The Unwalled City Part 3

THE UNWALLED CITY (part three)

III

            The window is open.  It was open when the storm passed.  The windowsill is wet and rainwater is pooled between the screen and metal frame. 

            Someone should have shut the window when the wind and rain came.

            Early morning, going-to-work traffic surges on the streets, tires splashing through puddles that the storm has left.  People take their dogs for morning walks.  They pass one another on the sidewalks without speaking or even nodding. the wide double lanes, beneath the underpass, the big road that once crossed the river on the freeway bridge is blocked by a phalanx of barricades and detour signs.  You can walk your dog through slots between the barricades, across the quiet pavement to the dead end where the great bridge once arched the river.  You can stand along the chain-link fence hastily erected at the chasm and look through the wire weave to the grey and brown river pumping like a piston in the rocky gorge.  Walls of skyscrapers rise above the ancient mills lining the flood.  The cul-de-sac beyond the barricades is a dog’s toilet: turds are scattered across the concrete plateau overlooking the river. 

            On a round table by the open window, there are some papers – applications for this and that, a mechanical pencil, a flyer for a newly opened Chinese restaurant, a book about the fall of Rome that Jason bought at a second-hand store and that he was reading before he left town to travel to Peru. 

            In the kitchen, there is a coffee maker.  Someone should be making coffee as an eye-opener, an accommodation to this cloudy Monday, the beginning of another work-week.  People are trudging past the locked door to the apartment on their way to the parking lot.  Through the open window, the sound comes of cars starting, engines turning-over, scattered gravel crushed under tires.

            Beyond the gush and hiss of the traffic noise, a siren is sounding.

            In the bedroom, there is a bed opened onto the sheets and a curl of covers and blankets.

            The pillows are bluffs overlooking the blankets, impressed with a ravine where someone rested his head.  Television sets play music and mechanical voices are speaking.

            No one alive is speaking.  The voices are all mechanical or electronic.

            On the counter by the sink in the toilet, a toothbrush rests beside a disposable razor.  A bottle of Ibuprofen stands next to the faucets.  No one is reflected in the mirror.

            The television in the apartment is turned off.  It’s screen is a convex eye that shows a little pupil of pale light entering through the open window.

            Someone should have closed the window.

            You can always hear voices but none of them come from living persons.  The voices are mechanical.  They are like the sounds made by an old vinyl record turning on a turntable.  There is a low bass rumble beneath the voices.  That sound is the deep hum of existence which goes around and around even when we are no longer present.

            – you know, I don’t see the point of it...I just don’t see the point.  You can get yourself plaster deer, that looks nice in the yard, back by the trees and the woodpile, or those flamingo birds which are colorful and cheap too, or, maybe, a nice wind-chime for the porch – some people even like those nigger boys in red jackets holding out little lamps or sitting crosslegged to hold a fishing rod, I’m not so enthused about them – it could be taken the wrong way – but, anyhow, there’s people who like them...or the Madonnas against a bathtub turned on its end and painted blue – it means something, I guess.  Catholics think they’re pretty.   But a fake wishing well?  It doesn’t go to anywhere, there’s no well there, just a circular rim about half-size and the cross-piece where there’s a little bucket hanging, but it’s a bucket that doesn’t go anywhere and can’t go anywhere ‘cause it’s just an imitation well, there’s no hole underneath...I don’t know what they paid for it.  Too much, no matter how much, that’s what I say...and what’s there to wish for anyhow?  Wishing doesn’t pay the bills.  Wishing doesn’t buy the diapers for the baby.  When you’re an adult you give up wishing.  To me, it’s just plain ugly – a fake wishing well for a lawn ornament.  Brand-new and fresh-painted, I’ll give you that – but it’s an eyesore, plain and simple, an eyesore.

            Arthur remembered talking about Peru.  It was in the barracks at Fort Dix in New Jersey when he was doing his military service.  Was it a weekend, warm and still, most of the soldier boys gone on leave to New York?  Lonely, he was lonely, he would always be lonely... There’s a certain ventriloquism to the past: the words or the energy that formed the words remains latent, trapped in the prisms of old ramshackle buildings, fading echoes between quonset huts and abandoned garages  – even now, a voice might be whispering from within a cistern or calling faintly from the bald dome of a silo or whimpering even from wet places where the leach fields for the sewage makes the grass grow a phosphorescent green.  It’s a confusion of place and time, a blur – not Princeton, but Fort Dix, smell of oil refineries in the night, but translated somehow, as if from one language to another to this dark prairie where the lips and broken teeth of decaying houses are speaking:  – Peru, it’s a mistake actually, someone planted a silver nugget in the creek north of town and, for a month people flocked to the village and there were tents pitched in the fields, but, of course, the geologists said that silver was not just unlikely, a vein of silver in the loam of the cornfields eight feet deep was impossible, couldn’t happen.  But where the little rounded hills lifted up over the prairie, where there were glacial erratics exposed on the knob-shaped ridge, there was gravel, lots of gravel washed into moraines by the ancient glaciers, enough gravel to build a thousand miles or more of road, and that was the town’s wealth, not silver, just round pebbles the color of slate or green as moss or red as hamburger – so the name’s a mistake, and the town’s a mistake too, a place conveniently central to enough to fertile fields to support a grain elevator, my daddy’s grain elevator and the side-track, the spur off the main road that ran straight as an arrow from LaCrosse to Sioux Falls, a corridor of rail shadowed by the big, abstract power towers and the high-tension lines – I’m not going back there, no, not going back there to waste my life, when you’ve lived in Greenwich Village and spent four years at Princeton, why would I go back there? It’s nothing, just a delta under some trees, cow-country – Boetia – not Ithaca, but the cow-delighting pastures and the cornfields of Boetia, a place where I happen to have been born, but which has no present relevancy to me, none....

           

            – it’s a movie about ancient times, like old Bible times, we got it cheap and will make it a social with lemonade and ice-cream, run the school projector in the gym at the elementary school, that’s the plan, get the old folks and the adults from the townships gathered-up on those damned uncomfortable chairs and sell some popcorn for a nickel a bag to defray costs, have a movie since there’s nothing else to do at the end of summer, school just around the corner, and Arthur saying that he’ll okay the use of the gym so long as the ladies clean-up afterwards – someone will have to watch the kids, they aren’t gonna sit still for the picture that’s for sure, even a picture with lots of slave girls and gladiators and barbarians and stuff, you know, old Bible times with the Romans and so on – the kids’ll slip outside and raise hell, but that’s what kids are supposed to do, just so that they don’t get drunk and crazy, we’ll have someone patrolling around the school take care of that problem – it’s a picture people are gonna like, that’s what I think, not like that movie that Arthur showed a few years ago, with those English fellers, James Sellers and Peter – is it Peter Mason? and that little girl –  that didn’t go over too well and there were people complaining about the language and the story was not something that I would care to even repeat here, but I think this will be better – it’s got that Italian girl, Sophia Loren, – she’s for the guys – and that Omar Shariff – for the ladies, I suppose – and that James Sellers too, I hope he’s better in this picture...People like to see stars on the big screen and armies and such and it’s supposed to be historical, set in old Bible times...

            – but what if the movie doesn’t come?  I don’t know.

            – sometimes, they don’t come.

            – then, Arthur can show us a driver’s ed film with some crashes and dead people and some burnt-up bodies or a hygiene film...what do you think?

            – I try not to...

              – Peru, a place to grow...get it? the corn, the soybean, the big old elevator, the best in the county if I don’t say so myself – Peru, a good place to raise a family.  We got our own school and we have movies every month from May to October in the school gymnasium with popcorn and soda for sale to defray the costs, not many villages this size have their own elementary school... and there’s some country churches nearby, churches for all the major faiths... and, if you get sick or hurt, it’s only a half-hour to Worthington where there’s a hospital and an emergency room and drug stores too – a good all-weather road all the way into town.  A day’s coming when this will be the biggest town in the county, maybe in this part of the state.  Some of the best farm land in the upper midwest and the elevator that’s a center for commerce – you can buy all your feed there, even dog and cat food, store your grain, get fertilizers for the field, various and sundries... this town is sure to grow, Peru - we like to say – a place to grow...

            – have you forgotten something?  Is there some place that you are supposed to be?  Try to remember? 

            Voices without faces, smell of disinfectant, someone watching TV is another room.  They say that the ability to hear is the last thing to go. 

            Light in a window, then, dark.

            — he’s dying.  You can tell by his mouth.  That’s called the “o” sign.  See how his lips are shaped: oval? 

            – Thy mouth was open but thy couldst not sing...

            — putting up the bomb shelter posters, for the basement below the school, something new this fall – we will have a place to hide when the H-Bomb is dropped – and carry down into the darkness some crates of canned food, some sacks of white rice, a fifty-five gallon drum of spring water and a dozen first-aid kits (bandages, gauze, iodine – what help in the event of severed limbs or third-degree flash-burns?), probably best to tell the people when they come to the movie that the school is designated a atomic bomb shelter...when the sky falls, you can come here and hide yourself underground for a while... stop, drop, and shelter, under the desks, kiddies, it’s the end...

            – still breathing?

            – in certain light and to eyes weary with seeing, the great fields of corn look like lakes, water shimmering in the breeze, and the roads are isthmuses of gravel and blacktop between the lakes, lakes everywhere and green islands of trees...something cool and refreshing to see, so much water spilled everywhere...

            — friends, lend me your... I know you’ve come to see Sophia Loren, but...before we begin the show, okay? -- the explosion and the fire taught us a lesson: this town needs a fire truck... isn’t that for sure, my fellow Peruvians?  When the elevator blew sky-high and scattered fire all around town, people had to take garden hoses and spray down the places that the falling soot and cinders had set afire....you all recall that?  And the water pressure from the wells wasn’t really sufficient to deliver much relief from the flames – we just had to stand by with our hands in our pockets and watch the elevator burn to the ground...there wasn’t enough water pressure and no hoses to reach that inferno and, besides everyone was too concerned with managing their own garden hoses to put out the blazes that erupted everywhere after the blast...I know you want to see the movie, you’ve come here to enjoy Sophia Loren and hear about the provisions in the bomb shelter down below, yes, but we should also talk about raising funds, by levy or donation or by selling raffle tickets or something, to buy a firetruck for the town, something to protect us so that the kind of conflagration that we saw last month will never happen again...

            ...aren’t you forgetting something?  Don’t you have to be somewhere?

            ...first day of school, the little girls have used blue and green chalk to make hopscotch ladders all over the playground, up to and under the basketball hoop, numbered squares... and, at recess, the kids are playing four-square with red dodgeballs, four-square courts also drawn all over the courtyard, a big school bus lumbering over the gravel roads, kicking up the dust...we don’t have enough kids for a High School, but we can, at least, manage our own elementary public school and, as long as there’s a public school here, there’s a town here also...

            Someone singing – Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

            – what are you doing?

            – playing Bat-minton.

            – where did you get the racket?

            – laying around, old ones, several of them just laying around...

            – Badminton?

            – no -- bat-minton.  You swing the racket and knock the bats flying around right out of the air.

            – Is it fun?

            – Lots of fun.

            – It’s mean.

            – Mean to bats.  But who cares?

            Whoop!  Swoop!  – Here comes one!

            – Missed!

           

            Is it the Met?  Edward Downes...intermission Opera Quiz.  But Texaco hasn’t sponsored...no, not for years... So what year is this?  A Saturday afternoon, undoubtedly, that’s when the broadcast takes place, but where?  What year?  Music pouring out from within a smashed trailer house half-hidden in the trees where the storm has passed and split their branches and the branches dangle down like vines, like ivy, all fat and glistening with leaves that don’t know enough to die, still green although the tree has been shattered just like the mobile home knocked on its side and spilling its contents onto the ground and the music playing, somewhere, close, maybe just in my head: I don’t know where or what year...New York City, that smell of cabbage gone bad where the sidewalks open down to the subways, yellow cabs, cabbage and yellow cabs, someone singing: Cosi Fan Tutti – they are all alike, every man and every woman, every day, every year, all time and no time at all: it’s an illusion, a hospital wall that’s merely a stage set and a window that opens backstage to where someone has painted a Worthington parking lot, not real, I think, but could be real, plausibly real:  a slice of grey lake behind and some trees and nothing much moving – supposedly a vista opening someplace somewhere, but just some flats and a stage with false perspectives and Despina singing (or others?) – is it on the radio or in my memory? 

Ah, questo medico

Vale un Peru

So this doctor’s worth...all the gold in Peru?  Is someone dying?  Why are they hurrying so much?  It happens every day.  What is the urgency?  Someone is always dying...

            – how did I survive?  Maybe, I didn’t.  Maybe, I was mostly destroyed.  You would have to judge that for yourself... But there were times...moments when I was not really suffering, when you might say I was happy or, at least, contented.  Not often.  I like peace and quiet and that was rare:  the wards were very noisy.  You couldn’t hear yourself think.  Someone was always growling like a dog or whimpering or shrieking without words, just a high-pitched wailing that echoed across the tiles and through the corridors.  You’d wake up in the morning and there might be naked man, stark naked, standing over you and howling like a dog...No reason, just how it might be... I was trustworthy, followed instructions, took care with the tasks assigned me.  Maybe, it wasn’t so bad.  Every day was planned for you, organized – I didn’t know that there was such a thing as freedom.  I was different from the others and they locked me up for that reason and, maybe, I was different, I don’t know; some days, it sort of made sense to me: who could I compare myself with?  People writhing in locked rooms?  An old man thudding against the padded walls.  The human pretzels knotted up motionless in wheelchairs?  The interns

smelling of booze?  And the doctors who smiled at you and didn’t listen, couldn’t listen, all elderly and defeated, smelling of cigarettes and booze too.  Who was like me?  In the winter, after dawn, I pulled on mittens and a scarf and pushed my head, shaved bald against lice, into a stocking cap and, hauling a tin bucket, walked through the snow on icy paths mostly made by my boots, saw crows scowling at  me from bare naked trees, found my way past the quarry to the gate into the underground, exposed my hands to the cold to fumble with key and padlock...inside: smell of earth and lanterns, piles of smashed bunks and abandoned wheelchairs on narrow skittery wheels and heaped up burlap sacks and all sorts of other junk, a couple yellow light bulbs making light that trembled overhead... and, then, the bins full of apples and sweet potatoes and round grey potatoes, some of them fist-shaped others like pebbles, and white and yellow onions and beets and carrots also, big bins made of wood full of vegetables:  above them the vault of the cave built with old brick and hairy with roots dangling down from the dirt under the trees on the dome of the hill, root-stalactites furry with cobweb, white encrustations plugging up the gaps between the bricks...you bend over the wood bins and inhale the dirt smell of the vegetables and sort through them to pick those for peeling and boiling in the stew that the kitchen-ladies will be making for supper tonight – “you done good,” they always say and pat me on the back like a dog or somethign, and, despite everything, that makes me feel good – pick out the good ones for the meal, it’s dusty and you sneeze, don’t take the potatoes shrunken in their skin, or the onions half-melted with decay, or the carrots all twisty and cork-screwed, just as twisty as the thoughts of some of the people in the wards who push their bony fingers into your breastbone and yak at you all day, words and words and words that you can’t understand and that don’t mean anything or, rather, mean something, all right, but not what the speaker means....but mostly I remember the dead people, they smelled a little too, but not like the potatoes or apples, just a faint disinfectant odor like a mint cloud hanging over them – you’d smell it when you unzipped the rubber bags and looked at their white faces just as still and cold as the potatoes or the onions or the apples, motionless and peaceful and cold as ice, lying back behind the vegetables, a dozen feet deeper in the cave in a kind of cage made of chicken wire with another padlock on its gate and trestles with icy cobwebs on them, a dozen trestles holding off the floor plywood trays where the rubber bags have been carried and lie side-by-side, next to one another...it’s so peaceful and quiet and the disinfectant on the breath of the dead people smells like bouquets of flowers going bad in the darkness.  They don’t howl at you or pester you with crazy talk or demand that you change the way that you are and not desire the things that you desire.  The dead people are just quiet and, at night, when I have trouble sleeping because of the noise, the others crying or pleading or bellowing with nightmares, I just think of the dead people in the cave and how quiet they have become and how they seem to be sleeping, just the way that I would like to sleep, still and deep and without any bad dreams at all – then, I know who I should compare myself with: my cold breath exhaled and their breath like a vase full of flowers at a funeral, that’s who I am, that’s who I am like...or who I would like to be....

            – the curtain goes up on the opera.  The ushers hurry to shut the dark doors marked EXIT and the glow in the chandeliers overhead is gradually extinguished -- an overture seeps up from below, and the spotlights pick out a tiny town on the prairie, lost in the corn and beans, the humid moon hanging overhead ripe as fruit on the tree of the night...someone puts a bag over my mouth and nose to help me breathe, but it doesn’t help much and the waves of the sea are rising...voices call from where ships have foundered on ancient reefs and the film stuttering through the projector has reached the end of a reel and the leader on the film is slapping against the side of the machine and the people in gymnasium, shuffle their feet and cough and someone clears his throat and says:   “now it’s time to change the reel” and outside: firecrackers, a string of firecrackers, rattling in the darkness...

            — you see, those kids had tennis rackets, two of them or three, old wooden rackets and, I guess, there was some fur and blood on them from batting down bats – those bats would storm out from under the eaves of the grain elevator, making a leathery flapping sound, and the kids took the tennis rackets and swung at them, and, sometimes, they would hit a bat and it would rocket through the moist darkness, no longer propelled by its little wiggling wings, but riding a flat, fast trajectory to skid across the gravel and lie dead and motionless on the edge of the lawn, nothing more still and silent and dignified than a dead bat, wings folded up and a little clot of blood oozing like a gemstone from a tiny nostril – see, that’s what the kids had been up to, murdering bats, but this night, the bats had billowed like smoke from their hiding place under the eaves of the grain elevator and they were gone, hunting the sticky, hot air swarming with mosquito, spiraling over the tassels of the corn and slick, green leaves of the soybeans, swooping this way and that under the warm moon... and someone had a string of firecrackers, and, once the bats had gone and were hidden in the darkness, here’s what the kids with the tennis rackets were doing: lighting the firecrackers, one at a time with a sulphur match and pitching the firecracker fizzing with flame up in the air and, then, batting it high into the treetops with their tennis rackets, bang! A firecracker flashing in the darkness and, then, gone, smell of gunpowder, tatters of paper falling from above, and, another one, hit hard toward the other kid with a racket and he hits it back and mid-air it also bangs and the thud echoes off something in the distance and, maybe, the adults in the gymnasium watching the movie hear the bang...another firecracker pops and the eye is bruised with the flash, and, then, another hit up overhead so that it bursts like a balloon above the shrubbery, and, then, another and the last:  it’s hit fast and low right at the belly of the other kid and he backhands it, swiping the firecracker still lit and shooting sparks back to the first kid and he returns the serve, swings hard, as hard as he can, and the firecracker sails up along the auger scaling the wall of the grain elevator and drops into the opening where the metal millwork corkscrews into the wooden shed and, then, there’s a roar like thunder and the sides of the grain elevator belch orange and red fire and great avalanches of corn and beans are suddenly roaring down from above, cascading from places where the elevator is split open, burying cars and trucks, a huge fire-ball rising up and up and up into the night sky to sear the moon and char the stars to soot and ash...

            Arthur put the sheaf of papers to be graded on his desk.  He was careful not to set the cold, sticky glass containing his whiskey on the papers – it would be unseemly to mark them with a wet ring from his cocktail.  He went to the phonograph and stacked some 78s on the spindle.  Outside shadows lengthened across the great, silent prairie.  As he fumbled with his pipe, voices began to sing, disembodied, pure, voices that sang beautifully and with great emotion and that were indifferent to whether he listened to them. 

            He had assigned his senior Latin class at the Worthington Catholic school ten lines of translation from Horace – Integer vitae.  Arthur looked out the window: far from the village, on the darkening plain, a grain truck put on its lights.  A little thrill of loneliness ran through his body.

            Before reading the translations, Arthur opened his Loeb’s Greek Anthology.  He flipped the pages, half-listening to the voices ascending as if weightlessly into the heavens.  In the anthology, he saw an epigram attributed to Epicurus:

Against other things it is possible be secure, but when it comes to death, we human beings all live in an unwalled city.

                                                                       

                                                                                    October 4, 2011