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?"