The Loon

I know it sounds crazy, but—like you—I might be a tenure-track catamite today, instead of a virtuous poet working temp jobs that I detest: if only Fred had selected a slightly tighter pair of pants that evening—our first date. 

Our dinner was fine. French. Bouillabaisse. His conversation and his choice of wine, thoughtful and excellent. We discussed my possible future—the famous men and women (and others) that I might meet at cocktail parties with his help.

After coffee and crème de menthe, we took a stroll. He waxed poetic, rattling off bits of Bishop and Merrill by the light of a waning moon. It was a beautiful autumn night. The sky was clear. The air was crisp. Three or four stars sparkled above Manhattan. I doubt that we would have lived happily ever after, but we might have enjoyed a few evenings of strip-poker in his apartment, or, at the very least, a healthy hand of Old Maid.

It was not to be. I was his student, you see, and a former gymnast, as I had just demonstrated on the horizontal bar in a little park near his apartment.

Fred Roland was here on a special Visa: a visiting professor of poetry at the university. And he wore baggy khakis.

I looked down at his face. I kind of admired the man for attempting to defy time as well as gravity: turning purple, eyes-bulging, hanging upside down in Washington Heights—keys, credit cards, condoms, and a handful of change cascading from his pockets. I realized with sadness that cards were probably no longer in the cards for us. Not even Old Maid.

So much for my career.

I lifted my eyes toward Heaven, and I sighed, “Don’t kill yourself, dear.”

He consented to live, with a grunt, after a painful attempt at something more spectacular—some kind of spin—before he dismounted, with stinging soles, upon the Earth.

Fred staggered over to a nearby slide and sat on its steely lip, to catch his breath and balance. I crouched to collect the scattered contents of his khakis, chattering about how I had once crushed my nuts in junior high attempting a similar move.

He said nothing.

When I thought I had collected everything, I handed the stuff back to him. He sorted it. He counted the change. He looked at me quizzically. And then he looked around. He squinted and he said, a touch tersely it seemed to me, “I think you missed something.” He winced, “over there.”

He pointed to a derelict disk shining in the dark.

I followed his shaking finger and walked over to where he was pointing, to see for myself.

He was right.

I had missed something.

I picked it up.

Even in the dim orange light under the swings, I could tell it was a coin. A newly minted dollar. A lost Canadian Loon.

The Case of N

My name is N. N stands for nothing. I stand for nothing. I say nothing. I have surrendered my identity to an attorney to plead my case.

I might be almost anyone. I might be you. Almost all the parts that make me who I am are interchangeable with yours, thanks to science: my skin, my hair, my eyes, my lungs, my heart, my pancreas, my liver.

Soon, you will have access to my memories. Make no mistake. I’m in all the databases of the State. And so are you. And, just in case, I carry a small card inside my wallet entitling the State to take everything away.

Except, perhaps, my soul—my client. My soul is something that I can’t supply, and nobody can take it away. Believe me, men have tried. My soul is mine until I die, I am afraid: since, strictly speaking, souls do not exist in science, or in law. Souls cannot be transplanted or imprisoned, can they? No. Although they can be put on trial, as my soul has been put on trial here. And some may linger on in literature for a few years—like love, or mercy—in a ghostly way.

I guess if any meaningful relationship exists between us now, outside of fiction, then, it must consist of dreams, mustn’t it? We are like the present and the past, forever missing one another as we pass into the night, the future, that land of dreams.

You have dreams. I have dreams. We all have dreams. And if you dream, you probably have nightmares, too. I hope your dreams out-number your nightmares. I really do. Mine run about fifty-fifty, if I dream at all. I seldom fall asleep so deeply that I genuinely dream.

Whatever the reason, usually exhaustion, now and then, my eyelids close and I suddenly find myself in situations so strange—so full of details, color and emotional intensity—they must be dreams. Or nightmares. They seem so different from the world I know.

Dream or nightmare? Where am I? I am definitely somewhere. I am here. Exactly where here is is hard to say with anything resembling the geographic certainty necessary to remove all doubt. A dream depends upon what sort of story you construct around the images you see. A cloud perpetually surrounds a dream. A dream expresses no reality, nightmarish or otherwise, until you wake. And then it is too late. The dream is dead.

The truth of dreams can only be verified by a disinterested third party—a witness who stands outside of time and space and never sleeps. And God is not about to swear to anything regarding dreamers, not on the Bible. Nor will he affirm anything. He won’t even cross His heart for us—even though we know that He was present at the scene on the night in question: we found His footprints. You have all seen them. They don’t mean anything. We find them everywhere. Look at these photographs: even on the Moon. God is just as bad as Man, you see; and Man is very sloppy.

Still, God cannot be summoned to appear in court for walking on the Moon, or littering, or murder, not like us. His whereabouts are presently unknown. He might be hiding; He might be attending a christening in Mexico; He might be on vacation in some other country. He might be dead. If so, I am sorry.

I am sorry that this crime has been assigned to me, and you have been selected for the jury. This is a court of law convened inside an unjust universe. Penalties are harsh and administered unfairly. That is the nature of Dream States. Only death absolves a citizen from responsibility to participate in trials. This is yours: you must set a precedent that will be used in judging others. Perhaps yourself. You must decide our fate.

So then, as far as dreams and nightmares go, here we are: there’s no escape. Though mine are hard to qualify. Let’s just say, they follow a general pattern: darkness shows up first; then, light; then, more darkness. Just as dreams do in waking life.

I probably should also mention that the light I see is dawn, so there is hope.

And that hope is the truth.

And the truth is gray.

Untitled

  

            My first foray into the world of friction [sic] was an untitled piece I slaved over for two years in the mid-nineties. As I envisioned the work at the time, when I was twenty-six and obsessed with Thurber, this would be the first in a series of Jamesian character studies centered around academic life.

            In the opening tale, Jack (34) returns triumphant from a contentious conference in Boulder, Colorado, where he delivered a provocative paper on the position of commas in the sex life of Gibbons (collateral descendants of the famous historian of Rome) at the Modern Language Association’s Annual Conference: only to find his boxer, Elgin—Marbles, for short—dreaming of beef marrow bones in an inaccessible crotch of an elm in his courtyard.

            As Eve (34), his girlfriend, is out shopping for fruit-flavored lubricants and other gluten-free delicacies with her best pre-op friend, Paulette (28), visiting from Portland, and President Clinton is downtown distracting the rest of the neighbors, most of the story we spend with the perplexed young adjunct, orbiting the tree: trying to figure out just how the dog came to be there. Jack advances several different theories, all equally credible: extraterrestrials, an earthquake, a mountain lion, Mustafa Kemal, ghosts, a tri-cobalt satellite (left over from an episode of Star Trek), the black magic of his gardener (Barney Haller), a cantankerous kite string, or a confabulation of faeries.

            For five pages we wander in circles with Jack under this tedious tree, looking up at his dreaming dog, trying figure out just what has gone wrong with the forces of Nature in this idyllic corner of Iowa. It never occurs to Jack to wait for Eve and Paulette to return with the fruit-flavored lubricants and gluten-free delicacies and ask them; or to call the fire department; or to grab the aluminum ladder the painters left under the lilacs and try to rescue his dog himself, so lost he becomes in a maze of sensitive semiotic questions arising from the presence of a dog in the crotch of such a tall tree: since, as you will notice, the word “Dog” spelled backwards is “God.” And we all know in what mysterious ways THAT gentleman works.

            Sadly, I never got further with this story than the thin filament of drool connecting Elgin above—Marbles, for short—to the Earth below, before I abandoned it as totally unworkable. Plausible as the image of a fictitious dog sleeping in a fictitious tree might seem to me, I couldn’t imagine anyone else would believe it.

            Except for the people of PETA, who would have hopped in a minivan and been over in a flash to burn down my house.