Over here, the national news always begins with the same brief sounds. A seagull’s shriek, a thunderclap, and six bars of music, slow blues for fog and dentist’s drill. The screen fades from what is said to be everybody’s favorite color (blue, and pale blue at that) as one or the other of the alternating news-anchors appears behind a fake desktop. Both the male and the female anchors are perfect specimens, so perfect and bland in fact, that life-sized holographs of them are rumored to be aboard a space capsule now at the invisibly farthest reach of the galaxy. Alien lifeforms, should they find and penetrate and access, will be in no doubt as to what a human being is all about.
The audience for the news sees behind the anchor’s rightward shoulder a parti-colored map of the continent. And behind the leftward shoulder, nothing much. If everyone on the island were to be watching the telecast at the same time, one third of the viewing audience would not fully or even remotely understand what it was they were meant to be afraid of. Or so a study, credited to, if not written by the Deputy Minister of Education, had recently warned.
And now for the weather. Mild, and dry. Or mild and humid. But only mildly so, never so humid as to cause one to bathe or shower more than once a day, or to feel one’s grip slipping clumsily or comically off buttons, keys, leashes. The nine-day forecast always promises more of the same and there is so little in the way of variation that from time to time the weather-girl (who also alternates but is always a girl) seeks out experts to sit beside her behind the fake desktop and discuss what life might be like with a different climate. What would the downtown of the capital look like under five feet of snow, for instance. In what ways would an earthquake impact the lives of the seashell-sellers, a tsunami with high-velocity winds interfere with the nude tourists on the featureless beach, known to locals as The Widow’s Walk?
In a bare room not her own a woman takes off her earrings. Another woman, eight hundred miles to the left and down, looks out a window of a café onto the butter and gold of the far-too-sunny street. Her sunglasses hide a black eye (or is it merely tears?)
For one of them (the woman unadorning herself in the rented room), her body is all that matters. At this moment and for some moments which will follow. She has made the decision to renounce nuance and be carefree, and so feels light and just a little cold.
The woman in the café, for all her motionlessness, suffers the nervous caress of a last minute doubt, conscious of the falling flag at the end of the curving sidewalk, of shadows surfing the mosaic and reflected in her dark glasses, the indistinct thrill of mind rising over body. Not an outright victory so much as a trial separation.
Unimpressed by memories of transient weather the host city brandishes its triumph. In a litter of mini-festivals that spread from their beginning in the square fronting the mosque (tip of the triangle, if seen, or imagined, from the air) and spilling downhill through narrow streets and public arcades and private patios and gardens to flatten out along the beachfront.
At some indefinable moment the refugee becomes an exile. A surrender from prolonged grief to permanent mourning. There are agencies devoted to smoothing that transition and entire bureaucracies charged with sieving the vengeful from the merely worn out.
Black as black is, as black as can be, as the script girl, falling to her knees. Lights-out bleeds and means: blackout. Car engines freshen themselves, wakening, as dawn moves round them like a lover, growing quiet to their moans’ increase. An Arabic word, shouted. The language coach taps her teeth, sticks her tongue out, shows the leading man diagrams of an angel’s larynx, marvels at the many sad things money can buy. A sun, blackening at the edges, leaping into the lap of milkblue sky. The script girl’s hangover has made a hash of the storyboard and the director, upon pedantic review, will declare an early lunch so as to be alone with his genius.
A beautiful translator of marginally restricted government data sits in the airport’s reception lounge, flirting lightly with the temp from the driving pool, who lingers over his beer because she’s asked him to. For no other reason than that smile at the toll-gate, when the token leapt from between his thumb and finger and spun its ricochet off her stockinged knee, and her then palming it, trapped with that smile.
His wife will be at her sister’s, last night’s pizza will be in the fridge, he’ll make faces at himself on the drive home, too superstitious to put anything into words. He’ll need to leave in a few minutes and the translator will thank him, wish him a good weekend, perhaps tease him with a token of her own, depending, all depending.
The flight is only sixteen minutes behind schedule, but knowing that she’s waiting so as to be witnessed, recorded as innocent, makes it seem much longer. She’ll stand up, she decides, when the first passengers reach the yellow spiral on the carpet.
On a day not far from now, a day of no anniversary, of no memory, of no significance at all, the part-time language student, full-time taxi driver will begin to change the names of every flower in his bitter garden. Here a bed of Pale Perhaps. Here a hanging basket filled with Scarlet Almost. And here, in a single tray of sandalwood and recycled foil, a golden sprig of If Only on the verge of bloom. Perhaps tonight he will force himself to dream in broken English. For once he will rein in his urge to point, choosing instead to use the ugly and inexact words of his hosts, to demand of the grocer’s pretty daughter a triangle of the too-yellow cheese, four grudgingly perfect apples, a something spontaneous from one of the higher shelves behind her. What he will not dream of is the expression on his wife’s face as she turned away from him back into the shadows of their house, her thin fingers tugging at the shoulder of their eldest son. Nor will he see his brother-in-law’s eyes, with that ping-pong of confusion and anger, when he said goodbye to him at the airport, three boarding passes in the envelope and no wife, no son, to accompany him.
For the sixth time this morning he tells his garden he had no choice but to go.
The piano student blushes, hangs back. Voices in the corridor echo the distance from lurch to sway and his heart beats faster as the instructor turns her gaze to the acoustic dilemma of his corner. He loves the way the false notes caress his nerves like a dream of spiders. He notes the way her nipples bump the thin material of her blouse, the way her white fingers draw her sweater in against the morning chill. His fingers creep a dewline not of his making.
The kids keep dancing, fed up with hearing about the old places, landscapes they wouldn’t care to fantasize themselves flirting in, wouldn’t look at twice if found in some tourist’s castaway brochure. Beneath the splayed wings of the Annunciation banners ghetto-girls and barrio-boys slow-dance through the heavy light, threat of happiness keeping them on their toes, sex and romance and getting high a form of reconnaissance in a new Old World, a mythology created from a bit of wire switching its clear music at the end of the alley.