Fugue # 60

I can’t think about anything else. Do you think about me like this? I can’t imagine.

I close my eyes, and focus on what I can remember. And I breathe, and I try to see you (my brain, a cd skipping - your eyes and your eyes and your eyes). And I say your name to you: Emily. I say it loud inside my head, and then say hi - hoping you’ll hear me, think of me. And call. Or do something, to let me know you hear me.

A note in study hall, a hand in my hand, a wink, something. Something anything that will take away the uncertainty, remove the doubt, tell me what to do.

Emily.
Hi.
Tell me what to do.

The sound of bare feet in the hall pulls me back home.

- What is it, Paulie?
- Nothing. I can’t sleep.
- Do you want to stay here and listen to music while I study?
- Yeah, is that ok?
- It’s ok. If you’re quiet.
- I promise.

My little brother isn’t so little any more. He crawls into my bed, lays on his back, and looks at me.

- Gene? Is everything ok?

" Yeah," I smile, "Shhhhh...I need to think."

Fugue # 59

There’s a hopeful, early-Donner-Party sense to a line like this (from Gene’s baby book):

"Don and I have been married for one year, and I’m expecting."

Paul reads on, aloud.

"The baby is coming next month. I’m excited but nervous! Don has been great. He rubs my sore back and my swollen feet. He even gets me ice cream and pickles when I get cravings! The nursery is set up. We painted it white with yellow trim, so it will look nice for either a boy or a girl."

- Too good to be true, Mom.
- What?
- You were like, right out of a movie from the ‘50s.
- Try ‘60s. I’m not that old, Paul.

She looks down to wipe her hands on her apron, and looks back up at him, wistful.

- What can I say? That’s how I felt. Like the whole world was an open book in front of me. I was in love with your father, and every day I loved the baby more than I thought I ever even could. I’d get butterflies just thinking about the day I’d get to meet him. Still do, when I think about it.
- Was it...
- No. It was terrible. Hard and long. And Gene was so sick for weeks. But then he was fine. And we started building our family.

Fugue # 58

Gene sits on top of the pickup roof, legs crossed, eating popcorn out of a brown paper grocery bag wrinkled and now stained with butter. His friend sits next to him, and they look toward the old fairgrounds, the grain elevators rising behind the bleachers - waiting, talking, joking like 10 year old boys.

In front of the truck: Paul. He doesn’t know what’s coming. He’s potty training and squirming in his mother’s arms, trying to get away from her and her lawn chair and back to (or on) the truck with the big boys.

- Paul, stop.
- No no no, I wanna go.

A tester - the white circle boom, a visual representation of pure sound. Paul quiets himself, crawls back into her lap.

- Soon, mama?
- Soon, baby.

Night has fallen, it’s cool. Paul looks past his mother’s face, over her shoulder. To the truck, to Gene, who smiles and waves: not teasing, not not teasing, saying in a gesture, "I’m where I should be, and so are you."

Paul waves and smiles back. He turns around as the fireworks start, and his eyes widen with the first flash.

Fugue # 57

Somehow (blame Ana, actually, for asking, "Did you read that review of the Madonna concert last night? I didn’t know leather could wear leather!") they end up on the Queen of Pop.

Paul doesn’t have much. He doesn’t mind Madge, but he also doesn’t place any cultural significance on her. She’s a singer, a performer, now a package: a commodification of hauteur and an out-moded sense of glamour (notice the "u").

Ana has more, beginning with a dismissive hand wave and a nasal-y eh.

"You weren’t a girl."

She describes a childhood informed by the loss of innocence that accompanied Madonna’s all-too-visible metamorphosis from ratty-natty Eurotrash club urchin (attitude? you want attitude? I’ll spraypaint my attitude all over your neo-neo-classical plaster apartment, while you take pictures!) to half-dressed gondola passenger (touched for the very first time), to Marilyn wannabe, bleating about living in the material world.

To bleach-blonde mermaid, to peep-show gal, to raven-haired defiler. To bullety boobs, and esses and emms to...what about Music? Makes the bourgoisie wear sequins again. And western wear. Bling.

Fugue # 56

The city’s history lies no deeper than the litter blowing down its sidewalks into forgotten corners of alleys, against curbs, into doorways. No deeper than yesterday’s concrete. Memories get torn down, repaved, replaced, by newer better ones.

Layer after layer, think: Do skyscraper stories each tell a new story? Does each elevator floor down from the collective roof of the city bring us closer to the past?

No, Zed, no. It doesn’t work that way. You should know that by now. The foundation and the glass it supports are part of the same building. They share the same address.

We don’t need to get closer. We’re already there. A Proustian nod, "The only true voyage of discovery is not to go to new places, but to have other eyes."

Lower Manhattan. They’ve taken away the crumbled stone, the twisted metal, the lives. And they’re building new shadows - a different shape, but the same shade.

Fugue # 55

- I’m bored and angry all the time.
- Yeah, I know.
- No, I mean really angry.

Paul takes the straw out of his mouth and looks at Gene.

- Why?
- You need to ask?
- I mean, I know you’re unhappy about some things - about Emily - but I don’t think you need to be angry.
- I guess you don’t understand love, then, Paul.
- Guess not.
- Right. It doesn’t matter. Can’t change anything right now, so why talk about it.

Gene sits up to look at an anthill.

- I haven’t destroyed myself over her yet. At least there’s that.

Silence again. They both sit now, backs against the haystack, Gene’s knees bent, Paul’s legs folded under him. The shadows lengthen as the sun falls.

- We’re all so strange. Look at Dad. (Anybody’s dad.) Look at the life he’s led - from the side or from a distance. The empty life he’s led. And you think, what could be better? You eat, drink, act properly, and then what?
- I don’t think Dad’s life has been empty, Gene. I don’t think he thinks it has anyway.

Fugue # 54

(You left her, Gene. You did.)

Her smile is different: wiser, but lonelier.

- Paulie?
- Emily?
- Hi...
- Wow.

He’s buying beer, she’s buying groceries. It’s a small world right now. They’re smiling, happy to see each other, at least until the the awkwardness of years apart reaches and overtakes them.

- So, I don’t know what to say.
- Neither do I.
- How are you? Where have you been?
- New York. New York City, actually.
- New York?
- Yeah, it’s weird...

Her eyes well up. It was bound to happen. She says, " Paul, I’m so sorry." He says, "I am, too." And they hug each other, tightly, holding up the line behind them.

(You left her. And I still don’t know why. Did you know what was coming?)

Fugue # 53

Gene lets the silence surround them, like the day’s heat. He lays back.

- D’you know what?
- No, what?
- Mom and Dad have a pretty good life. Dad stays busy with work, and Mom, too. She’s always doing something - enough that she says she doesn’t have time to think.
- Unlike you...

Paul pulls a straw from the haystack, holds it absently, rolls it between his fingers, puts it in his mouth. Gene watches Paul, turns away and exhales.

- Unlike me. Who lays next to this one haystack, in the middle of this field of haystacks. In the middle of all these other fields of haystacks. Miles and miles of fields and haystacks. Do you see?

He gestures across the landscape, raises his eyebrows, then lowers them into a half-scowl and continues.

- I’m pretty insignificant. And here I am. Thinking about that. Thinking, because I have nothing else to do.
- But everybody’s like that. Everybody feels that way. I do.
- Do Mom and Dad?
- Maybe. I don’t know what they feel or think. And neither do you.
- Yeah? Let me tell you: They don’t think. If they did, you’d know. Something would show, or change.

Fugue # 52

You would do anything for her. You would do anything to get her to love you. More than she already does, if she even does.

Of course, she does, and you know that. But you don’t want to think about it. You want to keep doing what you’ve been doing. It has worked, it is working.

On your desk, just to the left of your pre-cal book, propped against the lamp, where it’s a pleasant but near-constant distraction: her school picture. And to the right at arm’s length: a framed picture from a party last year. She’s more interesting than homework. You reach for it for a closer look.

The first thing you notice is her hair - blonde, mostly, and fine and shining like it’s made of light. Threads of golden light, paler on top, where it has been bleached by the sun all summer. It’s straight, but it’s all over - pulled off her forehead in a side part by unseen barettes, falling over her ears as if combed forward to frame her face.

That face. The flash of the camera washes it flat, and fair. The round cheeks, the small chin you’ve come to know so well, the nose. But it’s her eyes that hold your eyes: lucid and lined, and shadowed by dark dark lashes.

You miss her just looking at her. Emily.

Fugue # 51

The sun has gone down enough in the afternoon that the haystacks begin to cast shadows, which stretch sharp round edges toward town. A thin layer of lacy clouds hangs near the horizon, and everything is weekend quiet.

They lay in the shade, on armfuls of hay pulled from the stacks. It’s a brother moment, a hands behind the head, stare at the sky, and talk moment. Gene goes first. He rises onto his elbows, nods toward a nearby stand of trees, toward one tree.

- You know that tree over there?
- The one where the old barn used to be?
- Yeah, that one. It reminds me of when we were little. I was sure that the tree, and the foundation of the barn, were magic - like they had some sort of power.
- What power?
- I dunno. Power. I could go there and feel it. An energy or something.
- Were you scared?
- Never. And I could go there again and again without getting bored.
- Do you feel it still?
- No. I’ve grown up.

(pause)

Now Paul, laying down:

- Were Mom and Dad strict when you were young, when I was a baby? Do you remember back that far?
- They weren’t strict. With me, or with you.
- Do you love them?
- I do.
- Me, too.