After the Fire
It all stinks. The whole world. From Tupperwear to tangerines to teabags. Yesterday I caught a whiff of smoke in the wine-vinegar, at the fish counter in Adams’, and on the pen and paper for keeping the whist scores. This morning it was in the dawn air by the river. A thin, oleaginous film, bitter as the cud, smeared across the frazzled plain of the psyche. I run a finger along each seam of memory and it comes away black. Frank drove two hours from Jersey to poke about in the shards. He wore blue, latex gloves and asked if I’d made any enemies. “Bad business deals? Jealous boyfriends?” I’m second guessing everything, looking both ways, not making rights on reds; the safety net over the chasm (the one I used to swan-dive into from the trapeze) turns out to be shot full of holes. I can see through its weave into the abyss. And any accident that manages not to happen will, with a tug on the steering-wheel, turn into one that does. On peaks above valleys of desolation I squat like a sherpa making margaritas and curry. Because a bit of despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner.
I wake up to things looking pretty much the same. Seems I’m not the glue that sticks the cosmos together after all. Why had I believed this attenuated gesture of rebellion – thumbing my nose at the daily grind – would have a tectonic effect upon the lives of nations? As if I was some kind of anointed seer, sent into the wilderness in search of answers, coming back with tits to tell everybody what the deal is? So how come I have nothing to say? Sure, the hamster-wheel was a bummer, but at least it went round and round. Lurking at the twitching core of this piss-soaked bolus, nibbling seeds and shitting, is an exercise in petulance garnished with hubris. A rehearsal for death. Already exhausted, I shuffle into the kitchen to undertake the gerontic liturgy of the teapot. Shouldering the everyday burden of myself. A heavy yoke.
Later, traipsing around the blackened shell with kindly Matt, the adjuster from Albany, he’s pointing out things that ought to be of value, but aren’t. If you found this whole cacophony of jumble in the lowliest Salvation Army in Oneonta, you wouldn’t break stride for a single piece. Just walk on by. Boiled free of the imaginary glue that stuck it all together, huddled families of irredeemable junk peer back at me from dark shelves, untenanted corners, naïve acolytes seeking an oracle to remind them why they are there. It’s not sad. If anything, it’s pathetic. And then curiously liberating. That a life can be parsed through this absurd accumulation of detritus. Record players, stoneware bowls, knobs and gadgets, framed photographs by the toilet, heaped monographs, unopened first editions. Stuff we grip with white knuckles, watch over like a spy. Stockpiled fetishes, shrunken heads, darts tipped with curare, specious stuff that tries – and fails – to confirm we’ve been alive. Accrued to ward off the voodoo suspicion that it all adds up to nothing. Maybe everybody, once, should walk through fire. If only to witness the addled temerity of vanity; to say, “I don’t want any of this,” then go for a cocktail with a friend.
Booze and fried chicken with Rebekah in the park in the snow, its residue scrawled across the day like litter. For two days I’d eaten nothing, intensifying the cannula of fear that oozes invisibly into the bloodstream, surging in unexpected waves upon breakwaters of unguarded harbours. Food, I now realise, is gently meted out consolation for life’s vagaries. Silence. The cat-tongue lap of time and tide. These cultivate the impression of an idle galleon, a painted ship upon a painted ocean. Why struggle? The sea is wide, where would you swim to? Better that you retire to your cabin in steerage, sleep it off. Yesterday we pulled into port to busy natives riding bicycles, barking at each other like baboons. Today, at sea again, languor has me draped along the bar, sozzled lips pressed to some Princess’s hand. Long sigh. “Wake me when we get there,” I murmur, though I suspect I will be burned upon the beach like Shelley.
Remember all the stuff you had? The shelves of unread books nobody else could read because you were afraid you wouldn’t get them back? The guitar you wouldn’t lend because it was too valuable? The split-cane rods, the wine, unopened, because really, what visitor was worth a hundred bucks? All the things that went untouched for fear somebody else’s touch might spoil them. Hoards of useful stuff made useless by your patronage, castrated simply by being owned by you. As if you thought possession could be deployed like bait, to keep your threadbare metaphysics warm, while you titrated magnanimity out in carefully measured doses. Whereas actually it did the opposite; cluttered intimacy with avarice, soured trust, turned love into a marketplace. You smiled, then kept close watch upon your guest. Because anything that was yours was, by definition, not his. Even your wife. No wonder she always looked like she kind of loathed you.
And now, already life is creeping back, like an abuser in his “look, I brought you flowers,” phase. And with it, the swirling, kaleidoscopic taxonomy of what we think we want and don’t want, the voodoo-lily scent of stuff that quietly died and didn’t tell us. Mood, inevitably, invents landscape, and that thing we were doing – habit for a while – was actually a choice, and had run its course without us really noticing. But there was sweetness to it, and already I feel nostalgia for a finer time muddling the corners of memory like ectoplasm. Thanks to you, from Bushwick to Dorsoduro, Yorkshire to the Catskills, and to a palpable kindness born of adversity.
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