But not our child. And he should have been.
He turns to look another direction, anywhere but west. The girl turns her radio on low, tries to find the right soundtrack for a darkling world before her; but perhaps the only soundtrack that’s right is silence. She settles into the base of the transmission mast. She never asked why the song was so important because it wasn’t her business and’ getting right down to it, she doesn’t really care.
me, because the very first dream I ever had in my life wasn’t until that night I
With most women, she tells herself, curiosity is an unchecked reflex; perhaps I’m not the inquisitive sort. Perhaps I have an overly developed male sense of privacy — that is, for a female. Perhaps that’s why it’s women not men who have babies, because as a gender women are predisposed not only to not value privacy so much but to unconsciously abhor it like nature does a vacuum, because it’s women who are capable of that generous voluntarily surrender of profound privacy, the privacy of the body, the privacy of the heart.
I have nowhere to go tonight, it suddenly occurs to her. She watches the Asian man pacing the rooftop and then changes the station on the radio again: Are you a musicologist? she asked when he first showed up at the library, and he said no and then sometime later in the conversation revealed he had been a mathematics student in college before “history had its way with me,” by which she assumed he meant he became a history student instead — which doesn’t exactly explain, she thinks, what he’s doing operating elevators. Did you go to school in—? and then had stopped herself, checked her curiosity reflex, as much because she didn’t want to insult him. Japan? Korea? China? Thailand? can’t tell them apart, can you, she muses to herself. Well it’s true, you just can’t. The Emperor of Elevators, he’s musing to himself as he paces the rooftop not impatiently but aimlessly; he’s not yet become a man who never looks up.
To the contrary he’s a man who looks up as much as possible, who would look anywhere but ground level. East he can make out the lights of the harbor; from there his eyes follow the river north and count the bridges, contemplating the twinkling suture of the boroughs where, just at this moment, he can almost hear raven
miscarried him in Tokyo, waking and stumbling in terror through the dark to
navies surfacing from the floors of islamic oceans. Something about the night has already become familiar to him before he ever feels the tail-end of the gust, funneled hot memory brushing his face. And as he lifted his burning hand back in the Square twelve years ago to look through its new wound at the sky behind it, now he lifts the same hand not to feel the gust, since there are no nerve endings in the hand anymore to feel anything, not even so much to look at the night through the hand’s tiny window, but almost as though he expects that the lens in his palm will refract the gust and then burst into a vision, or as though perhaps the light of the moon above, shining down through the small round prism, will catch him in its spotlight. Or maybe even her. What it does cast is a moonbeam on the gust’s source — or maybe he would have shifted his gaze anyway, noting the vent in the low rectangular storage hut near the rooftop’s east edge.
By the time he reaches the vent, his mind feels about to explode.
The gust hasn’t subsided. In how many dreams in the last twelve years has he felt it blow across his face as it does now? Up here, he told her just a few minutes ago, you sleep above your dreams; so how is it his dreams have reached this altitude? How high do I have to go, he thinks to himself angrily, to rise above them once and for all? Once he wondered if this gust was an ally meaning to rescue him, or a weapon of the State meaning to remove him; but it’s really an anarchist without conviction either way, without interest in either rescue or attack. Once he stood his ground and the gust subsided, but now as he nears the vent it comes roaring out. Taking from his belt his ring of keys, he uses one to begin prying the vent loose around its rim, before he takes the vent cover in his one good hand and tears it from its space.
the toilet down the hall and making it just in time to see the glistening white
He peers inside.
He looks so deeply — although he can’t fit in his whole head as he did into the tank’s gun that morning twelve years ago — that when he hears the song, of course he thinks it’s coming from the other end of the dark to where the vent leads, from where and when he first heard it twelve years ago. Same strange distant Moorish drums, same dreamy Middle Eastern melody with the soft Spanish horns in the background, and the same woman’s voice of another century’s turn: excited, he turns to call to the girl who’s been trying to track down this very song, astonished that the song should happen to present itself at this very moment just as she happens to be here — only to realize the song isn’t coming from the vent at all but her radio. “But that’s it,” he says to her. What? she says sleepily, and he says, “That’s it,” pointing at the radio.
She looks at the radio a moment. “Are you sure?”
“That’s it.”
“Well that’s odd isn’t it,” she finally says. She listens awhile. “You’re sure.” She listens some more. “I don’t think this is that old a song.”
“Do you know it?”
“No but I think perhaps I’ve heard them play it before and I don’t think they would play an old song like this that often, if it was that old.” She says, “It doesn’t sound that old.”
“How can you tell?”
rain of my boy run from my body, and at that moment I thought of all the
“Well, I suppose I can’t,” she confesses. He turns back to the vent and from deep down out of the darkness feels as he did twelve years ago the same gust in his face; it smells of that same morning, the vent a tunnel to that very morning and that very place, at the other end of which is the portal of a gun barrel. This is when he realizes that, twelve years ago, what he actually heard was this very moment now, in this time and place, up here overlooking the world on this very night — that somewhere at the other end of this tunnel he’s there standing on the Square, his Other Self at an irrevocable moment, a young man of nineteen alone before the tanks with his head in the barrel of a gun, listening to a song coming from a girl’s radio twelve years and twelve thousand miles away. That what now blows through this tunnel is the Oblivion Wind back and forth across the shadowyears between the end of the Twentieth Century that morning, and this night — although he can’t imagine why this particular night, when nothing would seem to be happening of any importance at all.
He turns to see her lying there on his bedding, gold hair around her head ablaze in the ovulating moon. He walks over to her; she dozes at his feet. He has this distracted impulse to lie next to her, only because he’s suddenly so tired, but of course she would only take it wrong. If she could see him now, he wonders if he would appear to her as he feels: a man caught mid-transport. Uh, he whispers, we should go down now I think, but she doesn’t answer and he just nods in the dark and mumbles I’ll come back for you in the morning then, and turns to the dank light of the elevator, doors closing on his bewildered face. Briefly her eyes flutter to the sound of the closing doors, having somewhere in her semiconsciousness heard him speak, and now she answers from her sleep, But I have no place to go. She stumbles up from the bedding because she has to pee, and stripping off her jeans she
nights after I first learned he was inside me that I had stood in windows