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 "So perhaps lust is the ticket,"
I say, like I do all of the time but now walking along the Fenway this noon,
when the light is rose on the inlet ice. It has been snowing, and it's going
to snow. There aren't any cedars around, only shit-fruited ginkos, so I
go across the field, heading for that immense monolith known to us mortals
as the Hancock Building.
Lisa'll tell you it's a signal-- a replication of galactic
lighthouses for wandering cosmonauts. She read about it in The Herald: "New
Scraper Beacon for Betelguessers!" I'm not lying, I saw the headlines
myself: "Betel's Beam Blocked by Barnes!" The Herald's like that,
I told her-- it's always Japs and Nics. Line the birdcage with it.
"You gotta read this, what if they come," she
says, "You'd never find your ticket... " and she goes off to feed
the jasmines.
"It's a laminated plastic entry card," I say
out loud as if to her, as my foot breaks through the snow crust over the
inlet branch I thought was shorter. The card must look like that little
piece of ice floating there, rectangular in a few feet of water-- cool,
elegant, simple. I need it to get into the replica of that monolith on some
distant shore. I constantly wonder, as now, how I'll find it: what strange
trace will I be pursuing when I suddenly pause, turn to the south, and see
it-- on the careless traveler's roadside altar.
"Putain de merde," the macaw screams as
she flaps from my shoulder, getting an aerial view of the frigid situation.
"Quelle saloperie." I always say that when I fall through
the ice-- she's learning the phrases of all my recurring situations. When
I told the committee I wanted a mockingbird, they remarked that such were
reserved for deep south poets. The chairman whispered to me, "You're
from a tropical port on a placid western sea: take the macaw before they
give you a gooney bird." I took it. It wasn't the bird I needed but
I took it, to my daily regret. I knew even then what a macaw meant; back
home, I'd be out in the greenhouse tending the cattleyas, when I'd hear
the screech wafting in on the onshore breeze. Then it was out of the greenhouse,
into the foxglove bed, to watch the flash of crimson and sulfur squawk over
on its way to pillage some old woman's fig tree. Even at two hundred feet,
it was loud. So when I installed her in my fourth floor walk-up on Bay State
Road, across the street from where an old man had declined, living off his
checks from The Iceman Cometh, the din was nearly insupportable.
A hyacinth macaw with a five foot wingspan can be heard at a range of two
miles. Whenever it snows outside, her screeching bounces around the enclosing
walls, and then she repeats my predictable assessments of the weather patterns.
Legend has it that Martha Graham nourished
for years, perhaps still nourishes, a rare maurandia from the Yucatan in
her summer cottage outside Providence.
I grab a broken branch and haul myself back up onto the
ice and crawl to the now obvious shoreline. It starts snowing again; the
crystals stick to my wet clothes, to my hair and beard. In a few minutes,
I'm a short, fat, abominable ice creature, developing a three-inch crust,
with a hyacinth bird on my shoulder. "I gotta head back south and soon,"
she says, "where this crusty armor is not habitual." It breaks
at my knees and hips, and I walk away from the fens and the inlet, heading
towards the tower and Beacon Hill.
Lisa lives there, halfway up the hill, in an old brick
apartment with gargantuan proportions and very little light. It's a great
place for a macaw, but dancers don't get birds or animals, or even fish;
they're assigned various kinds of flowering vines. Legend has it that Martha
Graham nourished for years, perhaps still nourishes, a rare maurandia from
the Yucatan in her summer cottage outside Providence. Lisa has bouganvillas
and jasmines; she hasn't decided whether to stick to ballet or cleave to
modern.
I pause a moment in front of her old teak door and scrape
some of the snow off my face. Jessica shakes off her wings, and I flail
at the lit-up doorbell, like a polar bear pawing at the red light of a lost
oceanographer's homing beacon. The lit up name reads "El-kaiim":
Lisa's father was from Carthage. Lisa's mother is a local, but a few years
ago she left the apartment to her daughter and moved to Tahiti, where she
wouldn't have to be constantly tending her plumerias.
She does a few last pirouettes, unwraps
her skirt, and sits down next to me, naked but for her hammered gold chains.
Extracting a bit of kif from a turquoise box, she rolls it up, hands it
to me, and I light it from a candle flame.
The heavy door opens, and I enter the tropical environment.
The crust starts melting all over the Persian carpet; I put Jesse on one
of the bouganvillas, crack the armor, and throw my encrusted attire into
the irregular basin Lisa devised last December.
"You're exceptionally lovely today," Jesse says.
"I adore that skirt."
Lisa leads me away from the vestibule directly into her
chambers. I push aside the beads that guard her entryway and recline on
a few of the tufted satin pillows she's arranged. She lights the benjamin
and tells me she's almost done with her bar repetitions: I can watch and
warm up while she finishes. I'm already sweating from her greenhouse effect,
and her leglifts just make it worse. She does a few last pirouettes, unwraps
her skirt, and sits down next to me, naked but for her hammered gold chains.
Extracting a bit of kif from a turquoise box, she rolls it up, hands it
to me, and I light it from a candle flame.
We retake consciousness of the exterior world at dusk.
The northern sunset's arctic glow permeates the descending and drifting
ice with its deep rose light. This localized event terrorizes Jesse each
evening, and her screeches render the pleasure of further languid repose
implausible. Incense burns on the widely scattered pillows are the only
remaining indications of passionate energy. Lisa wraps several layers of
cloth around her body, foots it to the powder room, returns.
"I totally want a cheeseburger," she says, and
it is never sound policy to neglect her desires. My used Swedish army guardsman's
coat is damp but donnable. Jesse reluctantly flaps to my shoulder, and it's
back out into the storm, down the packed Beacon Street sidewalks, escorting
her on her constant search for the tastiest possible Whopper.
The fluorescent plastic benches and realistic lighting
are bad enough on a southwestern shore, but here the scene is unbearable.
I mention skipping the evening's entertainment and suggest we take the B
line to the reception. She makes reference to a previously unscheduled rendez-vous
with an implausibly female dancing comrade, whose purpose it is to scrape
a bit of rust off their tarnished pas de deux. So it's back out into
the storm, bearing the bird and my abhorrence of the long darknesses of
the solitary climate, walking towards the metro, occasionally casting a
casual glance for some hint of the white plastic entry card, which may,
after all, be hidden in the filthy piles of snowplowed ice.
The metro is quiet in its underground darkness. Neither
the rodents of the office workers nor the goldfish of their managers can
panic much without at least a hint of exterior light. But the trolley rises
to street level at Kenmore Square, and the rabbits of the photocopiers and
small does of secretaries begin thumping and clattering up and down the
narrow aisles. A few run out each time the B line stops, and after a while,
I ride alone in the rear car towards the frozen lake, terminus of Brookline.
Galway's bear has been lapping up vast
amounts of Coors since dusk. Seamus's wolf prefers Bushmill's, of course,
and when it's reached its tolerance level, as now, it howls indecipherably
at the chandelier, habitually mistaking it for the moon.
The trolley's lights fade as it stops. Thick snow blows
in through the open doors. The sidewalk looks like a ski slope before the
ice tractors pass: crusted moguls cast long shadows from the low streetlights.
At the lake's western corner, I leave the sidewalk and cut along the bank
towards the Jesuit stadium. There are evident tracks of bears and wolves,
and an occasional wolverine; I deduce that all the honored guests have preceded
me. At the fourth leafless oak, I turn left, clamber over the fence, and
cross the tree-flanked street towards the promised warmth of a two-story
illuminated brownstone.
Rosanna's husband examines me through the peephole then
deigns to let me in. His house is already a complex menagerie of familiars,
and tonight they are displaying something far from their best possible behavior.
Galway's bear has been lapping up vast amounts of Coors since dusk. Seamus's
wolf prefers Bushmill's, of course, and when it's reached its tolerance
level, as now, it howls indecipherably at the chandelier, habitually mistaking
it for the moon. Derek's wolverine doesn't drink, doesn't need to, but it's
wild as a dingo and more amusing than a Tasmanian devil, even when sober.
The mongoose of an imported professor acquired in the colonies gazes hungrily
at the young ermine of a giggly graduate student.
Most of the evening is taken up by the cackles, roars and
bon mots. The hostess glides from post to post, scratching fur or
smoothing feathers, calming snakes and herding rabbits. Jesse perches on
the fireplace grate, chatting up her red-headed amazon parrot. The delightful
chaos endures and complicates; associate professors hold impromptu student
conferences in the upstairs chambers. But the bear has grown annoyed and
unruly, and the wolverine looks a bit too playful, even for moonlight.
She frantically tries to grab some air,
to gain a little altitude; she only needs another foot or two to clear the
unearthly orange machine, but her feathertips are stuck together now, and
she plummets into the blade, falls to the ground beneath it, and is crushed
into the four-inch layer of ice that covers the cobblestone street.
The wolf trots unsteadily past the bristled fur grizzly.
Seizing his best occasion so far, the wolverine slinks down and playfully
nips the ornery bear's undefended end. He goes after the wolf, inducing
a spontaneous leap towards an unpremeditated landing. It may be said that
the picture window (which gives out on the frozen lake) blocked his flightpath,
but this is inaccurate, as it proves no barrier to his trajectory. Most
of the other animals rush through the reach, following the two disputants,
as the heavy snowflurries rush in. I watch Jesse watching them, watch her
leap off the grate and head out through the immense gap, terrified, into
the downdraft storm.
I follow her out through the breach, keeping my eyes on
her. Her left wing instantly ices up. She can't gain any altitude, and she
begins describing a long, slow left-hand curve: nearly straight for the
first few beats, unavoidably veering as she passes the first line of trunks
and moves out over the street. She squawks like a cockatiel during an earthquake,
coughs and sputters like a canary in a coal gas mineshaft. The circle tightens
as her wingbeats breed more ice: I can see it layering on her flight feathers,
lit up by the headlamps of an approaching snowplow. She frantically tries
to grab some air, to gain a little altitude; she only needs another foot
or two to clear the unearthly orange machine, but her feathertips are stuck
together now, and she plummets into the blade, falls to the ground beneath
it, and is crushed into the four-inch layer of ice that covers the cobblestone
street.
I follow her out through the breach, still keeping my eyes
on her. Like a 747 taking off with skyscrapers at the runway's end, she
gathers a burst of speed and pulls up sharply, barely clearing the first
row of towering limbs. A low level headwind coming off the lake slows her;
she loses altitude and scrapes the branches of the second row, leaving a
few hyacinth feathers to drift down with the illuminated snow, becoming
no more than a trace of painful squawks as she heads out over the lake.
I dodge the snowplow and clamber back over the fence. As I run across the
field, I can see the headlights of the ice fishermen's trucks near the lake's
center-- her screeching is heading right for them. I can't see any of their
small baitflags in this light, but I can see their cardtable lit up by their
trucks; all their holes must be cut and baited, and now they've nothing
to do but play poker and wait with their labradors for the dawn to send
them baggable flights of snowgeese. I run a little farther and fall into
a chainsawed hole. I try to keep my head above the water, try to hear the
receding screech... what I do hear is the unmistakable sound of a twelve-gauge
being pumped. The report is muffled by the snow but is still significant.
As she falls, she comes into the domain of the headlights: I can see her,
still flapping, in a last chance power dive towards the ice. Mimicking me
to the end, she falls into one of the fishing holes, struggles a moment,
then merely floats. The bleedin' Yankee walks over, picks up her limp corpse.
"Done bagged me a bluebird!" he says, as the dogs rejoice.
She's up to flight speed and climbing over the trees. She
makes a quick right turn and heads due south. The last I see of her is her
long pointed tail providing tentative balance in the crosswind. The snowplow's
roar covers her screeching. When it's gone past, there is only silence and
a cold glow out on the lake. The other guests gather their beasts and bid
goodnight, leaving in pairs (or, rather, foursomes). I stand in the street
with the snow falling around me, gazing south. "I can't blame her,"
I have to say to myself. "I wish I could head back to the tropics right
now." Thinking she might return, I recline in the snow and wait.
The hunters' guns, growing more and more legal with the
approaching dawn, do some serious damage to the concentric patterns of the
flights of snowgeese, waking me. The surrounding landscape bears no hint
of blue, so I redescend afoot to the Back Bay and collapse in my now silent
flat. Her squawking had been the curse of my tranquility and the salt poured
on my opened nerves; now I miss it, long for it. For several days I return,
find nothing. I stop going out, start screening my calls. Lisa's first messages
are anxious, then travel through anger to incomprehension, and end by attempting
a lighter tone. I return none of them. Instead, I go walking along the Charles
at dawn and dusk, always on the left bank, where Jesse loved to be promenaded.
"So perhaps loss is the ticket," I say to myself,
like I do all the time but now with a hesitant sense of intimate familiarity.
The ice blue building towers distantly as I walk along to her favorite spot,
a small bridge with a view of the Charles and a burning dome on the opposite
bank. A few lost or injured mallards expect my visit. The Arctic wind came
through after the storm, rolling a thick frozen crust over every available
surface, so the ducks huddle together on the ice beneath the bridge. I bounce
a handful of corn down to them and let my eye follow the riverbank towards
the east, let it gaze out past the bridge to the sea.
I throw them another handful of corn, watch it skitter
across the ice. I watch a small trail of smoke follow the wind from the
dome on the opposite shore. Then I hear a distant squawk of recognition
somewhere above and behind me. A blue streak is plunging down as if from
the Hancock Tower, bearing something white in its mouth. And now Jesse hovers
above me, beating her immense beautiful wings, dropping a piece of mangled
plastic from her beak, screaming and squawking and repeating my tired phrases
in an ecstatic succession. I offer her my arm for a perch, let her bite
my nose and scream all she wants. The entry card's finally at my feet, but
ruined: gnawed and chewed and worthless. Why should I care? All that seems
now passing vanity. Maybe Lisa'll go south with us, as soon as the roads
thaw out-- and we can build greenhouses together and aviaries on some distant
southern shore, never worrying about drunken bears or northeasters or little
white pieces of mangled plastic.
Circuit Traces would love to hear what you think
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