ABC

Albany, my last summer there, remains a gray speck on the cluttered map of my mind, seated at some oddly poignant intersection of memory and myth. Benches and streetlamps, a messy tangle of potholed avenues, indiscriminate and crumbling estates. Cat liked to say it was a “fixer-upper,” the whole city, just like that.
Down by the muddy banks of the Mohawk, a low sun painting our silhouettes against the river, we ate cheese sandwiches and sipped warm beer. Everything looked like a painting that day and I remember feeling big, like I was growing really fast but everything was growing with me so I didn’t notice; the whole scene was just getting huge. For a while, sitting there with Cat, listening as the echoes of our voices were trapped under the Rexford bridge, two giants tossing flat stones and bits of bread into the green water below, I was home. God could have swam in our shadows, we were that big.
Her little white house was the last on a dead end street. It had faded-yellow shutters, smelled of jasmine most of the time, and I knew she’d never leave it. Just because. Ken and Barbie dolls littered the floor of the pink room that had been hers before she took over her mother’s, their waxy limbs still reaching out, their forever-smiles glowing up in the dark. Leaving them there, I think, was her way of holding on to something, of not having to be the twenty-two year old girl sleeping in a dead woman’s bed. Maybe she just liked to play with dolls, I don’t know, I never asked.
Nothing changes; it’s been fifteen years and I can still smell her perfume, like lavender and watermelon. On summer nights, sitting with my daughter in our backyard, listening to the strange music of insects, I think of Albany and of Cat. Probably she’s still there, haunting the flowered walls of her sweet-smelling prison. Queen Cat, my gray eyed girl.
Rexford bridge still holds the sound of our voices, as they flutter up into its pigeon-cluttered rafters, the echo getting bigger, bigger, filling the sky. Someday I’d like to go back there, but I know I won’t.
There is a gray speck, a green river, a girl playing with dolls in a pink room. Ultimately, the words said, our thoughts, her touch, it all becomes color. Varying shades of memory. When I want to see Cat or revisit that summer, I press the tips of my thumbs hard into my eyes, until I see a thousand orbs of light, like technicolor stars blooming against the black drape of my lids. This is eternity, the mossy underside of a bridge. Years later, I am still trapped there with our voices. Winds carry me out into the river, but always back again, always bigger.

Supposed Angel - Intro

My father, no angel, will not simply vanish. We will watch him grow old and it will be his final gift to us, his two sons: teaching us how to age gracefully, how to die. My mother’s gift was different. It was singular, tragic and difficult to talk about even now, some fifteen years later. Her gift was that of eternal beauty. My mother was a metaphor. She sacrificed herself, I imagine, upon the alter of eternal beauty so that we might always recall, without the aid of photographs or drugs or dreams, her as Beauty, and derive strength from this. Our vanished mother, the Supposed Angel of Idlewild.

Library Vignette

There were old men sleeping in wire chairs with newspapers decomposing in their laps. The pale, round headed clerk at the front desk with his uncalloused body as soft and pliant as a rose. The gigantic diorama, the front steps of a cathedral, various parishioners frozen mid stride as they ascended. The giddy giggles of the bearded insane, rifling purposefully through their bags full of nothing. The air still and ripe as in a church, carried overseas in a thousand blushing balloons from the Vatican; it contains ashes from the fallen Rome, molecules of dinosaurs and bits of oil paint. The splashy fountain, its dark circles of coins staring up like shark eyes from the cool blue bottom. The ceiling hiding secret shadows and single-celled bodies of light changing shapes in the hidden crevices of its rafters. This building is ancient save the tile, is haunted save the children’s spittle matted around the softening corners of the children’s books. The black man with searching eyes, tries to sleep with his shoes off, pink and brown toes sticking through his socks, arms folded, wakes to the prodding of the clerk bent over him, and there is a scene which I pretend, in that other life which is a dream, to throw myself into, interjecting on his behalf. I tell her to leave him be, that sleeping, this red-eyed man means her less harm than all the ghosts in this ancient place.

valentines

Are not flowers perfect symbols of our love,
and therefore perfect gifts?
For in passing from hand to lover’s hand
they have already begun their dying.

the start of avery

Avery walks quickly through the narrow train station tunnel. Halogens flicker cancerously above and the wet clap of his souls against the shallow piss-puddles reminds him of his mother. When he was still pink and soft to touch she bathed him in a claw foot tub that smelled of rust and opium. He would slide beneath the warm bathwater gazing up into the strangely distorted face while she slapped the water’s surface, creating ripples that tickled his eyes and flicked the drums of his ears. He stares hard into the memory hoping to resurrect some of its comforts.

another excerpt

This was back when he still smoked cigarettes, and, calling forth the memory, it seemed such an indispensable prop that he knew he would either never have another moment of such naked sincerity, or, in the event that he did, he would desperately crave a cigarette. It was the distance between them, a cigarette; the smoke he tried in vain to blow away from his father. 

The neat rectangle of their back yard was blue in the moon shadow. A white puff of light streaked back and forth across the lawn. His father clapped his hands absently and called out to the dog.

He smoked casually and tried to hear his father’s words. But to look at your father’s aging face in the dusky light was to expose yourself to pangs of awful sincerity. In this moment, as the sun dipped out of view, and the little white ghost of a dog traced across the backyard, and a neighbor’s disembodied voice called out to his daughter, in this moment they were both too much inside their own heads, which was to say, asleep.

flight to freedom

How odd it was that he’d chosen the backdoor. Probably it was just easier that way. It raised less questions than leaving out the front. You don’t really have to ask a man where he’s going when he goes out the backdoor; he’s going into the yard. Except that my father wasn’t planning to stay in the yard. He must have hopped over our fence and then snuck through a few back yards to the boulevard that ran about a hundred yards south of our house. From there it’s anyone’s guess. We never heard from him again. The image of him hurdling over those fences is something I used to like to think about. It was his escape, with each picket fence he cleared he was that much further away from us, that much nearer his freedom. I know this and still that image pleases me. I like to wonder if he would have got a running start and hurdled over it, or, more likely considering the shape he was in, he would have had to put his hands on the fence, hefted one foot over, balanced his weight, lifted the other and kind of spilled himself into the next yard. It’s not a graceful image, but I like to think of it sometimes—the old man still in his lousy brown suit, tie loosened, hopping fences in suburban darkness, running for his life.