his heart.

  Depending on how it was going, at unspecified intervals I would have a fifteen-minute segment called Coffee Break. The idea being that Nescafé would sponsor my segment. I would not have guests but would invite viewers to have a cup of Nescafé with me. On the other hand, Fred and his guest would not be obligated to communicate with the viewer, only with each other. I went as far as to find and purchase the perfect uniform for my segment—a gray-and-white pin-striped linen dress that buttoned down the front with cap sleeves and two pockets. French-penitentiary style. Fred decided he would wear his khaki shirt with a dark brown tie. On Coffee Break I planned to discuss prison literature, highlighting writers like Jean Genet and Albertine Sarrazin. On Drunk in the Afternoon Fred might offer his guest some extremely fine cognac from a brown paper bag.

  Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know. Unexpectedly, when we returned from French Guiana, he decided to learn to fly. In 1981 we drove to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to salute America’s first airfield at the Wright Brothers Memorial, taking US Highway 158 to Kill Devil Hills. We then made our way along the Southern coastline, moving from flight school to flight school. We journeyed through the Carolinas to Jacksonville, Florida, and on to Fernandina Beach, American Beach, Daytona Beach, then circled back to Saint Augustine. There we stayed in a motel by the sea with a small kitchenette. Fred flew and drank Coca-Cola. I wrote and drank coffee. We bought miniature vials of the water discovered by Ponce de León—a hole in the ground gushing the supposed water of youth. Let’s never drink it, he said, and the vials became part of our trove of improbable treasure. For a time we considered buying an abandoned lighthouse or a shrimp trawler. But when I found I was pregnant we headed back home to Detroit, trading one set of dreams for another.

  Fred finally achieved his pilot’s license but couldn’t afford to fly a plane. I wrote incessantly but published nothing. Through it all we held fast to the concept of the clock with no hands. Tasks were completed, sump pumps manned, sandbags piled, trees planted, shirts ironed, hems stitched, and yet we reserved the right to ignore the hands that kept on turning. Looking back, long after his death, our way of living seems a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.

  Credit 7.1

  Germantown, Pennsylvania, spring 1954

  The Well

  IT SNOWED on Saint Patrick’s Day, causing a snag in the annual parade. I lay in bed and watched the snow swirl above the skylight. Saint Paddy’s Day—my namesake day, as my father always said. I could hear the tones of his sonorous voice melding with the snowflakes, coaxing me to rise from my sickbed.

  —Come, Patricia, it’s your day. The fever’s passed.

  I had spent the first months of 1954 cosseted in the atmosphere of the child convalescent. I was the only child registered in the Philadelphia area with full-blown scarlet fever. My younger siblings held somber vigilance behind my door draped in quarantine yellow. Often I would open my eyes and see the edges of their little brown shoes. Winter was passing and I as their leader had not been able to go out and supervise the building of snow forts or strategize maneuvers over the homemade maps of our child wars.

  —Today is your day. We’re going outside.

  It was a sunny day with mild winds. My mother laid out my clothes. Some of my hair had fallen out due to a string of high fevers and I’d lost weight from my already lanky frame. I remember a navy-blue watch cap, like the kind fishermen wore, and orange socks in respect for our Protestant grandfather.

  My father crouched down several feet away encouraging me to walk.

  My siblings willed me on as I plodded unsteadily toward him. Initially weak, my strength and speed returned and I was soon racing ahead of the neighborhood children, long-legged and free.

  My brother and sister and I were born in consecutive years after the end of World War II. I was the eldest, and I scripted our play, creating scenarios that they entered wholeheartedly. My brother, Todd, was our faithful knight. My sister Linda served as our confidante and nurse, wrapping our wounds with strips of old linens. Our cardboard shields were covered in aluminum foil and embellished with the cross of Malta, our missions blessed by angels.

  We were good children, but our natural curiosity often got us into scrapes. If we were caught tangling with a rival gang or crossing a forbidden thoroughfare, our mother would place us together in one small bedroom, cautioning us not to make a single sound. We appeared to dutifully accept our sentence, but as soon as the door closed we quickly regrouped in perfect silence. There were two small beds and a wide oak bureau with double drawers adorned with carved acorns and large knobs. We would sit in a row before the bureau and I would whisper a code word, signaling our course. Solemnly we would turn the knobs, entering our three-way portal to adventure. I held the lantern high and we scurried aboard our ship, our untroubled world, as children will. Charting new splendors, we played our Game of Knobs, braving new enemies or revisiting moonlit forests opening onto hallowed ground with burnished fountains and remains of castles we had come to know. We played in rapt silence until our mother released us and sent us off to sleep.

  Credit 7.2

  —

  It was still snowing; I had to will myself to rise. Perhaps my present malaise is akin to that childhood convalescence, which drew me to bed where I slowly recuperated, read my books, scribbled my first little stories. My malaise. It was time to draw my paper sword, time to cut it to the ground. If my brother were still alive he would surely press me into action.

  I went downstairs, eyeing rows of books, despairing of what to choose. A prima donna in the bowels of a wardrobe dripping with dresses, but with nothing to wear. How could I have nothing to read? Perhaps it wasn’t a lack of a book but a lack of obsession. I placed my hand on a familiar spine of green cloth with the gilt title The Little Lame Prince, a favorite of mine as a child—Miss Mulock’s tale of a beautiful young prince whose legs were paralyzed as an infant from a neglectful accident. He is heartlessly locked away in a solitary towe
r until his true fairy godmother brings him a marvelous traveling cloak that can take him anywhere he wishes. It was a difficult book to find and I never had a copy of my own, and so I read and reread a deteriorating library copy. Then, in the winter of 1993, I received an early birthday gift from my mother along with some Christmas packages. It was to be a difficult winter. Fred was ill and I was plagued with a vague sense of trepidation. I woke up and it was 4 a.m. Everyone was sleeping. I tiptoed down the stairs and unwrapped the package. It was a bright 1909 edition of The Little Lame Prince. She had written we don’t need words on the title page in her then-shaky hand.

  I slipped it from the shelf, opening to her inscription. Her familiar writing filled me with longing that was also comforting. Mommy, I said aloud, and I thought of her suddenly stopping what she was doing, often in the center of the kitchen, and invoking her own mother whom she lost when she was eleven years old. How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone? I took the book upstairs into my room and placed it with the books that had been hers: Anne of Green Gables. Daddy-Long-Legs. A Girl of the Limberlost. Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book.

  The snow continued to fall. On impulse I bundled up and went out to greet it. I walked east to St. Mark’s Bookshop, where I roamed the aisles, randomly selecting, feeling papers, and examining fonts, praying for a perfect opening line. Dispirited I went to the M section, hoping that Henning Mankell had furthered the adventures of my favorite detective, Kurt Wallander. Sadly I had read them all, but in lingering in the M section I was fortuitously drawn into the interdimensional world of Haruki Murakami.