Somewhere, magical, once upon a time, I lay under the stars at nightfall and I dreamed the fantastic.
I have few friends. Foster children who move from family to family, town to town, rarely maintain friendships. Foster parents seem now like dust shadows spread out against a windowpane. I can remember faces and names, but I feel so remote from them compared to the memory of the wheeling, open arch of horizon before and above me.
Now I have a wound in my palm. A wound that leads me back to the beach at dusk, of my grief at my parents’ death, that I had not drowned with them. Living but not moving. Observing but not doing. At the center of myself I am suggestibility, not action. Never action.
My parents took actions. They did things. And they died.
III
Despite my wound — not a good excuse — I drive to work downAlbumuth Boulevard, turning into the parking lot where tufts of grass thrust up between cracks in the red brick. The shop where I work occupies a slice of the town square. It has antique glass windows, dark green curtains to deflect the gaze of the idly or suspiciously curious, and stairs leading both up and down, to the loft and the basement.
My job is to create perfect sentences for a varied clientele. No mere journalism this, for journalism requires the clarity of glass, not a mirror, nor even a reflection. I spend hours at my cubicle in the loft, looking out over the hundreds of rooftops, surrounded by the fresh sawdust smell of words and the loamy must of reference text piled atop reference text.
True, I am only one among many working here. Some are not artists but technicians who gargle with pebbles to improve the imperfect diction of their perfect sentences, or casually fish for them, tugging on their lines once every long while in the hope that the sentences will surface whole, finished, and fat with meaning. Still others smoke or drink or use illicit drugs to coax the words onto the page. Many of them are quite funny in their circuitous routines. I even know their names: Wendy, Carl, Daniel, Christine, Pamela, Andrea. But we are so fixated on creating our sentences that we might well pass each other as strangers on the street.
We must remain fixated, for the Director — a vast and stealthy intelligence, a leviathan moving ponderous many miles beneath the surface — demands it. We receive several paid solicitations each day that ask for a description of a beloved husband, a dying dog, or a housewife who wishes to tell her husband how he neglects her all unknowing:
He hugs her and mumbles like a sailor in love with the sea, drowning without protest as the water takes him deeper; until her lungs are awash and he has caught her in his endless dream of drowning.
Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people’s attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.
Of course, we do not create objectively perfect sentences— sometimes our sentences are not even very good. If we could create truly perfect sentences, we would destroy the world: it would fold in on itself like a pricked hot air balloon and cease to be: poof! undone, unmade, unlived, in the harsh glacial light of a reality more real than itself.
But I am such a perfectionist that, in the backwater stagnation of other workers’ coffee breaks, in the tapa-tap-tap of rain trying to keep me from my work, I continue to string verbs onto pronouns, railroading those same verbs onto indirect objects, attaching modifiers like strategically placed tinsel on a Christmas tree.
By my side I keep a three-ringed, digest-sized notebook of memories to help me live the lives of our clients, to get under their skins and know them as I know myself. Only twelve pages have been filled, most of them recounting events after I reached my fifteenth birthday. Many notes are only names, like Bobby Zender, a friend and fellow orphan at the reform school. He had a gimp foot and for a year I matched my strides to his, never once broke ahead of him or ran out onto the playground to play kickball. He died of tuberculosis. Or Sarah Galindrace, with the darkest eyes and the shortest dresses and skin like silk, like porcelain, like heaven. She moved away and became an echo in my heart.
These memories often help me with the sentences, but today the wound on my hand bothers me, distracts me from the pristine longleaf sheets of paper on the drafting boards. The pen, a black quill that crisply scratches against the paper, menaces me. My fellow workers stare; their bushy black eyebrows and manes of blond hair and mad stallion eyes make me nervous. I sweat. I teeter uneasily on my high stool and try not to stare out the window at the geometrically pleasing telephone lines that slice the sky into a matrix of points of interest: church spires, flagpoles, neon billboards.
A woman who has finally found true romance needs a sentence to tell her boyfriend how much she loves him. My palm flares when I take up the pen; the pen could as well be a knife or a chisel or some object with which I am equally unfamiliar. My skin feels itchy, as if I have picked at the edges of a scab. But I write the sentence anyway:
When I see you, my heart rises like bread in an oven.
The sentence is awful. The Director leans over and concurs with a nod, a hand on my shoulder, and the gravelly murmur, “You are trying too hard. Relax. Relax.”
Yes. Relax. I think of Emily and the book I was going to get for her at the Borges Bookstore: The Refraction of Light in a Prison. Perhaps if I can project from my relationship with Emily I can force the sentence to work. I think of her sharp cadences, the way she bites the ends off words as if snapping celery stalks in two. Or the time she tickled me senseless in the middle of her sister’s wedding and I had to pretend I was drunk just to weather the embarrassment. Or this: the smooth, spoon-tight feel of her stomach against my lips, the miraculous tangle of her blond hair.
So. I try again.
When I see you, my heart rises like a flitting hum mingbirdto a rose.
Now I am truly hopeless. The repetition of “rises” and “rose” knifes through all alternatives and I am convinced I should have been a plumber, a dentist, a shoeshine boy. Words that should layer themselves into patterns — strike passion in the heart — become ugly and cold. The dead weight of cliché has given me a headache.
At dusk, I ask the Director for a day off. He gives it to me, orders me to do nothing but walk around the city, perhaps take in a ball game in the old historical section, perhaps a Voss Bender exhibit at theTeelMemorialArt Museum.
IV
I spend my day off contemplating my palm with my girlfriend Emily Brosewiser, she of the aforementioned blond hair, the succulent lips, the tactile smile, the moist charm. (My comparisons become so fecund I think I would rather love a fruit or vegetable.) We sit on a lichen-encrusted bench at the San Matador Park, my arm around her shoulders, and watch the mallards siphoning through the pond scum for food. The gasoline-green grass scent and the heat of the summer sun make me sleepy. The park seems cluttered with dwarfs: litter picker-uppers armed with their steely harpoons; lobotomy patients from the nearby hospital, their stares as direct as a lover’s; burly hunchbacked fellows going over the lawn with gleaming red lawnmowers. They distract me — errant punctuation scattered across a pristine page.
Emily sees them only as clowns and myself as sick. “Sick, sick, sick.” How can I disagree? She smells so clean and her hair shines like spun gold.