And then another small bolt of lightning struck, in the form of a grant from the estate of Josepha Larkin, she of the 63,492 photos. There was a very new technology, almost completely untried, which utilized laser-read videodiscs as a means of storing archival information: fifty thousand still-frame images per side of a two-sided disc. Would the museum be interested in developing this technology as a method of storing and sharing its photographic collection?
Since there was no one in the federal jobs system who had the precise requirements for a Videodisc Project Manager, Cultural Anthropology, BA or MA required, the job fell to me. Almost overnight I got a promotion and a raise and my own office and my own telephone and even my own staff, consisting of one part-time employee who worked nights at Popeye’s. It wasn’t the fast track that everyone else was following in those years, but it was security, a paycheck every two weeks and a pension when I retired. And while I was pretty much doing the same job as before, there was that office, with a door that closed when I wanted to put my head on my desk and nap, and my name on the door in neat green letters. And most of the time, that seemed to be enough.
iv
Saranbanda de la Muerta Oscura
YEARS WENT BY, MANY years. When I met Oliver I was only eighteen. At that age, privilege and latent schizophrenia can look an awful lot like genius. Now I was more than twice as old, and had made up for missing his funeral by attending many others. The plague years were upon us. I watched people I loved the and with each death something more of beauty drained away not only from the world but from me. I do not mean just that my life was lessened by their dying—though it was—or that I was not fortunate to be alive and grateful for it. I only mean that I had always felt that it was others who made me beautiful, by choosing to love me. This sounds like the sober admission of a dysfunctional woman, I know. But unless you had seen Oliver and Angelica together, laughing, or been as heartsick and lonely as I was when Oliver first greeted me that morning in Professor Warnick’s classroom: unless you had been me, enthralled but willing servitor, knowing I was unworthy of such friends, and so grateful to have been chosen—you could not know how I felt, how beautiful they were, how beautiful I was, on what a sweet bed we lay.
But now it was all to start anew. Finnegan begin again…
It was early morning of the first of May, a clear unseasonably cool morning for the city. I was hurrying from a cab to the sliding glass doors of the Emergency Room of Providence Hospital. A friend had gone into acute pulmonary distress, the last time it was to happen but I did not know that yet. I had not forgotten Oliver’s suicide, of course, but this hospital had long since become the scene of other dramas for me. I walked quickly to the ER doors with my head down, staring at the cracked concrete, the carnival detritus of shivered glass and metal. An ambulance was backing up from the doorway. Just outside the entrance a heavyset raw-faced woman was standing numbly, tears streaming down her cheeks. I did not want to look at her. So I looked down, tightening my grip on my briefcase. On the pavement were shattered crack vials and flattened cans, the ruby lens of a smashed headlight. You might have been able to trace the history of all the unfortunates inside of Providence, if you only knew where to look.
Then something else caught my eye. I hesitated, stopped, and bent to look more closely.
Overhead a metal awning thrust above the entrance to the Emergency Room, so that the rectangle of broken tarmac beneath stood in perpetual shade. There were small filthy pools of scummy water that never dried, and large black beetles with knobbed antennae that crawled across a liquefying red-and-white box from Popeye’s.
And there was something else as welclass="underline" pushing up through a crack in the concrete, not frail or etiolated as one might have expected but strong, its stem thick around as my forefinger, its curved leaves the deep nitrogen-rich green of leaves that bask in the sun all day.
A flower. A hyacinth.
Not the bulbous heavy-scented bloom known as a hyacinth in this country, but Scilla non-scripta, the wood hyacindi, Homer’s huakinthos. Its blossoms so rich a violet-blue they seemed to have been cut and folded from velvet, their yellow stamens as vivid and startling as eyes glimpsed from between the lappets of a heavy cloak. An amazing thing! I knew they did not grow anywhere outside of the Mediterranean, and even there only in wild lonely places, crags and mountainsides sacred to Artemis and her twin Apollo, and to the memory of the slain lover who gave his name to the flower.
Impossible; but there it was. As I brought my face closer I could just barely discern beneath the scents of car fumes and creosote its fragrance: sweet but very very faint, as though borne to me across mountains and rivers and stony plains, across an entire ocean, across a night country whose steppes I had seen only once but never forgotten. As from a past that was not my own but was somehow laying claim to me from an unthinkable, almost unbearable, distance.
PART THREE
Return
CHAPTER 10
Ignoreland
I DIDN’T REALLY CHANGE all that much. I didn’t turn grey. I didn’t get fat, I didn’t get married, I didn’t have children, I didn’t die. When I wasn’t at work I wore the same T-shirts and jeans and battered cowboy boots, although I drew the line at buying a black leather jacket at thirty-seven and pretending I was still twenty-two. I listened to the same music I always had, although Baby Joe did his best to educate me beyond the tastes I’d formed when I was still in college. It wasn’t exactly like I’d sold out on my life and dreams and all that other bullshit, because the truth was I’d never actually had anything to sell. It was more like I slowly froze in place, inside my little office at the museum; more like some part of me just fell asleep one day and never woke up. Everything that had happened to me all those years before gradually disintegrated into a kind of dream.
There was nothing to tether me to my memories of the Divine. Oliver was dead, Angelica might as well be. I had invested everything in two stocks that failed. Baby Joe remained my only real contact from that single semester. He had graduated summa cum laude, with a degree in English, and was now the beleagured Alternative Arts & Music critic for the beleagured New York Beacon, from whence he waged an ongoing war against his rivals and detractors in the Manhattan print media. Every few months he’d send me a compilation tape of music he thought I should be listening to. Baby Joe’s idea of must-hear stuff included the Ramayana Monkey Chant as well as the entire and surprisingly extensive catalog of a dreadful band called Boink. His scant free time he devoted to writing a novel, but he did a good job of keeping in touch. He called me every couple of months, telling me about people from the Divine I’d never had the chance to know—famous people, a lot of them, anthropologists and theologians and actresses and fledgling politicians—as well as Hasel Bright and Annie Harmon.
I thought of Annie often. Baby Joe gave me her number, but I never called. What do you say after nearly twenty years? But I was also embarrassed: like Baby Joe, Annie Harmon had gone out there and done something. Annie had become a cult figure.