Fugue # 50

Dark now. The roar outside on the highway has subsided and now thunders intermittently. Red ribbons (taillights) whip by the window in either direction and drift into distinct spots rising toward either horizon. Leaving me behind, here. I stand at the window, stand still, watching the glare of headlights get clearer for a moment, then widen until they pass. Trailing ribbons leaving spots. In this spot, anchored to this spot. Until tomorrow, until this night ends.

The plains hold us here, their shadows like ghosts, floating and diving around the motel’s neon sign. Night shadows in a place without day shadows, cast from false light, which throws them out, toward me. Searching shadows - the memories of the forms they mock, dodging and chasing and following. Too transient to touch. And I remember these shadows and that light.

And then sunlight. Long dusk-time shadows. Summer: Skin crawling with itches from rolling in the grass, dew-soaked bare feet, mosquito bites, fireflies. And a voice floating over these flat fields - these same fields - calling a name. And I’m running, out of breath. Through the fields, then backyards, then streets in town. Panting, the voice getting closer, I’m following the voice. I can remember. Bits and pieces, they’re coming back, I’m coming back.

In my eyes, pictures, getting clearer. Snapshots of a life I should know. The past beams up to me from the pages of a stranger’s photo album, like the light from a fire. It’s my voice.

"Gene."

Fugue # 49

A creeping feeling seeps from the floorboards through your feet, past your knees, into your thighs - resting, then flipping and flopping in your gut. This is new. This room, this town. But you know it’s not true (you’ve been here before), it’s just a lie you tell yourself, trying to ward-off the next wave of remembering.

Evening, not yet night, and the rain won’t stop. And the bathtub faucet won’t stop dripping, and your hair is wet from a shower. The coolness, the carpet, the furniture, the wallpaper. So familiar, this could not get weirder. Focus, concentrate, think think think - about here, and now. About nothing, and it’ll pass.

You walk to the mirror over the sink and lean in. You focus your eyes on your eyes. A blank stare. Then your nose. A plain nose. Your mouth. A grin a frown a straight line. Lean forward, farther, until you see pores, and more lines. Earned lines that tell stories. You try to refocus on your mouth, your nose, crossing your eyes. The familiar, moments ago, becomes an unfamiliar blur. Even the lines, less clear. They disappear along with their stories, leaving a youthful face. A youthful face? Only if you could remember. You stare at yourself again. Same eyes. Blink. Same eyes. Blink. You remember. Now you can remember, can’t you? A blur - the stories just out of focus. The eyes that saw them, too.

Fugue # 48

"Well, that’s where your dad ended up. I tried for a while, but it was too hard for me. To look at everything here - all the sad, and the happy, too, the beautiful, the ugly - and know that’s all there is. When it’s gone, or actually when we’re gone, that’s all."

She stops.

"It’s an awful way to live. Pointless, and desperate - because you feel all this pressure to do to act to experience. To suck everything out of every day. You worry so much about sucking, that you don’t have time to taste, appreciate it."

And again.

"And it makes the pain worse. I didn’t want to experience things without him. I just wanted to see him again. And talk to him and hold him. Maybe it was the easy way out (too easy, your dad would say), but I chose to think about the future. Heaven, I guess, something better yet to come. But not like clouds and angels. More like familiar, more like hope."

The same apron, but different hands.

Fugue # 47

Leave the school running: Out the front doors by the kickball field, the dodgeball circles and hopscotch squares, the jungle gym, the monkey bars, and the tetherball pole. Turn the corner at the kindergarden side, and take off down the long sidewalk next to the soccer fields, whose orange goal pipes contrast against the still green grass and the just turning leaves. It’s September, and it’s raining.

Place a stick in the curbside stream and follow it: Over bumps in the concrete curb, around blacktop chunks pulled out of the street and into dams created by fall’s debris or placed there for fun. Watch the stick - it’ll turn this corner and keep going, halfway down the block with no sidewalk, and farther. Past the osage apple tree, and the old man in overalls watching and waiting with cross words for kids shortcutting through his backyard, past the brick row houses with bare laundry lines.

To the corner, to the drain.

Look up, and across the street kitty-corner. There it is, remember? The oak tree in the front yard, hiding the planks painted gold. Five steps, the porch, the screen door, an apron.

Fugue # 46

Silence again between us, and it’s good. The car radio plays, and the grooved pavement hums underneath us as we pass over a bridge. Then by flowers, taped to a roadside cross, a skid in the gravel shoulder, a gash in the grass, now filled with gray sky rain water.

Details matter, she said.

(That cross. a snow cone, backseat windows that don’t roll down all the way, a broken shoelace, oversized headphones, fireworks.)

The vast majority of our days are overwhemingly similar, she said. One day fades into the next, and again, and together they blur into weeks, months, years. Snapshots help us keep track of where we’ve been. What we’ve done and what we’ve seen. Because if we remembered every moment - even the unremarkable - we would never have the momentum or the time to escape the gravity of the one life we’ve been given.

(A concession stand at the fair missing the second o in popcorn. I see it moving away, as the red rocket I’m riding flings me backward. I’m sitting next to my cousin maybe, or maybe a stranger. I come so close to remembering, then it all pulls away.)

It isn’t about perfection, she said. Our snapshots all have that proverbial thumb in the corner. They are badly composed and poorly exposed, but we remember them anyway - maybe even because of these imperfections. And we tell our histories by these moments. Episodes, like sitcoms: our family pictures jokes, our siblings often punchlines.

Fugue # 45

Ana sits on her bed and looks at herself in the wall mirror. Her hair is two shades darker wet from a shower. She pulls it back, then over her right shoulder, and squeezes. Water drips down her chest into her lap and onto the sheet between her legs. She tilts her head and engages her reflection like a photograph, the Ana other people see.

You’re not so impressive, you’re not so great. You look like a girl trying to be a woman - who are you trying to fool?

She opens her hands on her thighs, still damp and cooling now, and lowers her eyes, her head.

You are alone, you can cry.

Her eyes well with tears, which roll warm down her cheeks, down her lips and her chin and her neck. She wipes her face with her towel.

This is stupid, this is so stupid, why are you crying? (I don’t know, but it feels good.)

So she lets herself go: sobs shaking her shoulders, gasps punctuating her breaths, and tears falling on her legs and mixing with the water from her hair.

Fugue # 44

These currents are strong, but they are only visible on the surface in eddies and swirls. And moreso in the day than the night. It’s 1 a.m.

I’m driving her back home, out of town. The dashboard lights. The roar of the wind through open windows. The smell of night in the fields: cool, damp.

She says, "I’m sorry," and it sounds sincere, like true regret in her voice.

A long time, miles later:

"I’m sorry about this afternoon. This is all so hard, and I’m not very good at it, and I don’t know how to get better. I have so many feelings right now - happiness about seeing you, sadness about everything else, disappointment, anxiety. I don’t know what word to use..."

We use words as shorthand, sometimes, and end up talking more about them than our feelings. The what more than the why, and never mind the how. We get further and further from ourselves and each other, and that’s when the stories we tell ourselves in order to live begin to make even less sense.

Fugue # 43

The experience of raising a second child wasn’t any less meaningful (he writes, I read), it was just less immediate - and more immediate.

There was a sense of scale, of time - of the scale of time - and a certain enjoyment in letting go that sweetened the bitter background sadness, and sometimes slowed the inevitable anxious rush of knowing that this time was probably the last, and there was no way you could be perfect.

I will remember this time - the time when you were learning to talk - fondly. You were learning to talk as your brother was learning to read.

It always seemed like I was defined and described in relation to him. And that’s ok. The familial landscape changed when I arrived, but they still had to raise him first. And the growing they had done with him couldn’t be undone by me. They could no more lose him - and unlearn the lessons of parenting a first-born child - than they could lose themselves.

But I had the benefits of experienced parents, and a friend on the day I was born. If I got less attention, well, I enjoyed my moments: Dad reading me books after work, Mom giving me morning baths in the kitchen sink on school days.

Fugue # 42

The daily ritual of meeting at her locker before school: the bell, a whispered seeya from him, a pensive hmmm from her, whose inflection changed depending on the flavor of her gum - coy for fruit (watermelon, esp), demanding for cinnamon, matter of fact for any of the mints.

"Ok," she would say. Then class, 50 minutes of waiting, break. Repeat.

Time went so slow, then so fast. They wouldn’t always see each other between classes, but there would be notes. This one from French class:

"After we got off the phone last night, I called her. Another big blowup last night. So much drama! The devious one and the not so much? I feel like Switzerland!!!"

Underlined, exclamationpointed.

"Anyhoo...speaking of la Suisse, I have that report due on Friday, so no study dates this week. Bummer. Call me tonight, tho - around 10, or right before, the usual time - I have something to tell you..."

Smileyfaced, lefthanging.

Fugue # 41

He told bedtime stories every night. And in these fake adventures (characters wholly made up, or else borrowed from comics and cartoons), he told the story of our lives. Details seeped in, stayed in - and wishes and dreams (his/ours) marked our time.

"Once upon a time, there was a boy named Gene, and he loved to walk in the fields. Summer was a great waiting time, a season of hope - not a hope like spring, not a potential, but a hope of living and growing. A vast ocean of time between the last day of school and the first, when boys could see and do, and even learn. Blond hair curling in the afternoon sun, a hot breeze, and warm dirt under his bare feet, corn tassels just high enough to brush his shoulders, and the cheeks of his little brother Paul.

- C’mon, said Gene.
- Where are we going? said Paul.
- You’ll see, said Gene.

The boys walked and walked. Gene saw it coming, Paul didn’t, until they reached the last row of corn. The woods. One last look over their shoulders, back toward home and town. Then a step, two steps, into cool shade.

Fugue # 40

Ana on the subway, wearing her badass commute face. Stay away, I’m tired, it’s too early, I don’t know you, don’t talk to me, not even good morning because then I’ll have to reciprocate and I’m just not there yet.

She looks at her phone: missed call. Enbal.

- Hello?
- Hey, did you call me?
- Yeah. He called here. You got it.

(pause)

- Really?
- That’s what he said...
- Holy shit. Really.

Her brow relaxes, her eyes soften.

- You there?
- Yeah, it’s just...I can’t believe it.
- Ha, I told you.
- I know you did. And now...
- Now what? You did it. We can talk later. Have a good day.
- Thanks.

Ana closes her phone and looks out the window at the tops of trees.

Fugue # 39

One is not the loneliest number. Eight million is. There are so many people in the city: Strangers, with their own voices and stories hidden behind stony urban exteriors. We don’t know them, but we see each other, on tos and froms.

One day the pregnant lady is there, then she’s gone. Then she’s back, and smaller. The older lady is crocheting a baby blanket, the next day she’s reading - is the blanket done? Is it wrapped around her granddaughter? Newspapers, new clothes, new tattoos, new boyfriends and girlfriends sharing seats that were empty yesterday. An engagement ring, a suitcase, a wrapped present, a gym bag. A cloud across a face, a cellphone conversation smile...

...and more again. We see each other enough to notice changes, and in recognizing these changes, we become more familiar, less strange. We still don’t know each other - still don’t talk - but inside, we do. We connect, and we imagine. We extrapolate, supplement, and fictionalize - decontextualizing details, and recontextualizing them into our own story.

Zed to Marbell:
"I’m reading a magazine article about this photographer, Christian Waeber - he’s up in Boston, does a lot of figure stuff, some arcitecture, some landscape. Anyway, he says, and I like this, ‘I started to connect with the strangers who once drove where I was standing. I imagined their lives, their origins and destinations.’ "

Fugue # 38

"Do you remember? Something that you said once about traveling - well, driving - and listening to music? Music as part, a part, of the drive, or something. I think about that all the time. Movement through space, with music not - not like a song describing the movement or the space, not Bruce Springsteen or whatever - but music, as an integral part of the movement. And depending on the kind of movement, the kind of space, it becomes part of the story.

Think about a mix tape, or cd, I guess. It’s a genre; it’s got its own rules of reference - humor, camp, suggestivity. A threshold of me placing myself in your space, and your head hopefully, with my music. And so for road trips, the mix tape or cd isn’t just background or soundtrack. The music becomes part of the scene, it’s not just superimposed over it. Does that make any sense? Music does more than just set the mood for the trip, it is the trip, in some ways. That’s what I dig."

Ana nods, faux-knowingly.
- Music is the best.
- Totally.
- You have a lot of words in your mouth tonight.
- What?! I’m serious. This is interesting stuff.
- You’re loaded.

Paul, not sober, not sheepish.
- Yeah, a little.
- Do you want to drive to L.A. with me?
- Yes.

Fugue # 37

(I watch you get older, and I’m powerless to stop it. Your life, which begat mine, fades, and another home for me is gone. The place where I went is gone, and now the place where I came from is going.)

"He’s still up there, your Grampa is."

A nod up the hill on the south end of town, near the new elementary school.

"They’re pretty nice there."

They are, I quickly learn when I visit him.

(We develop these relationships with caregivers - until strangers we don’t know, and wouldn’t, except for the misfortune of injury and ill-health, and the inevitability of age - become friends. Or if not friends, at least familiar faces and voices who occupy the same frame as our familial concern, just at different times. They care in ways we don’t, or can’t. A glance, a smile, tired and maybe empathetic. It’s a job, the easy part. The hard part is for us.)

Fugue # 36

We fall into it.

He holds me, and I feel him and his warmth. I feel his arms around my back, one over my right shoulder, one under my left arm. I hold his shoulder, resting my forearm against his chest, and look at him. He pulls me closer.

He’s so me and not me at the same time. I’m him and I’m me, too, and does he know that even know that? That the space between us has disappeared, and so have we, to me.

We fall into it, finally. My head is spinning, and my insides are hollow. He breathes my breaths, pulls them from me, and pushes his breaths into me. He absorbs me and fills me with something that’s not me, but still me. I push back some. I put my hand on the back of his head, and hold a loose handful of hair.

Who am I to him? I’m me to me, and so is he, but to him, who am I? His lips are softer than I imagined. His tongue is bigger. And I can’t believe it, and stop thinking now stop thinking. Wow.

Fugue # 35

It isn’t that easy this time. So much has changed. The last one came before everything went digital. It was analog in a very real sense: What you found drove the narrative, and now, well, you can find anything on the internet, right? What does "found" even mean if you’re looking for it? Is this just contrivance and cleverness, outcome dependent crap? Or is it a reapplication of your old rules and ideas and twists on them - disregarding form while respecting it, and so re-regarding it?

Why did Mt. Fuji work? Because these views formed a multitude, a kaleidoscope of perspectives - your characters and you, and what you found. This new one is harder. Nothing will stay put. These people move, despite (to spite) you. They’re doing things almost without you. The mood shifts, gesture and intonation change with the daylight. This is right, feels right, and then it doesn’t. And wherefore art thou then, Zed? Huh?

You’re muusing again when you should be plotting, or at the very least dialogging. These digressions don’t get you any closer to knowing these people, or to knowing how this envelope of clipped pics and text helps you describe them. (If you could ever give up your biases - give them all up and write from your true pure heart - maybe then we’d get somewhere.)

Fugue # 34

They sit against the chain-link fence of the tennis court, waiting for a ride, or for rain. They’re done playing - too hot, too tired, too bored - so they sit. And stretch their legs and compare tans, talk about boys and imagine future happinesses.

- I don’t think he’d be a good boyfriend. Do you?
- Yeah, maybe. A good kisser...
- Are you joking me?!
- What?
- You’re crazy.
- I dunno, why not?
- He’s still a boy, boy-ish. He wouldn’t know what to do.
- That’s ok. There are other things besides experience. Like being cute. And enthusiastic.
- Look at me. Yep, you’re eyes are all sparkly. Busted. You’re in love, for sure.
- Shut up, I can’t believe you...
- Ha, you’re such a princess. I’m teasing. Anyway. How bony are your knees?

She smiles, and rolls her feet on her heels, side to side.
- Pretty bony.
- Where’s your mom? I’m literally melting.

Fugue # 33

Fractured newspaper accounts: the headlines clear, the stories less so.

America! (they say) We are under attack. Invincibility stolen, isolation pierced. Who’s responsible? Tell us. Now. Now. Don’t tell us about us, tell us about them. Who they are and why they did this. Wait...not them, not yet: Us. First tell us about us. Our pain and our pride.

If we could only get back to who we were on September 10th, we could take stock, make mental notes, prepare for tomorrow with an understanding of today. We were so naive, but not because we were innocent. Because we were amnesiac. Out of touch with our past, and where we came from.

We don’t return, we retreat (beaten, broken, but still standing) to first principles:

- Who are we?
- How do we express this?

The answers, not as obvious as they used to be or as we want them to be, will come.

Zed, satisfied, closes his computer.

Fugue # 32

- Maybe I’m going against the stream here...

(Zed, mid-monolog; this had been going on for some time.)

I feel that piece keeps the sensual flair, but loses the heart of where he’s been for years.

(We’re sitting and drinking after dinner, listening to him talk at us, then listening to Marbell talk back at him.)

- But couldn’t you say the same thing about your current work?

- Sure, sure, Neil, you could. The enterprise here, correct me?, is supposed to be more than just storytelling, right? It seems. It is for me, anyway. There’s another layer. Telling about storytelling. The extent to which that works, I guess, is for you to decide.

(Meta-this, meta-that.)

Point. Counterpoint.
Text. Subtext.
Leit. Motif.

Fugue # 31

She talks and talks, to herself or to the sun that falls through the open window, and tumbles onto the bed over her left arm, bare breasts, her face. Her legs are spread, a sheet pulled between them, and uncovered. Her chin turns away from the sun, into shade, toward me.

"...and I guess..."

Disappointment, fatigue, and which came first. She talks, we talk, she talks more, words like sand blowing from an open hand. Missed chances, last chances, and now this afternoon in her bedroom.

She says something like, "I was supposed to have a script." And, "Everything was planned - didn’t you think? I did, and then...you weren’t there. I was supposed to hear cues - when to laugh, when to cry, when to be myself, and when to act. But things got so weird, and I didn’t know what to do, and time - everything was planned, but then everything started moving so fast."

And "I was pregnant, I was 20. There he was, and where were you?" She stops, waits, and gets up from the bed.

Fugue # 30

I watch you get older, and I’m powerless to stop it. You’re not a boy, you’re a kid , though you’ll always be our baby - as far as you crawl/toddle/walk/run from those days. When we had nothing to do but hole ourselves up in that house against the winter and just be. Just be together. We learned to know each other and to love you - it wasn’t immediate: you were a welcome stranger first, then our child. By spring, you were on your feet, and we emerged, hopeful, ready to meet our neighbors.

The optimistic slant of a midmorning shadow. The dull smell of cut grass and mower exhaust. The bright silent faces of the neighborhood’s houses. And we understand. Wait until later: to visit, to share our families after the day has calmed and cooled.

- Can I go across?
- Look both ways.
- Ok.

He scurries away, pauses, looks, runs over to meet his friends. They have things to discuss that aren’t meant for grown-up ears. I wait, smile, and wave him on.

Fugue # 29

They’re a project, a diversion like a stray cat: He feeds them, they leave satisfied and come back, he stays connected.

Ana, would you set the table?
Paul, would you open the wine? How was work?

They relax. He watches and listens. He notes their gestures and their slang. The looks they give each other (inside jokes, shared confidences, amity, love?)...

Paul slips into the kitchen, behind Zed...

- What’s cookin’, Mister Z?

and snitches a spear of broccoli from the pan. A good-natured smack on the hand from a wooden spoon, and, as a peace offering, Paul hands Zed a glass of wine.

- Ana and I were just talking about your trip out West. Have you guys decided when you’re leaving?
- No, not yet. I haven’t talked to Neil about dates yet.
- Itinerary?
- That, too, ha. I used to dream about a life filled with excitement and danger...and I ended up living a life filled with plans.

Fugue # 28

But the town is so much fun, Enbal teased.

She knew, Ana did. An electric blue flyer on her desk: "While the ‘Cats are away, the (Groovy) Mice will play!" Tonight, at the bar. Tempting, she would love to see them (again), but tonight was for laundry and studying. Marbell mentioned an internship the other night, and his midterm paper was due next week.

Her notes were as scatological as his lectures. She’d have him to a point, then lose him in the details.

TRUTH (real world) / FICTION (not real world)

If B doesn’t *believe* in anything, incl. ART, does this distinction fall apart? T creates a fictional character who denies his own (fictional?) existence?!

Does B crit T?
Does T criticize T?
Does T agree?

That didn’t make any sense. Was it that Death of the Author shit again? She paged back to Barthes. Balzac, Mallarmé, multiple writings. This place is not the author, but the reader.

Fugue # 27

Juxtapose those porches - their perfect boards, pressure treated and stain sealed, screwed not nailed, with room for a gas grill and a table and two chairs, a planter with herbs hooked over the railing and flanked by two more with flowers, and no view except for the parking lot, the alley, other buildings, other porches - with this one:

Rotting wood, warped and listing organically toward the front left corner, painted white in some places, red or brown in other places, and not painted at all anymore at the top of the five steps. There is room for everything - plants, bikes, toys, chairs, garden tools, shoes, a doormat, a blinky cat, and a tired dog. The porch is as wide as the house, and open to the air, and its old boards creak more than the swing that hangs above them.

We sit there, on that porch, on that swing - pushing back lightly with our toes, then gliding forward. My hands in my lap, your hands on my arm, and your head on my shoulder. The twilight birds sing home songs, the crickets chirp goodnight. The air is warm and still. This is where we look and listen, like they did before us, and talk. This is what we say:

Tomorrow’s so soon.

Fugue # 26

A second story window, just to the right of the front door - a yellow glow, good. She’s there, she’s home. Throw pebbles at her window? Climb the trellis? Or the downspout? Yell pssst? Thankfully, she looks out and sees me creeping up the lawn. She opens her window, index finger: Be right down.

I walk around to the back patio. She opens the sliding glass door, index finger: Be quiet.

Really now, listen.

You would’ve said it was quiet. Then less quiet, the silence building upon itself, burrowing into itself, until we can literally hear nothing. (I imagine she is the same as me.) Nothing and its nuances. Layers, tracks, sections like an orchestra. A cricket over by the shed, tree frogs over the garden, the flutter of bats, the shush of leaves, the sneak of a cat, and across the yard out back, the slow rip of a motorcycle pushing its headlight up roads with numbers not names. Leaving us alone.

- Hey, I whisper.
- Hey. So, what’s up...

She stops, expectant. I look at the ground at my feet, then at her.

Fugue # 25

Late afternoon, night approaching, crossing the sea toward the city...

(start with a bang)

So there was this guy named Paul, and he lived in New York. Paul was a normal guy - job, watched sports, read nonfiction, worked out - but he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) remember where he came from. The only thing he would (or could) remember was an explosion: a flash, followed by a deafening roar, the smell of smoke, and the heat from a fire. But the heat, he would say, was far away. He would describe running, across a field maybe partway, until his stomach turned, and he threw up from the effort or from the event. And then nothing.

If you asked for more, he would tell you about it like he was answering a reporter:

Did you see this? I may have.
Were you there? I may have been.
When did it happen? I can’t say.
Where? I don’t remember.

And you would have to settle for those answers, until you asked again.

Fugue # 24

Patterns in a (mono) chromatic field. Rows of corn stalks arc’ing away and stubbling the field’s face - overgrown and unkempt through winter, shaved smooth and tilled under in spring. Sky blue, then light purple: the sun takes a long time to set, and you can see the horizon in every direction.

They stop at a crossing, apparently lost. Zed blows in his cupped hands, says something about the cold, and consults the map. Marbell gets out of the car and takes off...down the shoulder of the gravel road, up a hill, and into a field with his camera. The terraces are taller, and wilder, than they look from the road, and the ground is hard to walk on. A hundred yards in front of him sits an abandoned pickup truck. Zed finally catches up.

- Hey...
(nothing)
- Hey, what in the hell are you doing? I’m talking to you, hey!
- Look at this. This place is like the end of the world.

Two miles away north, a silhouette of a maple tree looks like a house. At your feet a dead bird like a frozen glove. And south, back toward town, the grain elevator (the new one) looks like a rocket. Red lights and steam.

Fugue # 23

He went to bed late and was tormented with disordered dreams all night, or what was left of it.

In one, Gene appeared in backlight, haloed. His face was glowing blue, and he was speaking insistently about something - it was the right voice, but the words weren’t words; sounds and syllables, but no meanings. He said he didn’t understand, and shielded his face with his hand to block the light, filter it. The words began to change, starting softly and growing louder, becoming recognizable.

"It’s astonishing that you still believe in words."

Gene smiled.

"Listen: God isn’t in the details. God is in everything but the details. The prime mover, if there is one, moves only twice. Our terminal fates - the Alpha and the Omega - the beginning and the end. The being from nothingness, and the nothingness from being. Birth and death. We share these things, but not what happens inbetween.

And the rhythms and paces of everyday life, the happiness as well as the sadness. The cold loneliness of crowds - not knowing anyone but yourself - and the warmth of love... all of that really vital, interesting stuff matters only in juxtaposition with the simple shared inevitabilities of your first day and your last day, and the understanding that everyone has those two days, too."

The light got brighter, and became the sun overhead.

Fugue # 22

As much op as pop, imagism meets hard edge. Silhouettes of soliders, massed and menacing. Or not. Their shoulders slumped, their guns held loosely in tired arms and pointed down. Standing against, before, what? There is nothing, a blank.

"Look here..."

Marbell with a laser pointer on the projected slide.

"There is a virtual gap between figure and ground, and that gap is partly filled by line and shape, party even by gesture. And partly, eventually, by the artist himself. Where the image recedes, the artist...ascedes? Is that a word? In his choices of form and medium. But this presence is illusory. As illusory as that of these soldiers, detatched from their struggle and placed here, with us.

Are they here? Remember that there is an almost temporal element to all this. Remember Derrida: ‘The present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the trace. It is no longer what every reference refers to in the last analysis. It becomes a function in a structure of generalized reference. It is a trace, and the/a trace of the erasure of the trace.’

The virtual gap."

Fugue # 21

She sits on the floor, surrounded by these albums and the photos she has pulled from them. She says she likes to play a game, shuffling old snapshots (seconds, fractions of seconds the camera’s shutter opened and shut). then trying to piece together a narrative. Portraits stolen from the past, decontextualized and recontextualized next to landscapes from years later, or earlier. 72 pictures from a life. Now tell a story.

She wades through make-believe memories, supposition and conjecture tickling her ankles like the flowers did to you: Tuolumne Meadow, age 6. Right, see? She holds one up. Another one: Mom, you two boys, Gramma - not quite posed, not quite centered, in the woods? (He knew, didn’t he, it’s in the grin. Mom didn’t, you didn’t. Gramma, no way.)

The next picture different than the last, robbed of its details... no, actually, the details remain intact - photos can’t lie - but your knowledge of what’s outside the frame is disregarded. You were out West, right? and that was taken in a campground, before dinner. Not a logical accretion, but a back and forth - seasons reversing then reversing again, heads spinning left then right. Shadows lengthen then shorten, and yesterday’s sunlight chases them away.

Memories are passages, pictures punctuation.

Fugue # 20

Paul pushes a nearly empty cart along an aisle of open freezer bins. And around the other side, going the other way, Ana pushes a fuller cart.

So. Cakes, pies, ice cream, popsicles...

(the dull bottom and lazy guitar of Rupert Holmes’ "Escape" on the grocery store speakers)

...frozen juice concentrate, hmmm...

They both reach for the limeade, and their hands meet. A moment of recognition, and pleasant surprise. A pause on the downbeat. And choreographed or not, the chorus makes them reconsider whether they want daiquiris:

- Do you like...
- Pina?
- Coladas?

They sing out loud to each other: meaningful eye contact, dramatic gestures, fake microphones (sure), pointing (there’s plenty of pointing). Dancing in the aisles.

It’s after ten, and thankfully, nobody notices. Ana shops with a list, and Paul does not.

Fugue # 19

"Yesterday was dramatic," she says, "Today is ok."

Cool, not cold, dusk. The sun is flat and low. They shuffle away from the cemetery, talking about anything but why they’re there - droll, appropriate smiles as they stare at each other fondly and telescopically across the gulf of entire lives lived apart.

They were inseparable through high school - they used the word "when" like a promise and the word "if" like a threat. Everything was so certain. They didn’t know, their stories were all details.

"First children are like first loves," he says, sincerely, reaching out and back both. It’s vague, maybe forced, but she leaves it alone. She understands that he understands, and appreciates his kindness. "Later ones might be better - more interesting, or more mature - but not deeper." A first child, like a first love, teaches you a new emotional vocabulary that you cannot forget.

Abstractions of light and dark in the folds of their clothes. Silhouettes against the dying day’s ash gray sky.

Fugue # 18

Morning: An alarm clock’s buzz, a hand reaching out of the covers for the snooze button, feet on the floor, hands raking hair, a shuffle to the bathroom down the hall.

Ana’s apartment window looks back over an expanse of gray, three stories down, an empty lot bounded on two sides by a chain-link fence overgrown with weeds and vines, on the other side by an alley. Passing the window on the way back to bed, she notices there are no cars parked there. And carved and smoothed into the gravel is her face, 30-40 feet long, just as wide, just as accurate as a drawing, an unsigned bas relief, stone and dirt.

It must have been him, right? And he must have been standing up here on the porch to do it. And assuming he did this by himself - he couldn’t have had help, who else would do this with him? - he must have made a hundred trips up and downstairs. While she was at class? Or work? While she was asleep? Maybe it’s right this time. Maybe it’s really wrong.

Enbal approaches Ana at the window, "Whatcha look–"

(pause)

"Whoa..."

Ana’s face, the real one, is flushed, as a cool morning breeze gently raises a small cloud of dust from her cheeks below. She closes her mouth in an uncertain smile.

Fugue # 17

The design is plastic: polymer, clear neoprene, but it hangs and drapes, not clings. Coins - various nations, various denominations - are pressed into it, and the bodice line, which starts low in the back and rises under the arms to meet a neck cord in front, is coated here and there in gold leaf. Ana hugs herself in a way the garment can’t - she’s not cold, just self-conscious.

Guy, the wardrobe guy:
- Pretty sheer.
- Is sheer the same as transparent?
- Hey, you’re beautiful, you know? Don’t worry.
- Yeah yeah yeah. What’s up with the money?
- Dunno.
- I think I’d rather just be naked.
- Why?
- I feel like a statue or something.

The photographer consults with his assistants about lights, they laugh and break their huddle. "Ok...here’s the deal: I need you to stand there, very still, like a Greek statute. Think Aphrodite or something. Got it?"

Ana nods, and looks at Guy. He shrugs his shoulders, palms up, and raises his eyebrows - what?

Fugue # 16

Zed HQ: a neo-Aztecy thingy, maraschino’d onto a residential box. Paul looks at Ana; she looks at him. They’re standing between the elevator and the penthouse door.

(backflash a week)

He’s watching tv, she’s painting her toes, they’re on the phone:

- Remember Saturday night. We have that dinner thing with Marbell at that writer’s apartment.
- Who is this guy again?
- Zed. That’s all I know.
- That’s all you know, Zed?
- That’s what Marbell calls him. He used to be a motivational speaker, Ziggy something. Pretty famous - infomercial famous anyway. He got into trouble with his bankrollers for a not-so-popular series of speeches. Then he wrote a book about Mt. Fuji or something, which took off earlier this year. Kinda unexpected.
- How does he know Marbell?
- I don’t really know.
- Do they? I mean, are they...
- No idea.

(and forward)

Paul reaches and rings the bell.

Fugue # 15

Darker and darker.

The cd stops. It’s quiet. We sit looking at each other, at our hands, outside.

Darker. We wait for something to happen. Forever almost, for something to begin. He moves from the floor toward me on the bed. Darker and quieter, until sound disappears. His hand my knee his eyes...

Then a call from downstairs - Mom, "Dinner" - and he leaves.

He leaves me.

Thinking, does he know what he’s doing? Asking, when?

And after dinner, after homework, after phone calls, absently singing,

Goodnight stars
Goodnight moon

(Another strain of melody - muted, farther off, inside my head: Goodnight light and the red balloon)

Goodnight friends,
I’ll see you soon.

Fugue # 14

To see with (but through) the visual memory baggage we carry. That accumulated perceptual junk, recalled and recycled, floating through our minds’ eyes. (These images drift into the wind and flutter back - into thinner air - back to thicker earth. Our ears hear what our eyes see; our minds translate, and the culturally mediated conversation continues.) We remember what we see, and we remember what others have seen for us. Our human limits overcome - our imperfect memories perfected.

They claim that this is the end of abstraction. I believe it is just the beginning.

I’m thinking here about the difficulties of separating our collective memories, particularly of landscapes - separating our collective memories (in popular culture - movies and pictures) of experiencing or seeing land - from our individual memories. Less experienced directly than experienced together indirectly, or anyway, what we have seen ourselves affected by what we have seen otherwise. Do we remember the most picturesque view - the quintessential postcard snapshot - or the imperfect view from more vernacular sources: from the backseat of a dirty car, cluttered by family banter and am radio, covered in a patina of sweat, tears, and sno-cone syrup. Borrowed images, borrowed memories are the white strings that we tie around parts of our minds to remind us what we’ve seen (if not how we’ve seen it). We need these strings to place us in the land, to externalize it, to frame all the context that our more vernacular sources provide.

So what do we mean by vernacular sources?

Fugue # 13

Ana, in class, taking notes.

CHANGE: shift, mvt, Thesaurus

Dimensions, traditionally...
- line: defined by two points, and limited to two directions (fwd/back, progressive/regressive, then and now and then)
- plane: defined by three points, more open but not yet free (when and where - time and place) - a grid
- space: defined by four points, at least one in a different plane from the others; fluid, loose, multivalent, polyphonic (then/now/there/here/object/subject) - the grid bends

And in the margins, with Enbal.
- Did you see her today?
- No, bad?
- S-E-R.
- WTF?
- Dunno.
- How’s P?
- Blush.
- Haha!

Marbell: "So what do we mean by vernacular sources, and where do they fit? Ana?"

- Merdre!

Fugue # 12

The high school auditorium stage is dark. We hear the sound of footsteps, and the hollow bump of a nervous hand on the body of an acoustic guitar. There is no spotlight, but gradually there is light, from a movie projector, that covers him, wraps around him, and spreads across the flat gray scrim behind him. A city, maybe New York. Streets, cars, trucks, and buses. Storefronts, bars, fences, stairways up and down to apartments, a sidewalk. People: Young and old, coming and going, some talking, some laughing, some crying, holding hands, friends, passing, strangers. The camera moves back, giving us the impression that he is walking among them.

Gene wears jeans and a brown suede vest with fringe over a white tshirt with a blue collar. A bandana rolled and tied around a blond wig, and wire rimmed glasses. (The city looks older now - the cars, the people sliding by toward another time.) He doesn’t move, he takes a deep breath. A note, a chord. Chords. Words. Words of description, of absence, of loss, of love. And a hopeful return. If you see him, tell him not to worry. Tell him to come back home. Everything is fine.

His voice is quiet but strong. His guitar is simple and clear. After he is finished, he takes another deep breath and nods with a tired smile. The projection continues for a few moments, then dims, and it’s dark again. More footsteps. A cleared throat, a cough somewhere in the audience.

The applause is hesitant and polite, but gains momentum. I stand up and clap until my hands sting.

Fugue # 11

Let's think about this.

"I can't wait to see you."

Ok. That was true. He could say that and mean it. The problem was the delivery: Would she hear it the right way? He really couldn't wait, but he was more excited than impatient - excited in all the good, traditional ways, and in just as many idiosyncratic ways. Like she was the person to tell. She was the one who should know about everything. Then they could...you know., move forward together.

"I love waking up with you."

Again, true - or anyway, potentially true, and so harder to say at this point. He would love waking up with her, but he never had. They had just met, actually, and though things were going well - hanging out, a few dates, phone calls late at night - it was still pretty early. Was there another way to say the same thing? Not really.

"I brought you something."

Easy to say, but what? Flowers? Maybe a book? A mix cd? A picture?

Fugue # 10

An extended dialog in a parked car, nearly whispering over the radio and its static. Stories about classes, friends, enemies, parties, work - their subtext (the responsibilities of playing adult, the rural cliché of getting out, the future/our future) obscured like the lights of the neighborhood's houses, upstairs downstairs, glowing through the now-fogged windows. A luminescent braille, for the two of us, blind to what we were really talking about. Sharp elbows under her coat, sharp knees under her pants hugged against her chest; her head on my shoulder. I remember the texture the pattern the weave of the upholstery. Wait, we shifted again. I remember...

She's standing with her back to her house, her parents' house, two steps above me - her face in shadow, her head haloed by icicle lights hanging from the roof. I whisper, "Don't...don't go in, not now, not yet," and I grab a gloved hand that slides thru mine, away, into a warmer coat pocket. A smile, "I have to," she tips her chin down, waits, looks up, down at me, "tomorrow...I'll see you." She turns, I don't. I watch her door open and close, and I breathe out into my cupped hands. There is a sound, low and harmonic, like the hum of ice forming, the blunted hiss of steam rising from chimneys. And snow flakes, fish scales, falling in the cold night air. I'm not alone.

Fugue # 9

Marbell’s lecture notes were more like a script, with ellipses to mark opportunities for improvisation ("chances to riff"):

We are tired, as tired as our ideas. The old ways we thought about our lives (a race a dash from little b to BIG D) have become lifeless. We need new. I know, I’ve said this before (EXPAND HERE - hippy platitudes about moving forward together, opening our eyes/souls). We need to recreate ourselves...and everything we need to do that is already inside us.

(TIME: Dictionary/Thesaurus)

It is time for us to change our relationship with time. It is time for us to approach time differently - to embrace what it is, and what it means, and to accept what it isn’t and what it doesn’t.

(PAUSE - HOLD IT)

I challenge the idea of "past." The ideas of "present" and "future." Through memory we shift and move to the past, thru imagination, to the future. We never leave the present. We are everywhere, at once, in time.

(Bakhtin’s Chronotope plus...a place in time informed by our feelings for all places and all times.)

Fugue # 8

Her bedroom, upstairs and to the right, after school afternoon. Fall light filtering through white curtains and between them cutting a soft rectangle on the shag carpet across the floor onto her bedskirt. She's sitting on the bed, and I'm sitting on the floor, and we're not talking or looking up from our books and notebooks, and we're definitely not getting anything done.

She clears her throat, then I clear mine. She asks:
- Do you want to put on some music?
- Sure...like what?
- R.E.M.?
- Ok.

Life’s Rich Pageant. It’s 1985. Begin the Begin. She asks:
- So...do you understand this Whitman stuff?
- I think so. Song of Myself is just - he's cataloging his world, documenting it, creating his own living history, and ours.

- The lists tho...man.
- Yeah.

A pause. She asks:
- What do you think about this part?

She bites her pen, and I don't immediately understand the look she gives me, but the words help.

Fugue # 7

I brush and blow away the dust on a frame.

- Great-grandpa was handsome.

- Yes, he was.
- Ridiculously handsome.
- Some people thought he looked like Cary Grant.
- Ha, did you?
- Not really, no. I always told people, told myself, that he looked more like Gregory Peck, but that may have been wishful thinking, because I never cared so much for the Brits.

The whole box is filled with pictures of him and them. Some in frames, some in snapshot albums. We talk about him as we look through the attic.

- Do you miss him?
- Most days. I wouldn't trade away a moment of right now, but that doesn't mean that looking back doesn't make me sad about what's passed.

I reach for another box, flaps folded over each other. I open I and find postcards and a rusting tin can with a piece of newspaper rubberbanded over the open end, holes poked through it with a pencil. Inside, a handful of cicada shells. We called them locusts, and there were so many that summer.

Fugue # 6

- I couldn't find you at the store.

He'll tell me, laying on his bed on his belly, chin on his hand, looking into me.

- I couldn't find you at the store... and, and....I couldn't find you.

Were you looking?

- Yeah, but I couldn't find you.

Was that a dream?

- (sigh) Yeah.

We live everywhere at once. We drift freely from one time to another: From seeing him in the hospital for the first time, to the disconnect of his first birthday (the pictures, as usual, tell all our stories), to just last night. A three year-old boy (anxiety as real as quiet as mine) saying:

- Stay here, for just a couple of whiles.

When we wake up on the other side of your childhood, what will the world look like - thru eyes that have then seen so much and inside heads (yours, mine) that have then grown so old.

Fugue # 5

She nightlights as a rockstar. Striped shirt, silver skirt (white leather/going down), tights, boots.

Between songs, "We love you, Ana!" Mumble mumble (beneath bangs) yo? 2-3-4, buzz fuzz crash thud. Two chords, maybe three (accidentally), and a prehistoric beat. She seethes, while they surge, and hang on every clipped word - waiting all tension and release during the verses, exploding at the chorus.

She bares her teeth to smile more than snarl; she winks at least a much as she scowls. A vulnerability equal parts passive, aggressive, attractive, and seductive. Roy Trakin, something something, no-wave. She sings about the things we are deprived of. Love, happiness, humanity, feeling.

Outside, afterwards, packing up. Snow falling in big cartoon flakes, orange pink in the alley streetlight. She carries a guitar case to the van, and from the back of her denim jacket, an acrylic-painted black-and-white mouse grins, (lopsided, blunted, eyes-half-closed), and says "The Groovy Mice."

Fugue # 4

Angles, principles:

"I worry that I live at oblique angles to everyone, to everything. I don’t know what oblique means exactly, but in my head it means flat - flat in the way that a sunset is flat: the light pouring over the horizon, angling low across these fields, before reaching us here in town.

There are ways to...lemme start again. Sometimes you meet people or things head on. Your path to them is relatively perpendicular - they’re standing in your way, or you’re standing in theirs, and you’re moving toward them, or them toward you, and your paths, and your lives intersect. You can choose to move past that. Or you can choose, they can, to go the same way, to parallel yourselves - and instead of moving apart you’re moving forward together.

Then there’s everything else. Oblique angles - not right angles - where you glance off other people. They affect where you’ll go after that, but you still go - you move on, changed, no longer on the same path. That’s most of what we do. Or what I feel like I do. Have done.

There isn’t a right or wrong here, it’s just..."

He stops and stares at his hands. The sun isn’t ready to set yet. We sit on the front porch, late afternoon late summer sounds. Cars of teenagers cruising after school; younger kids shouting to each other, riding bikes, playing whatever.

Fugue # 3

Ana daylights as a model, nom du jour: Urania Damofle.

As in...
Stop, Urania!

- Turn, look, flash.

Go, Urania.
Move, Urania.

- Vibrate, pulse.

(Let the inside of you make the outside glow, she told you.)

Flash.

"What is this?" she points at the background, "The moon? C’mon, you guys, seriously?" She smiles. Even when she hassles you, your eyes widen just slightly to see more of her. "I’m not feeling very lunar today." A wink.

The skirt is right. She is so going down tonight.

Fugue # 2

- Hi, love the book. I’m a writing student, and I have a question about your process. My question is this: What have you found is the best breakdown of your time? Like, are you a better writer when you read more and write less, or when you write more and read less?
- When I read and write more, ha!

Zed’s phoney keep-your-distance laugh answered on cue by the audience’s own. The questions were rarely deeper than that. How do you write your women so real? Are you married? Do you see what I’m saying? If you were a tree...

Parried and thrusted, deflected and guffawed and pshawed away. Zed in his element, letting them in on his craft, revealing himself, or anyway the self he played at these signing things. Anecdoting, then lulling them with readings from a new printing of the apparently rediscovered Mt. Fuji.

Life is as hard as you make it (this is sounding familiar), and the future is as bright as you can imagine: quiet and far away moving closer, louder and faster, and then a crescendo, and the sky is filled with triumphant clouds - moving and majestic, laced in blue in purple in pink in orange, framed below by houses and trees, above by God. And stars, just beginning to appear in the westward falling night.

Later, after the You. Are. Fine. passage, there was time for a few more questions. A tap at the microphone halfway up the center aisle. The voice as familiar as his own, the spotlights blocking the face: "Are you really Neil Marbell?"