|
She Comes Back—as a Calavera !
Listen up, girlchik! From this night on, I want a party when I show. Sing a few dirges if you must-- I know your brain’s sweet tooth for minor keys-- but don’t glut your tongue with grief. Build me a saintless altar, burning all the yahrzeits at once, and strew the tiers with ginkgo leaves. (You know the tree; it’s a punk rocker in spring, a flaunt of green spikes at impudent angles; but in autumn it turns geisha, dropping golden fans to the street.) As for the offerings, set out a pack of smokes, a cloud of bread, a thick Porterhouse to recall my sudden yen for steak in the midst of gridlock, orange daylilies erupted to the anthers, cereal bowls filled with water—one of fresh, one of sea-- a dog-eared mystery read by many and solved by none. Above all—I’ll have no balking on this-- above all, dance. Screw the self-help metaphors! In fact, screw any metaphor that sluts the easy phrase and carries nothing unsaid or worth saying. Such words mean as much as those cheerful little voids that grin on grocery bags and tell us to have a nice day. What I want is a language transcribed by your feet, a tattoo that shudders through the belly, through dirt and phone cables, root systems and blood, through doors, oceans, graves, and concrete. I want a manifesto written by your breath and sweat, the verbs of your head, hands, limbs, and hips spurring the air to fluxion. Ah! And here come the misgivings, the same sour old duennas who milled about and clucked at your shoulders when I was alive. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize them? Please—I didn’t listen to you every week for seven years without hearing them, too. I’m dead, bubeleh; not forgetful. I see where you’re going. The anguish of others, the knowledge of it, bit like a diamondback. You were warned, you’ll say-- the sun razed all havens of shadow; the rattle blurred and dispatched its telegraph; the head lifted and became the ace of spades, ready to trump. But still you gave your hand and let it marry the fangs. The paradox slid into your veins: As venom, it forced your blood to ferry it through each crook and hut; no organ, no surface, neither the meat drum in its cage nor the skull jelly moored to it, escaped contact. Faces rose from the stream, as though photographs rising from a bath that had made them living forms, and into the archives of bone, gut, and mind they burned themselves-- each changeable as flames, all owned by suffering. As inoculant, it saved you from indifference to those faces, from the seduction of self-made amber, sinking into it and letting it harden its hold until you lie in a crypt of false honey, touched only by petrifaction. And the times you thought you might be gnawed to nothing, your masonry of courage rendered soft and pocked as tuff, the infusion acted as mortar, kept you standing when the wind came to finish with its dull knives. You act, too. You march, sign your name, shout as loud as you can to make your small voice bigger, push your fear away for those who are braver. You give. But the bite continues to throb, the faces to burn, and you feel your efforts become shadow puppets gesturing in an unlit cave. You’ll object to the dancing then—despite my admonishment. You’ll object because it affords you a ration of pleasure, your one meager boast of grace. You’ll object because it is a joy, and, yes, you have known happiness, have scrounged its prizes from struggle and luck and stashed them shining in your Year-of-the-Rat heart. Even so, you’ll object. Because the bereft still teem and morph, and knowing that taints joy, makes it seem, at best, unseemly; at worst, a gain of theft; and somewhere in between lies mockery-- like a chandelier hanging in a slaughterhouse. How can you forget? you’ll ask. The diabetic who shops at 3 a.m. in the all-night supermarket, hauling himself on ruined feet through aisles of fluorescent light and packaged solace, finding sanctuary where the late-shifters barely raise their eyes to him and he can avoid the stares that judge his heft. The woman who, with a board in her bare hands, scrapes filth from the troughs of an open latrine, as they are shallow and filled quickly by those who deem her untouchable-- the stench shoving like a thug through the masking of her sari. The refugee who escaped murder but not decimation; her twelve years macheted down to the killing day, which lords the gulag it has made of her memory and ensures that she cannot outrun the men who pillaged between her thighs or the corpse splashing in the well or the mother unmothered by blade-- her belly’s long mouth spilling sand, delivering desert instead of child. The man who wore a garbage bag and paper crown in the rain, laughing at something the gray air said to him while the ink of old news trickled his face. The woman screaming in a welter of snow. And on . . . And on . . . And again you’ll ask, How? How can you forget any of this long enough to dance? And I say to you that the dance I want does not require you to forget but summons your full remembrance. If you expected a kinetic anodyne or melancholy soft-shoe, then you’ve lost your compass in the weeds again. I’m not talking a jig of half-steps here. Remember that dusk in August when you were need and nothing else and once more you were speaking of the pain that neither your telling nor my listening could stop? Your imagination began to dim—I could see it-- because you were slipping into talk of suicide as though it were a harness for wings. And just as I was weighting a net of words I hoped might ground you, an ice-cream truck parked on the street began to loop a jingle outside my window; it was a jack-in-the-box tune, a cranking nose-picker absurdity that blundered over the sill and worked laughter from us both. I conjure this to remind you that life is wayward and answers to no scale; the Earth itself rounds on tilted axis. Yet even so—even so, I say, Get up! Get up, Goddamn it! You have lived more than sorrow, and the wounded of your litany deserve more than mourning-- hell, they deserve more than this dance-- but understand this: What we do can never be enough, so we must aim to do what we can. These people you lament, they are not yet ghosts; and you don’t sit shivah for the living. You’ll betray them if you do; if you become only a rainmaker of elegy and do not seed the air with your evidence of hope, your portions of choice and chance and the light by which you saw them. So don’t begrudge yourself your keep of boons and gleaner’s eye. That they are and have been vouches for possibility-- that, in the arc a pendulum scythes, it will sometimes make volition arable and promise push up through heaps of locusts. When this happens, in the arc a pendulum scythes, agony proves not to be the sole litmus of being alive. Give testament to that as much as you keen. And what of the dead? Why do we come back? Mind you, I cannot speak for all Necropolitans, but I can tell you why I make the trip. I thrill to the arrival, for one thing-- that moment at the border when I touch its membranous door and the animates glance the other side. I enter then, eager for the dervishing rush of what I am not. And out I go, traipsing unseen among the protean crowds while the quanta of their heat cartwheel through me. My daughter, the one who still abides in the breathing world, I see her first and longest. For her I make the marigolds blaze when she walks by flower stands in June; clear her smudged eyeglasses with a cloth of breeze; drop gravel from my voice into the waters of her sleep where the soft ruptures launch rough lilts hooping out in concentric echo; every quickened ring held by the next quickened, embracing and releasing the signatures of love that say father, sister, and mother until the relay spends its final form and enters the solvent of dreams. I give her such things whether I come with all or part of our family trine or I come alone. And I’ll admit my desire for a grant of her memories, but I never coax; she, in turn, never fails to recompense, to beckon what she recalls of me so that I rise in shimmers-- chimeric stand-ins, true, but also a gift that intimates more than synaptic fire, imbuing my chemical apparitions with her longing, the gravity of her love. This, to figure in her musings—this is my sting and balm, the private blessing that consoles when her renderings of me break apart and I die again, falling back into the murk beneath thought. She is, of course, the sole constant of my destinations; where I go after leaving her, whim decides. I might end up at the office of a friend, delighting in her foul mouth and piquant moxie; or I may seek out a window box for the musk of tomato stems, for the fruit they clutch, reddening toward knife and teeth. Then there are the altar tokens I asked of you-- they, too, could call up old pleasures. As for these hankerings of mine and my journey’s purpose, I suspect they do not differ much from those of my compatriots. Sure, the charge of our sensory past lures us, but what drives us most, I think, despite the ample horrors we’re certain to see, is the nearness, the almost-touching of those who were born or in some way made part of us, and yet are other—bodied and blood-lit for our marveling. Some of our number may revisit the environs of their rage and malice, but in doing so, even they succumb to the pull of life. Nevertheless, the speech and songs of the dead do not ride breath, nor can we caress with fleshed hands. We have immigrated to Forever, and from there, we always travel round-trip. Stay awake to these constraints, and let that vigil feed your fight the next time you have to brawl with fear and despair. I know you ply your will like fists in those donnybrooks—I’d never belittle that. And I do not intend to toss out some smiley bromide for romancing life all rosy. But I will say this: Do not apologize for your days or deny what seasons them; and do not mistake such diminishment for kindness or appeasement or merely good manners. Because it is a sin swollen with chutzpah, an insult to the multitudes who died never knowing mercy in the realm of heartbeats and to the legions who still yearn for the tender and electric glories they left behind. So come, bubeleh. Be a mensch and do what I ask. Wear a dress as red as a jaguar’s mouth, and leave your feet bare. You can watch by your window, if you like, but there’s no way you’ll miss me. I’ll be quite the vision—arriving by ice-cream truck, jingles and all. I’ll wield a golden fan as I pass through your door, and sport a brown kimono slashed with green, a diamondback obi at my waist. Then, in the glow of the altar lights, we will begin our dance-- I, your bony geisha and wry calavera; you, my ruddy-frocked opposite. I will clack and tock about, but the noise I make will not sound from a solid source; just as you will see my clasp but not feel it. Don’t let these oddities bother you. They are simply spectral shorthand, drawn from idioms of shadow, rebus, and symbol. I’ll be moving with you—have no doubt. Now ándale, girlchik! Be ready when I show. This dance is always in its cups. We will whirl and stomp and stagger, shimmy, tap, and sway. We will be as raucous as November 1st in Oaxaca, and our feet will stutter like firecrackers in a graveyard. We will sing the music for every step, and a Kaddish in every language will hatch from our mouths. We will turn in the iris of each living eye, and tango roses for the bite of the dead. Later, when we are done and I am gone, when you falter or stand baffled, remind yourself of our rounding, of how you must try to be nimble as you live. I will remind you of these things, too, returning for our engagement through all your years. And in this way, before you join the diaspora of ghosts given up, you will learn at last that our dance mimes in miniature the splendid and terrible wheel of souls. |