One damn thing and then the next, and the talentless joy of linkage, by hook and by crook into something blue, gold, and riverlike, on without stop.
And then we came down, looking at everything twice, or three times,a lazy mist about and thick and steadfast, with occasional pips of blue neon sneaking through. Ladies drink free and has she got a sister? and many other such, some written down but mostly forgotten.
If mediocrity is the greatest sin than what a thriving den goes here about its hideous laughing job (fireplace or urinal? French doors or naughty tableau?) How dare you drink in the Lord’s dark house? And indeed we’d asked each other the same thing sometime lately or perhaps it was another era altogether. We were neither chased nor harried, though dogs were heard champing and leashes tinkled briefly along the stairs, but rather sluiced out on a spilling torrent of abuse, effective in its elitism and the lowering by an octave.
Motley in the breathless damp, reconstituting round the runaway statue of the Prime Mover, shuffling for oxygen in the crunch of icy grass we well knew to be green but here black as we looked and stumbled on it.
The first to recover, both tall and of sluttish good looks, declared herself a new Prime Mover and there was no dissuasion as she addressed the foreigner,
myself, somewhat abashed at the illegality and the fondness of it in his hosts. Brandy, rum, cigarettes accounted for. Speech, and quickly, as wind discovered our little knot and knocked like dolphins at our thugging shoulders, our childishly capped heads.
-He is no different, she began, berating me and likewise linking her arm in mine, he would have us be as all the others would have us be, militants or sex toys.
-And what, I said, and coughed, and cleared a clear jewel of sputum from my racking lungs, and what would you yourselves be?
-Us, ourselves? She mimicked then my gravity with a grin, why militants and sex toys, and no prying philosophicals to unsugar our candy, chook our chins with their rational follies. Defend yourself.
Bics and fugazi Ronsons flared like winter fireflies, bottles lifted to click on metal jacket buttons, frozen ears warming and pricked.
-Are we (the defense begun, a glittery Straw Man stuffed with crystal) so transparent in our desire for a good that brings us, as though sheer
and unexpected luck, a benefit, a profit, a hoarding up of mini-crowns in heaven? Be like us so that we no longer need fear you. Where’s the harm in that?
A wind blews through the park, unsettled the ice that caged shrubs and benches, lilted among the groaning of the upper branches, lost from sight in upper darkness. That perpetual nativist quiz, be it theirs in this bone-chilled now or mine, at home, in some warmer past or future, had it any motive other than diminishment of the one who comes up empty of answers? No courage even in a risky guess, any good intentions or slop-wristed stab at humor parried with derision, or silence masking derision.
Spoiling for a fight, laid bare beneath a loser’s banner.
-Tell me (far from being done, my arm catching her passion animate) further tales of heroic woe, rub my face in my own ignorance by making something up right on the spot. Contradict my contradictions, disprove my skepticism with a show of deeper cynicism still, argue my black into a sea of white, fetch and show me antidotes set just beyond my reach. I will insult back and mock your slipshod rearrangement of my language, and by dawn’s blue pain we’ll call our congregation a faculty of friends, allied in the face of our lords and masters, those better monsters who dine high up behind frosted windows and claim to speak and breathe for us, whose tears could quench dry provinces of thirst, had they the means of being shed.
I looked around then, as if to verify my smile in the wounded eyes of the others.
Had apprehension tipped its vulnerable bias? Here at my frail worst, and held in complicated balance by luck, and lust, and the cringing ooze of a metaphor’s maggoty embryo. What I saw as obscene, she saw as obsolete, and the river that ran between us curdled its majesty, the same view
from either bank.
The moon dipped as though struck and snow scattered low across the ground.
The metaphor came into shape and caved away and I gathered my wits into a single thought: the apparent eternity of the cold.
-Oh God, someone said, can’t we please go inside somewhere.
A bar beckoned to us from its shell of antiquated darkness.
Half gymnasium, half defunct disco, but above all, darkness.
A happy band of parasites, invited in to feast upon our host, its ancient skeleton as insubstantial as light projected through a rood of black silk, a run of runes for fracture-pattern, from workers’ paradise backwards into snowbound empire.
A lesson was already underway, perhaps nearing completion in the dining hall, the walls lined with great blue blankets and idle strips of red cloth added for color, pretty bonnet on a placid pig. The tables nearest the floor-wide, story-tall windows were unoccupied, body warmth and smoke and noise all grouped in a scythe that ran the length of the bar, a village’s decent distance from the neighborhood of wolves.
The old man into whose domain we had figured, fingered his latest talisman, putting the youngest supplicant through her paces.
-Now walk to the pillar and turn around. Pick up the cup and bring the (is it empty) cup to me. Put it down. No, don’t look at me, nor at them, they haven’t any answers.
A whisper traded long enough to mount confusion.
My companion, in turn, whispered into my ear:
-He represents only a part of the world we will destroy. For now he serves our purpose.
The old wolf looked at them (and us) and through them, offering his many gifts in mime, a stranger’s gestures, garnished with tacit understanding. Bring forth a thousand lesser beings, let them haggle for dominion, drawing and quartering till prophecy ceases to bewilder or astound, till conjuring sounds like last month’s weather.
Redirect me, I fear I stand accused.
The train station is over there, its silhouette commands the skyline like a hound sleeping lightly.
The guards parade like clockwork, sleek and oiled in their phallic cult, eyes blank with readiness for the scenarios outlined in pamphlets 9 thru 12, the purple and green ones, the pretty ones, the ones left out for inexpensive girlfriends to marvel at, thrilling to a future that extends only as far as midnight.
The Lost-and-Found takes up a corner of the basement, and furs and umbrellas and rings and cigarette cases and eye-glasses and combs and gloves and paperbacks and traveler’s laminated street-maps and bus tokens and carved boxes filled with earth and scarves and cushions and cellophaned pills and passports and nail-clippers and crayons and word puzzles and harmonicas and lipsticks and holy cards and compacts and switchblades and address books and objects the owner might know the use of and all of these on rusted metal shelving causing a headache to the untrained visitor but following a system one could quite easily master in a single afternoon, given patience and freedom from distraction.
The verbal walking tour begs any number of questions, not least of which is the nature of its performance. Threat? Provocation? The trusty time-kill of chatter? See, I know more about what you’ve blindly been doing for the past hours and days and weeks than you can ever hope to appreciate. Me, however. Appreciate me. I am as much a fount of knowledge as of nothing. And one is often disguised as the other anyway.
In the collision of café lights the sluttish beauty forces me to look and my admiration trips over itself and chinks open a window of hope. I don’t mind being taken advantage of although there is an itch that credits my every move. The desire for the wink and nudge of I-know-you-know-I-know-you-know. My tongue tries on a language two sizes too small, I burst the seams on this exotic clause, tenses overlain like a transvestite in full nakedness. I’d almost forgotten and pine for a heartbeat and no more.
Somewhere near the top of my list of conversation-stoppers, skimming the chamber on its heavy roll. She says One of the guards was almost my brother, and I let her continue while I puzzle for a substitute word that will make sense of that.
The impossible gets short shrift in snow country.
As though she were reading my mind, you’re not turning into one of those, are you? And indeed I’m not, hardly, far from it. I do however preen for the falling detail as much as the broad stroke, a cruel sort of militaristic alienation into which she, sex-eyed and gambling the precious lily against the pink pound, will eventually intrude. Or is it merely appear? What exactly are their helmets made of, these strutting pulse-pounders, these slit-eyed blue-black phalluses, so high on honor and skint on scruples? In what order do they shed? Are boots kept on in stomping, straining scandal? Was there ever even a ghost of privacy or more likely were her dealings with them en masse?
She blows the froth from her cup, impounds my lighter to her edge of the circular table, pauses so I can pause with her, imagining an intimacy less arctic, footnoted in Latin like a clipping getaway horse.
I count the bubbles spittled on her snowwhite teeth, resist the liberation of my softly bouncing heart, like the sag of satisfaction on an attic mattress,
hang upon the terms of my entrapment, make a bet with myself that I’ll not recoup the loss she’s spreading neat and slim for me to enter.
But I’ve misread her tack and find myself peering at a coral polyhedron.
She tells me the old man was a great lover in his youth and fantastically improved by middle-age, although those nights were legend and past at the time of their own acquaintance. I relax but she isn’t through and spells it out, sketches the broad and the byte, a paragraph of much delicate thrusting, accompanied by conducive gasping and the apologies afterwards which made her almost grateful, happy in the honor of a notch.
Three sips away from draining my glass and beginning my deployment of her up and out of there and I stop, locate my pride and venture This fabulous snowman, has he got a name?
-His name is Bela (tonguetip over teeth) Dzurduj.
-Bela? Dzurduj? Now that’s a ridiculous name.
And I repeat this at intervals until she nods and laughs and clicks the cage shut.