Last March
A closet drama.
Ceiling (looking down at a Person on the floor): Why are you playing corpse?
Left and Right Walls (to each other): She stares at us interchangeably when she tires of glaring at the hopelessly pathetic advertising across the street.
Ceiling (to Windows): Illegible from this vantage. What is it?
Windows: Live well, forge ahead. A state of mind, a way of life.
Column: Plus details about available square footage.
Lower Back Corner 1: I’m fortunate to be spared such sight. Last thing I need right now is motivation from real-estate developers.
Windows (to all Corners): Say that to your angling of shadows.
Lower Back Corner 2: All I look at is stacks of windows across the street and scaffolding removed so gradually it’s as if I were seeing a time-lapse photo at glacial speed.
Column: A New York point of view.
Person: Glacial? You need an idiom upgrade, guys! At the rate glaciers are melting now you would’ve seen the scaffolding come down way before the contagion began.
(No part of the room wants to hear they’re passé. Cabin-feverish themselves, they become more animated when hearing reggaetón from a passing car’s booming sound system.)
Top Front Corner 1 (to Person): Why don’t you replay your temporary savior complex instead of getting on our case?
Right Wall: I get it. Besides doodles the papers on the table contain notes on hypervigilance and the displacement of experience.
Column (twisting): What is it: outside looking in, inside looking out? Outside looking down, inside looking up?
Ceiling (looking down at Person on the floor): Let me repeat the question. Why are you playing corpse?
Person (chanting):
These days, walks are my cinema verité.
I socialize in my dreams.
I climb the social ladder up and down in my dreams.
Dreams are my social nightmare, my cinema verité.
Walks are my party. My cinema verité. Namaste.
Floorboards (in unison): She was a visitor quote unquote.
Last February
With nothing to look forward to, disorientation ensues. I am not one to plan
my next move standing still. I need to be already on my way before I know where
I am going. I think with my fingers, to quote someone else who’s miles ahead.
Fingers, legs—I am using them interchangeably here, for nothing comes to mind
until I leave the house and walk to the waterfront park about a mile and a quarter away.
The sun has set already, but across Manhattan I see the West Side glimmering
in a crimson light. I walk to the Newtown Creek dividing Brooklyn and Queens and
into which, a few months later, a Greenpoint old-timer will throw police barricades
in protest against the Open Streets program shutting traffic on certain blocks,
alleging it only benefits the hipsters in the neighborhood.
Once at the creek, a tributary of the East River doubling as a Superfund site, I
realize that the building I orient myself with, vacated by Citibank in the last year and once
the tallest in the area, now displays the name of a corporation I’ve never heard of. It
happens to be exactly in the direction opposite to where I expected it to be.
Triangles, not squares, dominate this part of the borough, but I am less surprised by my
disorientation than by the corporation’s odd name I’ll look up later, if I manage
to remember it. No associations mean resistance to my mnemonic tricks.
I walk toward the building instead of retracing my steps through the park. A bank as
polestar. Go figure. The Queens Plaza station’s tile mural reproducing
the exact topography of the area above the station circa 2005, Look Up Not Down,
features the building prominently. Artist Ellen Harvey could’ve designed it for people
to make sure that when they emerge from the underworld back to street
level, they do so on the right side of the chaotic juncture outside. The
street names at the exits of the station being
insufficient given the local grid’s idiosyncrasy the same number designating
an avenue, a street, a road, a place, a lane, and a drive and the logic
underlying the system appears unintelligible, conceived to gaslight visitors to the
borough. As if the city planners who found a way to squeeze more roads into
the grid without having to revise the numbering system that was already in place in the
1900s were also interested in proving Zeno’s paradox on the nominal impossibility
of movement from point A to point B.
Before long I know where I am. I pass the beer hall I never made it to: the space’s for
rent now. I make a left at the end of Vernon Avenue, at the intersection with Jackson.
I know every block of Jackson Avenue so well it doesn’t matter that
I’m not wearing my glasses. The fog from the mask would be more of an inconvenience
than my nearsightedness anyway. I pass Manducatis, a red-sauce eatery empty tonight
except for the perpetually present manager whose suit and demeanor have always
reminded me of someone I can’t pin down now till now: a mortician.
That’s it. He seems to be doing accounting alongside a giant Rolodex on a table near the window.
Every time we’d pass a cemetery, my grandfather would crack the same joke:
“That place is so popular, people are dying to get in there.” Not that it applies to
this place always half empty, as if the sparse patrons seen through the lace
curtains were the Old Country’s ghosts, long gone, already dead.
Ghosts of the before times flash before my eyes. Ghosts of those who died not
knowing an unthinkable disaster of the pandemic’s magnitude could ever overtake
the planet. The untimely ghosts of those who took their own lives or were taken away
by fluke accidents, various types of cancers, overdoses, heartbreaks, breakdowns.
I hear Aura’s perfect-pitch impressions of Nico at a bar in Coney Island
one summer in, what was it, 2003, 2004? When you’re all alone and lonely
in your midnight hour Lou Reed sings and the waves of the Atlantic lap at our feet on our
giddy way back to the car. We’re at Andrew’s for dinner in the same building where Sonic
Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore lived before their marriage ended,
across from David Bowie’s place on Lafayette. I see Juan in the Bank Street railroad
apartment whose lease he later passed on to me. Anne and I at the wine bar on
Vernon straight out of a noir film. I have yet to return. C.D. crammed
into a corner after dancing to Amy Winehouse at Barbara’s birthday/New
Year’s Eve bash in the West Village the night midnight struck while we were on
the subway trying to get to the party. We reveled underground with fellow riders
until we got to our stop. Carolee at Rio Mar in the Meatpacking District one of
the first times we hung out with her in the city. Carla and I seeing the Radical Women show
at the Brooklyn Museum, which Carolee and she could’ve been in were it not for
Carla’s being too young and for Carolee’s not being Latin American.
Robert Wyatt’s song starts playing randomly: At last I am
free / I can hardly see in front of me… City of serendipity. It is February
and I’ve got nothing to look forward to except for meeting people in boxes on the screen.
The streets are dead.
Last January
There is Z again, on a park bench
near the playground and dog run,
as if waiting for me. As if because
she’s pretending not to but is.
Delays with the paperwork mean
no groceries for her today.
She needs shoes. Men’s shoes.
Minutes later, a pair materializes
on the concrete chess table near us.
She has God’s ear. In my mouth
again the taste of awkwardness,
as if I’d meant my saying, “I’m here
to help you.” As if I were pretending
to be looking for her and am. As if
she meant her saying she would
pay me back sometime. “Don’t
be silly,” I say, not meaning it either;
I know she doesn’t do silly. What is
and what isn’t the case. The world
according to an I speaking about you
with whom mutuality is possible
only in fleeting exchanges. She here
relegated to the third person, who
improbably trusts me as much as I
trust her, which isn’t saying much.
The construction triply negative.
In a hurry I once avoided her
to avoid the unease of having
to leave—my self-importance.
Our reperformances staged
in a four-block radius, movements
synchronized like those of Shadow
and I whom she complimented
breaking the ice. We’re aware
of gaps and they pain us differently.
People want stories that illustrate
their bridging, or its illusion.
Here this does not happen. Today
I left the house wanting to ask
what story she’d like me to write.
If I were to write about you. The story’s
that good, someone beat me to it,
you say. Besides, I’d have to pay for it.
You weave together a birth in Tibet,
an abduction, a supreme court judge,
the priest of the church down the street,
Barack Obama, a rape, a murder attempt,
a cover-up, a $29 million settlement, and
just when it’s inconceivable there’d be more
to add, you mention a forced sex alteration
confirmed by doctors upon finding your
“dick in your stomach.” You’re playing me,
which elsewhere means you’re seeing
my face. ¿Me estarás viendo la cara?
Me piensas María. You still have God’s ear.
“Love you,” is how you say goodbye.
“Love you too.” Then Shadow
pulls me back to our square.