womb of mine already older than I was, the question calling up to me amid the
a silver boat, he’s about to slip off into the sleep of the void when, like a voice speaking out loud to him, like someone right there at his side, there floats up from somewhere deep in his mind something that was left there years ago, planted in his ear one night while he slept and having sunk deep into him, and now opened like a time capsule that was waiting for precisely this moment of loneliness to unlock it, there in the darkening hush of the trees
your mama loves you
and he sits straight up to it. Like someone right there at his side has whispered it. He sits straight up to it and it’s still there, the thing he just heard, it hasn’t disappeared like a dream. It hasn’t vanished into memory like one of the Lapses of the Lake. It’s still there in the air and, seeing it, his eyes light, like fireflies darting above the grass.
historical rumors and little spasms of collective memory ripping outward, and
at twilight I would look out toward Tokyo Bay from the window of the ryokan
2001–2089
where I stayed when I first got to Japan and I would watch the pixilated black
waves rolling in and with them they brought that memory I had forgotten, of
He gets out late winter. He’s off on the exact day by thirty-some hours, which isn’t bad calculations. He made a decision when he went in to keep track of the days, because he knew it was the intention of his jailers to jettison his sense of time; they brought him in 2037 in a metal truck with no windows. The rumor is that the penitentiary is somewhere in the plains of the Montana-Saskatchewan annex. When he’s released, a metal truck takes him back to Seattle; they open the doors of the truck and the glitter of the afternoon sea is like glass in his eyes. He sits back in the truck until someone says, Move.
standing with my uncle as a little girl on the banks of the river and seeing the
They put him on a boat going down the coast to Los Angeles. For five days and fifteen hundred miles he doesn’t see anyone except a soldier here and there, like the guards at the Northwest-Mendocino border. The boat sails into L.A. mid-dusk, past the smoky moors of the Hollywood Peninsula, navigating the outlying swamps where the Hancock Park mansions loom in ruin, water rolling in and out of the porticoes. It crosses the rest of the lagoon into downtown, then up the main canal. Cale can see the smaller canals trickling off between the buildings that are black like the mansions behind him, and there’s a sound of bubbling music from the Chinese storefronts along the water. It comes out of the buildings, a distinct and different melody from each one; addresses on the doors are scratched and defaced, and there are no signs on the street corners anymore. Ask someone how to get to this place or that, and she’ll sing you the directions.
Two women on a train. Their destination is the end of an argument. They’ve been riding the argument all night since they got on the train originally and carelessly bound for … what? dinner? a movie … they almost can’t remember, they have been riding 2001 and changing trains so many hours now. Each knows something more is at risk in this particular argument on this particular evening than just its resolution, than one woman conceding to the other if only to placate the moment. This particular argument has always been just a little too profound to call merely a lovers’ quarrel.
woman on the other side, and it was only there in Tokyo staring out over the
To others riding the train with them, the two might appear to be mother and daughter. One of them is close to fifty, with a recently cropped mane of increasingly silvery hair and serenity woven in the air around her like a web; the other is barely a woman at all, nineteen years old. The older woman, who doesn’t like to think or speak of the age difference, has to acknowledge to herself that indeed it makes their argument more complicated. They’ve had some version of this argument many times now in the last several months, and this time each senses that they won’t, as in the past, just move on when it’s over. Or rather: they’ll move on, but without each other. Although the older woman seems the less agitated of the two, the less heated in her words, that’s more a function of maturity; in fact she feels more is at stake for her — but, you know, try telling the younger woman that. Thinking about it in the many silences that fall between each of the argument’s flare-ups, the older woman realizes that to the younger woman, with her entire future still ahead of her, the decision has consequences that much more resounding. So maybe, Sara admits to herself, it’s not so fair to say she has more at stake. I have too little time, the girl has too much. She admits this to herself but not out loud; admitting it out loud, she would lose everything.
They’ve just gotten on the subway line heading south. It’s become a ritual of this argument, in the way all arguments have rituals, that every time a cessation of hostilities coincides with a subway station, the women get off the train and change to another. At this point they’re not paying attention to which train or which station. Somehow as long as they keep moving — as opposed to going to a café somewhere and thrashing things out for good — perhaps some rubicon can avoid being crossed. Lately the younger woman has begun to feel things are out of control, a feeling she hates. She doesn’t want to bring up the age thing with Sara. It’s always been
water that I finally realized it had been my mother on the other side of that
a psychological obstacle for the couple to surmount, particularly for the older woman who’s that much more keenly aware, the younger realizes, of everything such a divide in years represents. By now the girl accepts there’s something maternal in her attraction to the older woman, and doesn’t understand why this is any less a basis for love or a romantic bond than anything else. Women are drawn to father figures all the time so why can’t I be drawn to a mother figure.
That this probably says something about her relationship with her real mother, the girl understands. Ironically it was this that brought her to Sara as a patient in the first place. Somehow, though, they never got into it in any of their sessions, and she’s trying to remember if she was always the one avoiding the topic or if, now that she thinks about it, it was Sara who avoided it, once the attraction became apparent. Rather quickly it seems, now that the girl thinks about it, they wound up talking more about Sara than her. “You’ll spend your whole life,” Sara said that first session, “making peace with your own true nature,” and every now and then Sara repeats it as though to imply she understands the girl’s nature better than the girl does. The girl still isn’t sure what it actually means, the business about one’s true nature, or whether it’s just something Sara says to sound superior. But at this moment it seems to her perhaps it says a lot more about Sara than about her.