Against Gravity

By Madison A. Kirby

MADISON

God created His world in seven days; I destroyed mine in six.

Day One

I saw her sitting on the bench of the bus stop, under the merciless sun of May, next to the dark woman with a bundle, and I desired her. I saw her, small and lost and orphaned in this cruel city, and I thought, Ah, if I could only lay her tiny body flat on my hard bed and crawl on her; if I could press my bones against her nakedness and blow my breath into her and show her one way (the only way?) one can survive in this goddamned world; if I could teach her how one can conquer loneliness and worthlessness—even if for a minute or two . . . and I know, I know . . . all the weight of the world will land on one’s shoulders after that, but so be it. So be it. That’s fucking life.

I stood there in the shade of the dusty magnolia, watched her, and followed her gaze. She stared at the gorilla on top of the Transco Tower, standing tall and fat, with his arms wide open, his chest protruded, as if laughing at the city. She stared at the animal’s helium-filled belly, shimmering with gold and red, the sign of one oil company or another. The gorilla lifted one foot lightly, then another, tap dancing in the hot breeze.

May is even more cruel than April in Houston, Texas. Let Mr. T. S. Eliot check this out. Magnolias open shamelessly, exposing their insides, their juices oozing, and their scent—the scent of lust and death and decay—fills every inch of the thick air. You inhale the sweet thing and you want to do something severe to someone or to yourself. You want to live and love and lust, or you yearn to cut your veins with a sharp blade in the thickness of a sunset that reflects in wide, blue windowpanes.

I stood there, ten in the morning, watching her watching the gorilla, oblivious of her daughter sitting next to her and the dark woman with the bundle on the same bench, and of course unaware of me, standing not far from her, in my gray suit, now too thick for the season, perspiring, panting a bit, because of the strong scent of the magnolias.

When I sat next to her she saw me and we both smiled. I introduced myself with the same insipid joke I’ve repeated all my life to mock my name. I said, “Hi, my name is Madison, but don’t call me Mad!” She either didn’t get it, or the humor was weak. I said, “I’m your neighbor, Mr. Thompson’s tenant.” She said her name was Roya and introduced her daughter—eleven or twelve years old, a bit fat, dark face, frizzled hair, and frowning—apparently a brat. She said the girl’s name was Tala, meaning “gold” in Farsi. Then we talked and I realized that they’d just moved to the Thompson’s garage apartment, next to Bobby Palomo’s, and that they were Iranian (she said Persian), but did not come straight from Iran. They had lived in India for a while and before that somewhere else she didn’t mention. I said I’d been to India too—in the late seventies—and this gave us a common subject to talk about. But I didn’t remember anything decent about my India days and I couldn’t talk about the dope and the wet-eyed, underaged girls, and the long nights that I sat stoned in a small park in New Delhi, gazing at the dense woods, thinking about my dark life or rather feeling it. None of these I could share with her. But she volunteered a lot of information about herself—a political refugee, on welfare, looking desperately for a job—a single mother. She had a brother once who was executed by the Islamic regime. She had a cousin in Houston who was her sponsor, but a busy lawyer, too busy to be able to help her. She told me more than one should tell a stranger in a bus stop on a hot day in the city of smoke and cement. Much more than a man like me should ever know. She trusted my suit, I thought later, or my round glasses and my balding hair. And she was naive, unsuspicious of people and places. A foreigner. Persian.

Before her bus came we sat for a minute or two in silence, now both uncomfortable because of what the dark woman was doing. I had seen this creature’s rituals before and she began right in front of our eyes. With that plastic bag on her head, the four corners tied to make something like a shower cap for herself, she began folding a pale denim jacket on her lap, then unfolding it, and again folding and again and again. Her black, spotted face—burned sometime in the past and healed in shrunken leather—beamed with satisfaction.

“She is the ghost of the city,” I said and smiled.

“Is it that bad?”

“What?”

“The city?”

“It depends. It all depends.”

She sighed and glanced up at the gorilla again and I looked at her pale face and large eyes, framed by black eyelashes under thick lenses. But her hair was cut brutally short, close cropped, which reminded me of a French writer whose picture I’d seen somewhere long ago and whose name had escaped me, like all the names that escaped me every day and all the books that left my memory by the dozen.

When their bus came, the girl bounced up and pulled her mother behind, unable to hide her joy that the conversation with the stranger had ended and she had her mother to herself. They ran, more like two children, the mother just slightly taller than the child. I looked at the muscles of the woman’s buttocks, firm and young and shapely in tight white pants. A gazelle. Something stirred in my guts again and I wanted her the way I’d never wanted a female in my life. Now she climbed on the bus and pressed one hand on the small of her back, as if a pain had just passed through and she touched its route. She smiled at me from behind the opaque window and I smiled back.

the heavy bus jolted in large potholes and bumped up and down and creaked and cracked. My stomach was upset and I felt like vomiting. There was an odor, too. Someone behind me in the dark end of the bus carried the smell of death and decay. With my white, ironed handkerchief I covered my nose, murmured, “The Ship of Death,” and gazed out the window to amuse myself.

Outside, across the street from Sears, there was a fountain with three benches around it, each one occupied by the homeless. I saw the same woman with the plastic bag on her head. How did she get here before I did? Or was she another woman with the same shower cap? A young man with shabby blond hair and a long beard sat on another bench, staring at the fountain. He had Christ’s torso, bony, bloody, and injured before crucifixion.

“Have you built your ship of death, O have you?” I murmured.

Now I remembered that the book by the French woman was on my father’s crowded desk at the university. The woman had large black eyes and a boys’ haircut and wore a black turtleneck. Father read her, or maybe even taught her. I was too young to read it. But I’m sure I looked at the book’s jacket, at those large black eyes, for long moments.

A bee passed through my chest and I grabbed my heart as if to catch it before it entered. It was the familiar pain.

Father had a wide desk in his small office. I sat on the other side and read. His dim room with a dusty window looking at the red roofs of Austin smelled of stale coffee, Scotch, and mildew of yellowing books. He graded papers with a fountain pen filled with blood-red ink and once in a while lifted his head to make a comment about the book I was looking at. I didn’t doodle or draw; I read to please him. “Read the biography of the writer first, know him, then read him,” he’d say, or, “This is John Donne. Look in my Oxford for the vocabulary.”

When he taught a seminar, I sat in the library waiting for him. I did my homework and once in a while glanced at the tall, intimidating clock tower and watched the students coming and going and listened to the frightening sound of the big bell, too close to me, too alarming, announcing the passage of time. The daylight faded, I felt gloomy and tried to think about Mother and her delicious stew, waiting for us on the table, but even that didn’t make me happy.

Home was cold and quiet and we ate in silence, because Father didn’t speak with Mother and didn’t encourage talking. There was no television and I was not allowed to play outside and no neighbor boy or classmate visited. I didn’t do what other boys did and I couldn’t have a dog. My mother was asthmatic. Once I had a goldfish, which died soon, and I didn’t want another one. In my room I read and listened to Father’s music, resonating in the long corridor. The tunes penetrated through the walls, reached me in a remote and dreamy way, and made me pleasantly sad. It was either a symphony or a piece for strings, and never piano, because my father didn’t like piano and I thought that it was because Mother played it so well. She played piano for the church and when Father was not home.

The strings and percussion lamented and exploded and reverberated in the cold and spacious house and I interpreted the tunes in my own way and murmured to myself, “These are the footsteps of the giant. He is approaching: Boom, boom, boom,” or “There is a circus in town; I’m here, watching.” I whispered to myself and told stories—a lonely child’s pastime.

Bending over homework in my room, I knew that Mother sat opposite Father in the cool, dim living room and her image reflected in the dark windowpane. She’d leaf through a housekeeping magazine, or if it was winter she’d knit a little sweater for me, which was only completed when the winter was over and the endless summer began. They seldom talked—Mother and Father—they only exchanged a few broken sentences until the evening ended.

Father read his favorites, Shakespeare and Marlowe, for leisure. He sipped brandy in a fat wine glass and at times smiled, or even chuckled to himself. This was when he read a line that he liked. But he didn’t share any of these with Mother, nor did he ask what she read or wove. Mother and Father did not sleep in the same bed. A small oak table covered with Father’s books separated them forever. I heard them saying goodnight to each other and the lights dimmed.

With me, he shared more. A heavy book in one hand, his wine glass in another, he walked the length of the long corridor and scraped his leather slippers against the shiny linoleum. He knocked on my door and said, “Son, are you doing your school work? Just listen to this for a minute; listen to the beauty of these lines. This is Titus. His daughter has been tortured and he is lamenting. Shakespeare is still young here, but listen to the language: ‘When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o’erflow? / If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad, / Threatening the welkin with his big-swollen face?’ Now listen to this. It’s like a symphony, the melody changes. ‘I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth blow. / She is the weeping welkin, I the earth.’”

When he recited, his eyes welled up and I felt an unbearable love for him. He identified with Titus, who had just lost his daughter, and as young as I was I felt the intensity of parental love. So he loved me too, as deep as Titus loved his daughter. After he left, the rest of the night I interpreted the distant tunes of the symphony under the influence of Shakespeare’s lines. I said to myself, “Now the sky weeps, now the storm comes. The sea is mad. The girl is weeping.”

Mother borrowed me from Father every Sunday and took me to church with her. I was an altar boy. I wore a white gown and held candles in my hands in Father McFarlin’s Church of the Holy Virgin. I didn’t see my father all Sunday, until supper time, when he came home after spending a long day at the library and the Faculty Club. He was a bit drunk when he came home and didn’t eat much and went to bed early. A few times he took me to that club. Old professors sat around patio tables under an arbor, sipped Scotch, and exchanged campus gossip. “This is Madison, my son,” Father said. “Brilliant boy. He is a little scholar. My assistant!”

But at the church I felt like a child. I played with the boys in the backyard among gray stone statues of the tall virgin and the saints and I didn’t even think about serious matters. Mother held my hand tightly when we walked home. Sometimes at home, before Father returned, Mother played piano and I sat next to her warm legs and listened.

i thought about all this because the Persian girl resembled a picture on my father’s book and I missed my stop. I had to walk half a mile back to Saint Luke’s. Dr. Haas was waiting for me. It was getting hotter by the minute and my chest hurt and my lungs wheezed and I felt like staying in the cool bus and never getting off, never setting my foot in that hospital again. But then I thought about the small woman and told myself, I have to recover; I have to gain my health back. Who knows? Maybe, she is the one . . .

So I walked back under the burning sun and maneuvered around the piles of cement and mounds of brick on the edge of the street. Like most of the streets of Houston, there was no sidewalk, and I had to walk in a narrow pathway crowded with gigantic pipes. Cars rushed and dust rose and I covered my mouth to not inhale quicklime. I cursed like a lunatic when I stepped in a pile of brick dust and soiled my polished shoes. So by the time I threw myself inside the rotating glass door of the hospital and fell on the first leather couch to catch my breath, my mood had been ruined for the day. I pressed my chest, panting, then held my breath and listened. The bee was there, circling around my heart, trying to find a chamber to get in.

i sat on the edge of the bed in a paper gown, looked out the window, and thought to myself, what if God passed—by sheer accident—in his chariot, behind this window of the twenty-fourth floor of Saint Luke’s Hospital, and saw me? What if He saw Madison Arlington Kirby, naked as the day he was born from his mother, sitting in a thin paper gown, waiting for the final verdict? What would He say? He’d say, “Son, the voyage of oblivion is awaiting you, build up your ship of death.” He’d recite Lawrence for me.

I daydreamed and stared at my hairy legs, two sticks ending at my yellow toes, and I remembered that when I was a little boy my mother sat me like this on a tall table to trim my toenails and I cried. I was afraid of almost everything, as if my whole life with its million small threats was a monster from whom I could never escape. Why did nails grow? Why was one forced to go through the torment of a haircut? Why did doctors pierce one’s skin with needles?

Where was Mother to see her naked son?

I looked out the window and waited. The bee wheezed and passed through the narrow pathways of my chest, causing me pain and worry. More worry than pain—because I could take the pain, but not the anxiety of waiting. I went mad with bad thoughts whenever I waited.

“Bad thoughts! Maddy, you think bad thoughts all the time. God loves you. You’re a fine child. What are you afraid of?” Mother said.

And this was before the math exam, or the spelling bee, or the baseball game. I couldn’t sleep because of the worry. And now I had to wait for the doctor to come back to the room with a piece of news for me. Bad news. I knew it. I read it in her narrow, wrinkled face, in her round, lashless eyes, those two colorless holes showing eternal wonder. I knew it when she ran the cold, deadly stethoscope all over my chest and frowned. I knew it from the way she sighed, from the way she listened to what I said about the bee and nodded. The news was bad.

I sat there and worried and looked out the window—waves of haze. On the horizon two refineries, not far from each other, swam in a white fog. Tall, dark columns, derricks and cat crackers, pierced the white clouds, but these were not real clouds, they were vapor coughed out of tall pipes. On the right side I saw the compact geometrical towers of downtown, silver and blue, taller and shorter, flat as unopened books, reflecting the crooked image of each other and mirroring the floating haze. I saw the red roofs of affluent houses on the left, and closer, the hospitals’ and hotels’ roofs. On top of the Marriott a swimming pool glowed like a piece of turquoise fallen from the sky. A woman, the size of a doll, bathed in the sun. I saw flattened ground, bases of gigantic structures growing out. I saw tall buildings being born out of the wombs of vacant lots, rubble that used to be people’s houses and churches. The city didn’t have respect for old age; it bulldozed and demolished history. It destroyed the past to build a short-living now that would never become a future. I saw moving cranes with huge hooks lifting roofs. And God never passed to see all this and I, Madison Arlington Kirby, in my white paper gown, waited and worried.

“This city is the image of doom,” I told Dr. Haas.

“Why doom?”

“Look! Can’t you see?”

“I know, I know. I live on top of one of these expensive towers. And we’re on top of another right now. The world has changed. We are ten years away from the millennium. Capital’s rule is absolute.” Her German r rolled in her throat.

“It’s doom!” I repeated.

“Don’t be so negative. Look at the bright side.” She didn’t lift her head from the paper she held in her bony hand and didn’t say where the bright side was. There were green and blue spots on her knotted fingers. Paint?

“What does the test say?”

“I think we’re there.”

“AIDS?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I’m going to die.”

She laughed. Not a real laughter, but something sudden, dry, and short—a bullet cracking in the air. “No. There are people like you all over the world now. In many laboratories scientists are working on it. What you need to do is this: Exercise! Build up your resistance. Raise your spirit, eat well, and take your medications.”

“And the bee?”

“The bee?”

“In my chest.”

“It’s your lungs.”

“Infected?”

“Tuberculosis.”

“So I’m a bag of infections, rotting with diseases.”

“Listen, Madison. I’m ill, too. Hepatitis C. Did you know this? I used to work twelve hours a day. Now I’m working less than ten hours a week. I was working on the virus and got contaminated. I lost a grant for a very important project—”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“When I realized that the disease might kill me, I changed my life.”

“Oh, you have a lesson for me here, huh? You’re preaching.”

I didn’t need to become bitter with the woman, but I couldn’t stop. I was all poison and wanted to spit it onto her ugly face. The goddamned German whore, the fucking anticapitalist, who lived a bourgeois life.

“I wouldn’t call it preaching,” she said coldly. “What I mean is that you have to change your life. Don’t withdraw. See people. Study again.”

“Ha, ha!”

“Didn’t you tell me you quit working on your doctoral dissertation in Austin? Start it again. Get your degree.”

“Ha, ha!”

“I’ve enrolled in different classes. I paint.”

“Good for you, Doc.”

“You’re not short of money, or are you?”

“Nope. I’m not poor, if that’s what you mean. I have a big sum lying somewhere, getting fat, but I don’t want to spend it.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story, Doc. And melodramatic. I can’t touch that money.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s my father’s inheritance.”

“Spend it, Madison.”

“Because I’m dying, huh?”

“Because you have to enjoy your life.”

“I’ve never enjoyed my life and don’t know how to enjoy it now that I’m being pushed out.”

“No one is pushing you out, Madison.”

“Yes, He is!” I shouted and spat venom at her. “He is pushing me out of life, that son of a bitch!” I pointed to the clouds of vapor.

I certainly didn’t show much grace after hearing the news. I made a fool of myself and stormed out as if the poor shrunken woman was responsible for my germs. In the leather couch downstairs I sat gasping and thinking that this whole thing was not surprising news. Hadn’t I been dying since I was twenty-five? Since I abandoned my widowed mother to seek refuge in the East? Didn’t my death begin then? Or to be precise, on March 5, 1978—the day of the wreck?

I was working. Taking notes. Final research for the dissertation. Someone tiptoed toward my cubicle and motioned to me to come out. I left my books open on the desk and followed this man, a small clerk, a bald man whom I’d seen sitting behind the circulation counter watching the girls’ legs with his mousy eyes. He told me in a whisper that there was a phone call for me. It was Father McFarlin. His old voice shook. He said that my father had been in a car accident. I said, where? He said, the Hill Country. What was he doing there? Who was with him? He didn’t say more. Left it for me to find out.

So the old bastard died and I died with him. Not because he died, but because of the way he did—so cheap, so ugly, so ungraceful. I didn’t want to bear the damn professor’s name anymore. Kirby was my middle name. I made it into my last name and divorced the boss forever. Then I left Austin and my dissertation remained open on the desk of that cubicle in the library, half done. I had to travel. Beyond the seas. To the East. India. Turkey. China. I told Mother I’d be away from Austin for few months, but I never returned.

i walked all day aimlessly to weary myself. I strolled in the narrow, shady streets around Rice University and daydreamed. If I didn’t have to die and if I had to live in Houston, this would be where I’d choose—an alley with a roof of intertwining oaks, all shade and peace and tranquility. Being here and not being here. Houses old, decent, and modest. Cozy and inviting. Smelling of aged wood. Red brick walls, small, green backyards, tall oaks protecting them. A place to raise a family, to grow old, to become a grandfather and die a natural death on a chair near the fireplace. Now I laughed at my sentimental fantasies and resented myself for such thoughts. But I couldn’t help envying the owners of the houses and feeling bitter and angry.

Never in my life had I thought about marriage or family—not even when I loved a woman and made her pregnant. Before the wreck, Father was my marriage and my family (my nourishing mother stood in his shadows) and after the wreck, I put my life on pause. I lived a temporary life, thinking that this was just a break and I’d take my manuscript back from Mother and work on it and graduate and begin to teach. I traveled through the East, lived the foggy life of an opium smoker, and returned to the States only because of a coincidence. I saw a former classmate in a teahouse in Istanbul and he told me that there were a couple of openings at the college in New York where he taught. He said he would recommend me if I were interested. I thought that New York would be a good place to get lost and I said, Sure, I’m interested. My friend didn’t know how lost I was and how low I’d fallen. All he knew was the studious Madison, the Madison of the Honors List. He recommended me. After a month, the college received my transcript and my former professors’ recommendation letters and invited me for an interview. Knowing that I’d impress them, I moved to New York, confidently.

For almost a year, I taught philosophy during the day and lived a wild life at night. I drank and smoked and slept in unbelievable places with unbelievable people and my contract was not renewed. Once on a long LSD trip, from which I almost didn’t return, I found myself at the end of a maze, face-to-face with shapeless creatures made of the substance of night. They were the instruments of darkness and with their batlike screams warned me about something, as if there were anything more horrible than them. They had visited me in India once, but I had forgotten them. Now they were back and this was a sign. So I packed and returned to Texas, but not to Austin, where my mother was. I knew that I had hit bottom.

It was the spring of 1985 when I lived in a small room on top of a laundromat in Houston. The room shook with the vibration of a dozen washers and dryers and smelled of cheap detergent. My mother sent me money to start a life. I was willing to help myself, too. My old Greek landlord told me about the People’s Aid Center, and I went to see that one-eyed, big Italian, Ric Cardinal, the saint-counselor of the Montrose area. I sought help.

The doctoral candidate in philosophy was now a night watchman of a skyscraper, a junky, a showman of AA meetings, and a paranoid bum who was visited by vague shadows and shapes. This was a good lesson in humility. It took me two years to get cleaned up and begin to debate whether it was the right time to pick up the manuscript. But then I was diagnosed with HIV and lost heart.

Then bad turned to worst. I couldn’t handle the night job in the enormous building. Shadows tricked me again and followed me in the dim, empty corridors and when I wanted to catch them, they hid behind the marble columns. I flew out of the skyscraper, my heart banging in my mouth, until I was breathless. Paranoia, doctor-diagnosed. I needed rest and medication. I had to quit my job before I caused a theft or damage to the building. I didn’t tell Mother that I spent three weeks in a mental hospital, and whenever she called and mentioned “my money,” I told her that I didn’t want to touch it, she’d better keep it in her own bank account. I became eligible for disability and my life remained on permanent pause.

What went wrong? When? When did things go wrong?

Thinking about all this, as if watching a movie of my past life, I stopped at a dime store in the Village and looked at myself in the window. But it wasn’t only me looking at myself—all these masks, these old, dusty Halloween masks of years gone, stared at me from behind the finger-stained, greasy pane. I cupped my hands around my eyes to see better. It was an image out of a nightmare. All the red-cheeked, rubber-faced presidents, deformed and horrible, made faces at me and mocked me for being pushed out of a life I’d never had a chance to begin. It was as if they were saying, “We made it! We made it! You lost it, you loser!” I entered the store, not knowing why; maybe I wanted to smash all the masks and the rest of the cheap, random junk in the shop. But a hundred-year-old man, who sat on a chair, leaning against a cane, stood up shakily and approached me with stiff legs and a wide smile. I rushed out and ran for my life as if he was death personified coming to claim me. Not yet. No, I wasn’t ready. There was hope. There was hope. There was a small woman with large dark eyes who could save me. Yes, she was the only one who could save me. My Persian—Roya. •••

as long as I could remember there had been a greasy spoon coffee shop by the name of Dot on this corner. It had the atmosphere of the old times without the pretension. When I was a night watchman I ate breakfast at Dot on the way home. A few lanky, sleepy, middle-aged waitresses in blue aprons filled my cup with coffee and served me eggs and french toast. I stared at the TV and at times glanced at their hairy thighs when they bent to pick up something from the floor.

Now I walked and walked, beginning to wonder if Dot had also been a figment of my imagination. If it was not, then where was it? The afternoon heat increased as the naked sun slipped down closer to the earth and the gulf somewhere, not far from the city, breathing out fire. With the image of a tall glass of iced tea like a mirage in my head, I kept walking until I felt dizzy and soaked in a cold sweat. The bee wheezed crazily in my chest and hit the wall of my heart. I stopped a man and asked him, “Where is Dot?” He shrugged, as if he didn’t know English. I saw a bead shop and entered. An annoying doorbell announced my entrance and a woman approached me with a smile. She wore a long flowery dress and many rows of beads hung from her neck—a hippie out of place and time. Boxes surrounded her. She was packing or unpacking.

“Excuse me, where is Dot?”

“What?”

“The coffee shop next to your store.”

“Oh. They demolished it a few months ago. They’re building an arcade here. They’re going to dump my store too. I’m moving to a new location.”

“Oh.” That’s all I said, then glanced at the boxes and left.

“Need beads?”

“No, I don’t need beads,” I murmured.

In the street a yellow bulldozer crept out of a vacant lot that used to be Dot and crawled toward me. On my left, an ocean of cars roared and approached. I felt trapped in a dead end and had to decide. If I went to the right, I’d get run over by the yellow beast; if I went to the left, I’d pass out under the invading cars. So I entered the bead shop again and the bell rang. I vaguely remember that I murmured something like, “Madame, I don’t feel well—” and I passed out.

i opened my eyes on my bed, facing my red, round alarm clock. This old clock had been my companion for years, the only object I’d brought from the East. It had a sweet female face, Arabic numbers, and a life that was entirely in my hands. If I didn’t wind it, it would die. It was ten minutes to five and I tried to remember the day. The images of the fake hippie, the crazy homeless men, and the large-eyed Persian woman mixed and mingled in my head and confused me. The dialogue with Dr. Haas played in my head to remind me that I had a terminal disease, and then I heard someone knocking on the door.

“Come in. It’s open.”

It was the neighbor. The boy. Bobby Palomo.

“May I come in?”

“I just said come in. Didn’t I?”

“Are you okay?” He approached my bed cautiously, as if afraid.

“Why?”

“Well, the ambulance brought you home and I helped them put you in bed. They told me to tell you that you should call your doctor. That’s why I’m here. To remind you. I guess you passed out in the street.”

“In a bead shop.”

“You need something? Food? I have lots of good stuff in my fridge. I can warm something up in a minute and bring you a fancy tray. It’s restaurant food. First class. What do you say?”

“Do I look starved?”

“No, it’s just—I work in a restaurant and I take home some food every night—”

“What do you have?”

“You like lasagna?”

“I guess. I don’t remember the last time I had Italian food.”

“I’ll get you some lasagna with some fresh garden salad. I’ll be back in a wink.”

The bastard pitied me. Was it showing, then? The illness? The paleness? Did I smell of death? So soon? Then the woman could notice too.

A minute later I sat in my bed eating lasagna and some kind of green soup the girl had sent. Bobby sat in a chair next to my bed and said that the new neighbor, the Persian woman, saw him taking food for me and added this bowl of soup.

“Did she see the ambulance?”

“Oh, yeah—”

“Shit.”

“Why?”

I didn’t answer him and he just sat there and looked around.

“What are you looking at?”

“I guess you haven’t had time to unpack yet. I’ll help you this Sunday if you want.”

“I moved here two months ago.”

“But you haven’t had time—I can help—”

“Why are you helping everybody, huh? I saw you sweeping the parking lot for Thompson and cutting the grass. Does he pay you?”

“He’s my dad’s friend. I mean was.”

“Are you living here for free?”

“No, I pay my rent.”

“Where is your dad?”

“Not sure.”

“Mother?”

“Chicago.”

“Abandoned you?”

“I’m nineteen. I can take care of myself.”

“Sure you can—sure you can. Go now, I want to rest.”

“Will you call your doctor?”

“What do you see in my face? Plague? Cholera?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“Go kid, go. Your lasagna was good. I’ll keep the rest of this green soup and I’ll return the girl’s bowl myself. Thanks. Now go!”

I took a long shower and all the while thought about the young woman. Her name emerged from the depth of my memory—Roya. It was as if I’d met her long ago, somewhere else, somewhere remote and strange. Now I remembered that she’d come from India and all of my long-buried memories emerged from darkness and surrounded me—the jasmine clusters hanging over clay walls, white and purple and lavender, the sharp perfume of blossoms and the smell of sandalwood in the air, the occasional scream of strange birds in the jungle, and the demons of the night, who appeared to me for the first time in Delhi.

I stayed in a small solitary room on top of a roof in an old widow’s house in New Delhi. The house wasn’t air-conditioned, so I slept on the roof all night, wearing nothing, under the Indian sky, which sent the waves of fire and the scent of wild flowers down. Sleepless from the intensity of the heat and the perfume of the plants, I went to a nearby park at the edge of the woods. I sat on a bench for hours and looked at the dense trees. A peacock appeared occasionally and opened his tail feathers and remained motionless for a long time, as if posing for me. At times I heard strange screams and thought that from within the thick woods shapeless shadows warned me.

Now this woman was coming from the same city. She had appeared on this particular day in my life, the day of the bad news. Could this be a coincidence? What if it was not? What if the woman was sent for me? Wasn’t this another turning point in my life? I had only a short time to live and I had to live it fine and full and she was here to hold me tight, to caress me with her gentle eyes, and to stay with me until the moment of my departure.

I left the steaming bathtub in a daze. I was confused. The past had emerged from the bosom of the present and lived in my throbbing cells, yearning for the future. The present seemed unreal and the reality of death was as strong as the urge to live and love. I smelled the intense perfume of unknown flowers, while my windows were tightly closed. Was I going out of my mind?

All night I lay on my side, palm under cheek, looking at the face of the red clock, counting the minutes and hours. Sleep never came. My brain was so tired that it had ceased working. I was all acute senses like an animal and smelled nonexistent scents—sandalwood and curry, dust and manure and hot sweat. Then I heard the click of the old man’s typewriter next door and the tick tock of the red clock; the scents of the past vanished. My eyelids pulsated with pain and a hammer hit a long nail into my scalp.

Memories came to me, but not in long, graceful chapters, nor in well-arranged sentences, edited in my mind to refinement, as was often the case. They came in a fragmented, nervous way, in the shape of broken images, meaningless and chaotic.

I was burning with fever on my narrow bed. Father sat next to me and lay his big hand on my forehead. The fever vanished. I had shivers now. Father lay his palm on my head, and his warm life entered my frozen blood. He spoke worriedly with a doctor who had come to our house. “Will he be well soon? Will he?”

He loved me, then; he loved me, I thought in delirium. He had given me life and he was worried about me and he loved me more than anyone in this world.

Now I looked up at the bell tower of the university; someone on the top was shouting. I ran out of the library and screamed, “Dad . . . Dad . . . ,” and saw other people running, calling for help. I ran under the bullets and fell on the ground. Someone pulled me down and I stayed there hunched into myself, never lifting my head up to see the man, the size of a finger, on top of the tower, shooting. Now I found myself in my father’s arms. He pressed me to his chest like a baby. “Daddy, Daddy,” I cried. I was a big child then. Twelve.

I sat under the piano and rubbed my body against Mother’s bare calf. She pushed one foot on the pedal and sang her Irish song: “I hear a song in my deep sleep / the waters sound asleep / the moon’s lonely dreams.” In my tight shelter under the moving hammers I felt the evening descending and the light dimming. The darkest of all the blues had covered the sky and soon Father would come, carrying that blue light inside with him and the piano would cease playing and Mother would become silent for the rest of the night.

“maddy, maddy, don’t be so Saddy!” Mother sang and soaped my back.

“No, no, no, no—not the shampoo. It burns!”

“What are you afraid of, Maddy? The cute little good-smelling bubbles?”

mother had another asthma attack. I heard rhythmic bangs, opened the bedroom door, and found her on the floor, squatting, rocking back and forth and each time hitting her head on the wall. A hoarse voice came out of her tight chest: “Leave! Leave, Madison. I’ll be fine. Fine. My lungs are tight . . .”

I felt guilty breathing.

Father read my papers carefully and beamed with satisfaction. He went over the tiny words of praise my professors had written in the margin. I was his prodigy, on my way to becoming another him. Our fields were not the same and this was the only liberty he had given me. I impressed him when I lectured on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. My little power was in the big books that I had read and he hadn’t. I lived to please him and he loved me. I knew he loved me.

My dissertation, “Being There and Being Pushed into Nothingness: A Study of Martin Heidegger’s Existentialism,” was already dedicated to him:

“To Father, without whose life-giving breath I would have  never been able to breathe life into these pages.”

As I wrote fervently in that windowless cubicle, I imagined him holding the black hardback book, the printed manuscript, in his hands, leafing through it, looking at the dedication and the table of contents. I imagined him raising his eyes from behind his lenses and creasing his forehead, as was his habit, and nodding with a faint smile. This nod was life for me and I didn’t desire more.

Then he died.

palm of one hand under my cheek, I looked out through the bare window until the morning light, still faint and reluctant, glowed between the dark branches of the thick oaks. I watched the light growing brighter, turning phosphorescent, waking the birds. They sang at once and crazily and broke the spell of my past. Now the morning, full grown, strong, and imposing, filled the room. I turned my back to the window, closed my eyes, and before falling asleep saw the image of my father. But I woke after ten minutes and sat up. I thought that if the Persian had come for me, if she was here to save me, I’d call Mother and give her the news—news of the approaching end and my happiness before the final departure. Then I thought that I should pluck a half-opened magnolia from a tree and put it in the empty bowl; I should knock on her door tomorrow and when she opens it, offer her the virgin blossom. With this plan in mind, after eleven hours of tossing and turning, I fell asleep.

Day Two

In the evening I shaved, put on some cologne, and ironed my shirt. I slicked my hair with water and combed it back to cover the near-balding top. I debated whether to wear the suit jacket. Didn’t. Now I opened the window and with much effort plucked a half-open magnolia. The branch was a bit far from my reach and I hoped that no one saw me hanging out with a pair of scissors in my hand. I placed the blossom in her blue porcelain bowl and crossed the parking lot. Climbing the creaking steps, I hoped that Bobby Palomo wouldn’t open his door and see me. I stood behind the door and waited before knocking. There was a conversation in the house, between mother and daughter. It must have been in their language, because I couldn’t understand a word. I knocked, but no one opened. I waited. The dialogue was not friendly. There was tension under the woman’s voice and the girl had a half-nagging, half-whining tone—on the verge of tears. I thought I should return another time. The dark narrow hallway was now filled with the sharp perfume of magnolia and it made me sick. As I turned to go down the steps she opened the door. Against the sharp light she seemed transparent, as if her body was empty of organs. I almost looked for her wings and thought, Yes, she is God-sent. She is here to save me and I’m doing the right thing. I offered the bowl and mumbled a thank you. She invited me in, something she shouldn’t have done. I wished I could tell her right away, “Dear girly, don’t invite a stranger into your house. Neighbor or no neighbor! You’re in America, my love!”

She offered me a strong hot tea, which made me perspire in that long-sleeved starched shirt. Sweat bubbled in my hair and rolled down inside my collar. Her window air conditioner was worse than mine; it rattled and shook the house without giving out cool air. The girl, the daughter, had slipped inside the bedroom, hiding, and the mother went in and out of the small kitchen, bringing more things to eat and drink.

“Sit for a second for God’s sake,” I said. “Why are you serving me?”

“You’re my first American guest,” she said. “We offer tea and sweets, then fruits. We insist that guests stay for dinner.”

“Eastern rituals. I had a landlady in India who knocked on my door every evening and handed me a tray full of food.”

“How are you feeling today?” she asked.

“Why?”

“You were sick.”

“Oh, the lousy asthma attack. I didn’t have my inhaler with me the other day—”

She didn’t ask more, didn’t mention the ambulance, and I didn’t explain, either. Then there was silence and I had a chance to glance around. Her desk, which was a yellow door resting on orange crates in front of the window, was covered with books and papers. I told her that I didn’t know she was a student. She said she was not, but she wished she could continue her education.

“In what?”

“Literature,” she said.

“What are you writing?”

“My memoir,” she said and laughed shyly.

“I thought old people wrote memoirs.”

“I’m not that young,” she said. “But it’s not really serious. Just some notes.”

I asked her about her family and she told me that her parents had died in a car accident one year before the 1979 revolution. She was in the last year of high school then, but still managed to graduate. She had an older sister who was like a mother to her and then for the second time she mentioned her brother’s execution. I said that my father had died in a car crash too, and I immediately regretted saying it. I shouldn’t have brought up that subject and ruined my mood. More to avoid answering questions, I asked her to walk with me to the café across the street and have a light dinner with me. Neither of us had a car to go anywhere farther, I said. She agreed, but said that she had to get her daughter ready. I didn’t want the daughter with us, but didn’t say anything. She was in the bedroom for a long time—longer than it should take a big child to get ready—and I heard hushed and nervous conversation. At last a door banged, something fell in the bathroom sink and broke, and Roya came out, face flushed.

“We can go,” she said.

“And your daughter?”

“She’s not coming.”

She had on the same white pants with a white T-shirt that had a hand-painted picture of a Christmas tree. The picture was out of time and place, but white was her color. With her short hair and boyish outfit, she didn’t look more than eighteen. We could have been mistaken for a father and daughter.

We strolled in twilight and the moist air sat on our skin. When the breeze blew from the west, I smelled lilac on her. She had used perfume. I was short of breath, wheezed and coughed, and became embarrassed. Sweat ran down my neck and the bee spun in my body and hit the wall of my chest.

“Are you okay?”

“Oh, yes. You know; it’s the asthma. The evening air bothers me.”

“Then you shouldn’t be walking.”

“I don’t drive.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

We sat in Café Express next to the window and while she ate a salad I recited “The Ship of Death” for her. I will never forget how her large black eyes opened wide with wonder, then became wet with tears. She stopped eating.

“I’m sorry if I made you sad. You were eating.”

“Oh, please, don’t apologize. I love poetry. I write some too, but not in English.”

“Nowadays, death has cornered me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I listen to my heart and can’t imagine that this faint throbbing which has been with me for so long would ever cease.”

“Why do you think about death?” she asked innocently.

“I don’t think about death, my dear. I think about the benign indifference of the universe.”

She didn’t understand what I said; she looked puzzled. I tried to explain what I meant by “benign indifference of the universe” and, as if feeling offended, she became defensive and began to tell me that her German was better than her English and she knew a little Russian too, but her English was much better than her Russian. Then to change the subject I asked her how her past few days had been. She said she had found a job at a shirt-painting company, but this was just temporary. The employment agency was going to find her something better. She said she had a degree in comparative literature and wished she could enter a doctoral program here. I didn’t mention my dissertation on Heidegger.

When she spoke more than one or two sentences her accent showed and I helped her once or twice when she got stuck pronouncing some words. But then I regretted doing so because she blushed with embarrassment. Her voice was soft and deep for her young age and she spoke slowly for fear of making a mistake.

The poor gazelle. Only a week in America.

While we sipped our coffee in silence, I gazed at her shamelessly. Her beauty was ethereal and angelic, dark and sad. There was more in her, much more than appeared on the surface. I wanted her to know that she was sent for me. She was here to save me, to stay with me during the last years of my life and console me. She was the promised happiness, a dream coming true. When she lowered her head from the burden of my gaze, black curtains of long lashes fell on her wet eyes and cast shadows on her cheeks. This was a celestial beauty.

On the way back I asked her what the meaning of her name was, and she shocked me by saying that her name, Roya, meant “dream” in Persian, “sweet dream,” she corrected herself. I told her that her name suited her well, because she seemed like a sweet dream to me. In order to discourage me from intimate remarks, she told me that this was a very common name in her country and she didn’t like having a common name. Before crossing the street, we stood in front of a closed clothing shop, a boutique of some sort, and we looked at the men’s suits and women’s accessories. I told her that I wouldn’t mind possessing that black silk suit, but I didn’t tell her that my secret wish was to wear it standing in front of the altar with her. Now I asked her if she liked any of the jewlery. She blushed and said that she never wore any.

“Why?”

“I’m not used to it.”

“Well, let’s imagine you’d wear a pair of earrings. Which pair would you choose?”

It took her a long time to look around and finally she showed me a pair of pearl earrings with three droplets hanging in a row like frozen tears. I admired her choice and told her that I’d choose those too and we laughed, imagining how I’d look wearing long pearl earrings. Then we laughed some more at our window-shopping and the fact that the suit cost twice Mr. Thompson’s rent for the hot box of the garage apartments and even the earrings were worth our electricity bills put together.

In the vacant parking lot, now darkened and deserted, my stairway was on the left and hers on the right. We stood in the middle to say goodbye. I remember that the moon slipped out of the dark clouds and brightened the night and I took it as a good omen. As I bent to kiss her lips, she raised her head to watch the moon and I changed my mind and decided not to take the risk. No. Wait. Not now! Let her trust you more. We parted like old friends with warm smiles.

Day Three

Yes, I knew that soon I would die, but she was here to guard me and take care of me to the day of my departure. She was the one who had heard me among the angels and she was here to press me against her chest. But I had to help myself too. So I went to Ric Cardinal, my old friend and savior at the People’s Aid Center.

If there was only one man in Houston whom I liked with a mixture of envy and admiration (envy for what he was and I could never be), that man was Ric. He saved me in 1985 when I came to this city and was confused and lost. He talked to me for endless hours, took me to doctors and shrinks and AA meetings, and encouraged me to study again. He found me a job and prevented me from sliding back. If I slid back, I’d end up under the bridge of Highway 10. He was the same with his other clients. I don’t think he had much of a life for himself. His wife had deserted him long ago and he was raising a troubled teenager. I remember that half-joking, half-seriously I called him Saint Cardinal, the Saint of the Montrose Wretched.

But I quit going to PAC after I was diagnosed with HIV. I gave up on the idea of working on my doctorate, too. I remember that once, when I was very sick, I called Ric and made an appointment with him. I wanted to tell him about my failing health, but this meeting never happened. He had a family problem and didn’t show up. Then I decided not to see him anymore. I moved and didn’t get a phone. He couldn’t find me.

Now Ric was happy to see me again. But he couldn’t hide that he was shocked.

“Do I look like a bag of shit?”

“You’ve lost weight, Madison. Tell me. What’s going on?”

“There is a bee in my blood, Ric; it circles and circles, but each time misses the entrance to my heart. The day that the bee finds its way inside, my heart will cease beating. I live only by chance, my friend, hoping that the blind bee remains lost.”

“Weaving poetry again—the same old Madison. What are you trying to say?”

“AIDS.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

There was silence for a long moment and I looked down through the wide window at the Montrose crowd. It was lunch hour rush. A tall, black faggot with short shorts, high heels, and long thighs held on to his curly blond wig as if it was falling off and tried to cross the busy street. Cars honked and heads popped out the windows.

“I’m not a faggot, Ric.”

“Oh, shut up, Madison.”

“I’m just being pushed out of life and it’s all—all—His fault.”

“Whose?”

I pointed to the window, the haze, the white summer glare, and then I covered my eyes.

What a shame! I was all in tears—from self-pity and from that goddamned feeling I always had when I saw Ric Cardinal. The man’s big body gave out warmth and I felt like a child sitting on Santa’s lap unable to dismount. I was only a few years younger than him, but I felt like his son. He looked like an archetypal father, a Zeus or something, but a god without the wrath.

He was looking at me now, panting slightly, as he always did. For a long moment he played with the tip of his bushy beard and then said, “How about we get out of here and go somewhere to eat? Let’s go somewhere nice.” He got up and paced the room, pulling his beard, as was his habit when he thought hard. I could see that he wanted to do something for me, but didn’t know what. Eating was an animal instinct. He wanted to feed me.

“Let’s go to Kemah. Get up, man. Let’s go to the bay and get some fresh air and seafood.”

Ric was mostly silent driving through the busy streets, but I chatted incessantly to make up for my disgrace in his office. I gave him a report of my life since I last saw him three years ago. I told him about the odd jobs, then disability, one dingy apartment after the other, and this last one, a garage apartment, hanging suspended in the air, in a parking lot, surrounded by walls. I talked about my temporary life among boxes that were never quite unpacked and contained objects that had lost their purpose and meaning and my life that was on pause and this was taking forever. I told him that my memory was fading away and all the books that I’d read and all the poems that I had in my head were leaving me. I told him that I was becoming an empty sack before being kicked out of this life.

Then at a red light I saw the dark woman with the bundle sitting on a bench at the bus stop folding a stack of napkins on her lap. She divided the napkins in two stacks and began folding the first. Each one she folded she hid in a pocket. Next she began the second stack. Then she made binoculars with her hands, looking through the imaginary lenses. She saw me sitting in the car and recognized me.

“This is the ghost of the city,” I murmured.

“Who?”

“That homeless woman. She is everywhere. She follows me.”

“Once I thought that death was following me,” Ric said.

“Tell me about it.”

“I was a kid, six or seven, and I thought I saw death with my grandfather in the basement.” Ric paused for a long moment, deeply immersed in the past. “Grandpa had a small embalming business and I knew what he was doing down there, but I’d never seen it. I wasn’t allowed there. But one day when I was playing in the street, my ball rolled to the basement window and stopped. I hunched to pick it up and I looked inside. Grandpa stood in front of a black box, working. But behind him there was a shadow on the wall—a tall, dark shadow, waiting. I got scared and ran away. A couple of days later Grandpa died and I thought that it was death that had stood behind him.”

“Do you believe in God, Ric?”

“No.”

“I do. But I don’t think he is merciful. He is indifferent and forgetful. This dark woman is nothing to him.”

“Your god is like a corporate executive or something.”

“Exactly. With immense power and gigantic hands.”

“Hands?”

“Because I’ve always imagined that if I’m falling—and I’ve been falling for a while now—there must be a hand with a soft, enormous palm that would hold me midway and prevent me from crashing. But now the same hand is pushing me out, Ric. I can’t bear the idea of this . . . this . . . powerlessness. This fast trip toward nothing.”

“You’re still under the influence of Heidegger.”

“I was raised a Catholic, Ric.”

“Me too.”

“I’m a believer, Ric.”

“Didn’t you work on Heidegger for years? For your doctorate?”

“So what?”

“Wasn’t he an atheist?”

“Fuck Heidegger.”

under the green umbrella we sipped our iced tea and gazed at a white boat sailing smoothly on the blue water. The day was warm and breezy and it was good to be away from the metallic town. Ric had gained more weight in the past few years; he panted, wiped his sweat, and sweat bubbled on his forehead again.

“There are tables inside too,” I said.

“Then what’s the point of eating here?”

“You’re right. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I sweat a lot. Don’t worry. I need to lose this!” He grabbed the flesh of his belly in both hands and shook it. “Now tell me. What are we expecting from this disease?”

He said “we,” meaning he was with me, offering his unconditional support.

“I have tuberculosis. It may become worse. And I can get any other disease in the world. Anything. I don’t have an immune system, Ric. My hair is falling out. Soon I’ll itch from head to foot and my stomach will bloat. I’ll lose even more weight.”

“Is there anything we can do to make things better? I mean—”

“There is only one thing. One person.”

“What do you mean?”

“There is a girl I want to propose to.”

“Propose?”

“Don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m not laughing. Go on.”

“This woman, my neighbor—I met her a couple of days ago. She—she—”

“What about her?”

“She is poor. Educated, but poor. Peculiar situation. She is a refugee. Hasn’t found her place yet. She’s struggling.”

“And?”

“You know that I have a sum of money with my mother. The famous inheritance. Remember? I could offer her this money.”

“To marry you?”

“I could offer her this money in exchange for being with me. I don’t want her to nurse me. Most probably I’ll end up in a hospital, or I’ll have to hire a nurse. I just want her to be with me.”

“To live with you, as your wife?”

“Is this too much to ask? She’ll have the money and life will become easy for her after my death. She wants to go back to school, but she can’t afford it.”

“Who is she?”

“A Persian.”

“Oh.”

“Why ‘oh’?”

“I knew a few of them in college. Opinionated girls. Radicals. Of course this was in the seventies. A few years later they went back to Iran to participate in the revolution. They must be dead now. What a pity! All those dark-eyed women.”

“This one is quiet.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not opinionated. Angelic. Big eyes like a deer, soft voice. Kind of shy.”

“But after a couple of days—?”

“I know, I know. I need more time. But I don’t have it, Ric. You understand? If I become very sick, if I begin to stink, who would desire me?”

“Oh, quit this, Madison.”

“All I know is fading away, Ric. All the books I’ve read—the poems. I’m losing my memory.”

“Memory loss doesn’t happen in the early stages, Madison. Stop being negative. Tell me more. What are you planning to do? Offer her money? Isn’t this offensive?”

“Is it?”

“Yup!”

Now we followed the smooth movement of the white boat. Farther in the distance, the water was darker blue and glowed with silver. What a blessing was life on this earth.

“She needs to fall in love with me.”

“Yup. Girls are romantic, Madison. Even the tough ones. They’re all after romance.”

He was right. What could I say? And who could make anyone love anyone?

The waiter stood above our heads with an enormous tray on his shoulder. The plates were big and piled with food. Ric attacked his lobster, broke the joints, sucked the marrow, and licked the shells. He ate with absolute dedication and looked like a mythical monster, a cyclops, feasting on raw meat, juice running down his beard.

“Eat, Madison, eat!”

“I wish I had your appetite.”

“That’s all that’s left for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Eat!”

“How is your son?” I realized that I’d forgotten to ask him about his son.

“At the moment, he’s with his mother.”

“How old is he now?”

“Nineteen. He was here with me. I monitored his medication and gave him a little job at the office. But he left me.”

“He’ll come back home.”

“I live with this feeling that any minute there will be a phone call—to rush to the hospital, or to his funeral.”

“Things are that bad?”

“He has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was in bad shape when he left and his mother is no help. She needs help herself.”

“I’m sorry, Ric.”

“We’ll see. What can I do, huh? Go there and grab a nineteen-year-old and bring him back by force?”

“There is nothing much you can do.”

“You talk about powerlessness. See for yourself. I raised a kid and he turned out crazy. I wanted to help him, but he ran away. He is nineteen, Madison. Tell me, what can I possibly do?”

“Stay on call, Ric, like what you just said. What else can you do?”

We sat in silence for a while. Ric cleaned his teeth with a toothpick and I listened to his wheezing. He was a smoker, but because of me didn’t smoke. What I liked about this man was his absolute lack of superiority. You have a problem, I’m your counselor and I’ll try to help you, but I have a problem too, I’ll share it with you. You talk to me. I talk to you. And he did this because this was the way he was, not the way he made an effort to be.

The boat became a white dot on the horizon and a group of noisy diners sat at the next table—young women, golden arms and shoulders bared for the caresses of the sun. I glanced at them and didn’t desire a single one. They laughed loudly and flirted with the young waiter. I didn’t want to sit there anymore. Ric was annoyed too. He paid the bill.

“Ric, what is your last word for me? What do you suggest?”

“About the girl?”

“Yes, my neighbor.”

“Do you think she’ll like you?”

“Ha, ha—”

“Do your best and don’t mention the money.”

she would fall in love with me if that ugly, unsmiling brat, that fat daughter of hers, who resembled her as much as I resembled Hercules, hadn’t ruined the night. The night, I said? Oh no, my life, my short stay on this earth.

I sat for a long time on that filthy, uncomfortable couch Mr. Thompson had planted in her living room to call the mouse hole “furnished,” and sweated and waited, my hand squeezing the small box in my pocket. She was in the bedroom speaking with her daughter, in their own language, explaining something in a hushed voice. Then they came out and the girl sat on the floor in front of the old TV set with her back to me and began watching something stupid with roars of recorded laughter in the intervals.

“I was preparing some dinner,” she said. “Please stay.”

“Oh, no. I’ve eaten a big meal today. A friend of mine treated me to seafood at the bay.”

We talked this way while she was in and out of the kitchen and the TV was loud and the laughter made me nervous. Now she lay a tray of food in front of the girl and the girl began to eat.

“You look good in tights,” I said. She was wearing black tights, like a ballet dancer, with a long T-shirt hanging over them. It was one of the painted T-shirts, given to her for free at the job, designed with masks of tragedy and comedy and some confetti sprinkled around. Her eyeglasses were large and the thick lenses made her black eyes look even larger. “You look like a French writer,” I added, remembering the image on that forgotten book.

She blushed and went to the kitchen and came back after a few long moments and sat on her desk’s chair, facing me. Either she didn’t know how to take a compliment, or she was very shy. It was not easy to become intimate with such a woman; she escaped each time I made a personal comment. She went in and out of the kitchen, we made small talk, and the girl ate and watched the seemingly comic show without a trace of a smile on her stony face. I couldn’t find the opportunity to take the box out. Now the mother bent her knees to pick up the tray and I noticed something wooden about her back, something I had noticed the first day when she ran toward the bus. Her torso was too erect, as if an iron rod was planted in her spine.

Now she talked about her memoir again and mentioned an old man, a friend of hers, who had encouraged her to begin. Then she said that she had a small Rilke book that she read whenever she was tired of her stupid, tedious job. She talked more, moving back and forth between the memoir and Rilke and her shirt-painting job. I didn’t show any interest in her memoir; in fact, I wasn’t listening very well. Since she had mentioned Rilke, I was trying hard to remember a line or two to impress her, but my memory was blurred and all I recalled were Rilke’s angels and nothing more. I knew that he had written a long poem or a series of poems about angels, and once I used to know a few lines by heart.

“Are you okay?”

“Why?”

“You’re thinking.”

“Oh, the damn poem, all of the damned poems have escaped my mind. I’ve lost my memory.”

“Why?” she asked innocently.

“I didn’t take care of it,” I said and laughed.

Then instead of doing something to make her like me (as Ric Cardinal had suggested), I began to tell her all about my past drug use and my rotten lifestyle in New York. I went into detail about the bars and nightclubs, needles, and even that LSD trip in which demons followed me in a dark maze. With her large eyes that were always wet with fresh tears (they bubbled from a mysterious source within her), she watched me carefully as if measuring the shape of each word coming out of my mouth. She looked sad but stayed friendly—formal and friendly at the same time. After two visits and one dinner and a small stroll under the moonlight, she still called me by my last name.

“You’re not using drugs anymore, Mr. Kirby, huh?”

“Please! Call me Madison. We’re friends now.”

“I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to get used to first names. Back home we don’t call people by their first names, unless we become very close.”

“Then let’s become,” I said and laughed loudly, to suggest that I was joking. This was too much for her because she disappeared into the kitchen again.

“I was telling you stories about my youth. I’m not a drug user now. Don’t be afraid of me,” I yelled, “I’m clean as a baby, my dear.” I yelled because she was in the kitchen and I wanted her to hear me, but the girl, her brat, became irritated, bent forward, and raised the volume on the TV set. This was to let me know that I was distracting her from watching her show.

“This is too loud.” Her mother came out and turned the volume down.

“I can’t hear,” the girl complained in English.

“We can’t talk this way,” the mother said.

Now the girl bounced up and dashed into the bedroom and banged the door. The whole cage of the garage apartment shook and the walls creaked as in an earthquake.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Sorry for what? I can tell that she doesn’t like me. She didn’t like me from day one.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Kirby—”

“Madison.”

“She—she needs time to adjust. She has lost her home, you know? More than once. She cries every night and sulks about everything.”

Now I made the biggest mistake of my life. I said something that changed my future (or whatever was left of it)—that short interval between a life that I hadn’t lived and a death that was final, an interval to which I was trying hard to assign meaning. I led her to her destiny and took myself to my doom. Out of fake sympathy (which I’d always condemned) and a sheer lie (because I didn’t care a bit if the little brat lived or died, went crazy in this wasteland, or survived), I suggested that Roya should take her to a counselor. To show that I was as concerned as a good stepdad would be, I told her that I’d recommend my friend, Ric Cardinal, who was an expert and worked with children. I even added that he was my savior and I respected him more than anyone else in this town.

Hearing this, she sat more relaxed, her stiff back softened, and she sighed a long sigh. Now like a good friend she told me a few stories (in a hushed tone) about her daughter’s strange behavior since they’d set foot in America—her rudeness, disobedience, and compulsive TV watching, which she found “dangerous.” She referred to certain programs that were not appropriate for a twelve-year-old that the little girl watched hungrily every night. I repeated that Ric had experience with teenagers and gave her PAC’s address. When she softened and trusted me, I took the box out of my pocket and offered it to her. She changed colors and stood, ready to run away.

“What is this?”

“Nothing important. Please open it.”

She opened the box, took out one earring, and held it with her thumb and forefinger as if holding a mouse by its tail.

“Oh, no!”

“Why? Didn’t you say you liked it?”

“You shouldn’t have done this. This is expensive and quite unnecessary—” Now she realized that she might have offended me and added, “It’s beautiful, but I can’t accept it.”

“But why? Aren’t we friends?”

“Yes, but I don’t see the reason for this. Maybe it’s a cultural thing. Women don’t accept such gifts without—”

“Without enough intimacy? Well, it’s different here, my dear.” I lied, because I knew very well that here it was the same as anywhere else. You don’t buy a special gift for a neighbor a few days after meeting her.

The girl called her from the bedroom and Roya put the box on the table and left. I sat and waited and the bee circled the chambers of my chest, hitting crazily against the entrance to my heart. Sweat ran down my neck and I stood and decided that if she didn’t come out in a minute I would leave.

As I paced her small living room, a strange feeling overcame me. For the first time I felt a burning anger toward her that bordered on hatred. I thought that if she rejected me, I would never forgive her for denying me a small happiness and comfort that I deserved at the time of my death. Ric Cardinal was wrong, I thought, I should have mentioned the money before anything else. She wasn’t an angel; she wasn’t sent by God; she was a human being and I could buy her, the way thousands of women were bought and sold every day. I was mad and confused and paced in the small living room and heard the constant uproar of the artificial laughter on TV. I felt the whole world was laughing at me. Then I stood in front of her desk and looked at her papers and books. I took the small pocket Rilke and opened it. I read a line or two and couldn’t understand the German words. Didn’t I read German? Didn’t I take five fucking German courses to be able to work on original Heidegger texts? I realized that I had lost almost everything worthy that I’d ever possessed and all that was left of me was spite. Spite. Spite. Envy and spite! I envied this woman now and felt an urge to take her papers—on which strange Persian cursive crawled like a drunk worm—and tear them and throw the pieces in the air like confetti.

She came out and passed by me and went to the kitchen. She didn’t want me here—otherwise she would say something like, “Why did you get up, Mr. Kirby?” I heard her open the refrigerator and pour something and dissolve something in a glass and all the while I waited, pacing the room. At last I went to the kitchen and stood behind her and said, “I think you want me to leave.”

She was startled at first, then turned to me and said, “I’m sorry, Tala is not feeling well. I think she has a fever. The other night she had a fever too. It’s more emotional than physical. I have to go to this counselor tomorrow. Thanks for your help.”

“Yes,” I said and left the kitchen. She followed me to the door and when I was turning the knob she handed me the box of earrings. I took it without a word and stood there looking at it. She waited with that glass of lemonade in her hand.

“Why do you keep your hair so short?” I said, as if this whole awkward situation was because of her hair.

She blushed and unconsciously ran her free hand over her hair. “Why?” she said after a pause.

“It may create misunderstanding, my dear.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You never wear earrings, either. Are you a lesbian?”

I don’t know what had gotten into me. I was spitting venom at her. I wanted to hurt her.

“I don’t understand,” she repeated again.

“Let your hair grow if you don’t want women to approach you. You’re in America now.” I said this and rushed down the dark steps and almost tripped on the last one. •••

outside, the blue light of dusk had gathered in the narrow flowerbed along the brick wall. I stood in the middle of the lot for a long moment, not knowing where to go. I felt lonely and miserable and knew that if I went up to my room the walls would approach me from four sides and the dark shadows would appear to me. I stood and listened to the slow-paced clicks of the old man’s typewriter. The crazy bastard wrote letters to sweepstakes companies hoping to win something. His room was full of junk—plastic toys, knickknacks, and useless gadgets. I stood and listened to his absurd clicks and the sky rapidly became darker. Then I turned my back to our ugly apartments and exited the parking lot.

I sat on the bench of the bus stop for hours and recited “The Ship of Death,” then I repeated it when it ended. “Have you built your ship of death, O have you?” I was empty of everything except a massive pity for myself. I was swelled up with air like that stupid gorilla on top of the tower, who banged his chest and assumed importance. Who was I anyway? And in what way would my death make any difference for anyone? Who cared if today I was here and tomorrow not?

Night had fallen. The summer sky was white and the earth was black. A breeze brushed the gulf and sent the smell of salt into the city and I sat and looked up at the oaks across the street thinking that they’d soon burn and die in the merciless heat. The street was vacant now and the gray asphalt shone. Only a few cars passed by and I heard their swish and followed their taillights and counted them like a child amusing himself. Now it was silent again and I heard somewhere far away a rooster’s cry tearing the night apart. This was a solitary rooster in the heart of the city and I could hardly believe that there were people who still kept roosters in their yards. My grandmother had a rooster in her yard in Llano whose alarming calls woke me at dawn every summer morning. I waited to hear more, but this untimely rooster didn’t sing again and I doubted its existence. Now millions of cicadas sang in the nearby bayou and this was not my imagination. Waters were awake in this city all night and only the daytime heat put them to rest.

I sat this way for a while until the breeze swept a sour odor onto my face and the smell of rot and decay turned my stomach. This was poisonous vapor—gas and sulfur. A minute ago, I almost admired the night, the white sky, the silent waters of the many bayous, the cicadas’ fuss, and now this deadly odor brought me back home. I looked for a kerchief in my pocket to cover my nose when an old beaten Dodge, once navy blue, now grayish and dented, occupied by teenagers, slowed down in front of me. All four windows were open and the stereo pumped out rap music, shattering the quiet night. A black boy stuck his head out and sang with the rapper in an angry animation, hands moving in the air, pointing to the sky, to himself, then to me.

“Tonight is your night / Your neck looks just right / Die, die, die, die, white man!” Now with a sudden gesture he turned his long arm into a machine gun, rattled with his mouth, and pierced me with hundreds of hot bullets. The bastard executed me. A cold sweat sat on my forehead and my body became hollow and numb.

“Hey, staying up tonight?” The boy, Bobby Palomo, always caught me when I was feeling the worst.

“This city is infested with worms,” I said, pointing to the speeding Dodge. “Worms, worms, multiplying worms!”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. They just shot me.”

“They’re pretty dangerous, man,” he said and laughed. “They beat up our busboy one night. They didn’t even know him. I guess it was an initiation ritual. You know what I mean?”

Bobby leaned his bike against the bench and sat before I invited him. He wore a greasy apron and smelled of kitchen sink and I thought that he wasn’t a waiter, he was a dishwasher or something, lying to everyone, boasting.

“How was work tonight?” I asked.

“Slow.” He yawned and lit a cigarette. “Do you mind?”

“Blow your smoke away from me. I have asthma.”

“I’m taking the little lady to my restaurant tomorrow,” he said.

“Which little lady?”

“Our neighbor,” he said. “She’s working all day, painting these funny T-shirts, and she is not making anything. I guess they pay her below minimum wage. And she has a master’s degree too. Did you know that?”

“That degree is worth nothing here. What do you mean by taking her to your restaurant?”

“To wait on tables.”

“I don’t think she can work as a waitress.”

“Why? Her eyeglasses, you mean? I told her she needs a pair of contact lenses. Appearance is everything.”

“She is cold and stiff. Awkward.”

“I agree. She could use a little smile.”

“And her accent,” I said.

“Well, to tell you the truth, that’s a plus in our business. Accent helps. I know a guy who has dark hair and mustache, he pretends to be Italian. He’s a manager at Café Angelo. His name is Brian, but all the customers call him Bruno. He fakes an accent. It’s funny.”

“Everybody lies in this city. Worms, worms.”

“Pah—what did you think? The real cheaters are up there!” He pointed to the top of the Transco Tower, where the gorilla stood.

“She can’t be a good waitress.” I wanted to talk about her. I had this urge to sit there until morning and trash her like an old village gossip. “She won’t be able to handle it,” I added.

“Well, let’s give her a chance.” He was silent for a long moment, then he said, “Hey, listen, do you know she’s spent some time in prison?”

“What prison?”

“In her country. She told me that she was a political prisoner. They tortured her. They killed her brother, then let her go.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I thought you were friends.”

“It seems she’s more friends with you. She told me about her brother but not herself.”

“I’ve got to go now,” he said. “I’ve got to do my runs around the block.”

“Now?”

“I need to exercise. I need to move.”

“Are you on drugs?”

“What?”

“Taking pills? Speed?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Be careful, son. I’ve been there too.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He biked toward home and I kept sitting, wondering why I called him “son.” Had I become old enough to call young men “son”? Then all of a sudden a rush of hot blood pumped into my heart and I felt feverish. The poor girl had been tortured and I’d acted like a selfish bastard. I’d insulted her only because she didn’t pay enough attention to me. How could I undo what I’d done? How could I apologize and give myself another chance? But again, she had shared this important secret with a boy, with this little neighbor, and stupid me had thought that she had volunteered a lot of information to me. She had never trusted me and when she’d begun to feel a bit more relaxed, I’d ruined everything by offering her the fucking earrings and then insulting her. I hated myself, felt mad at her and jealous of Bobby Palomo; I regretted that I’d recommended Ric Cardinal and felt absolutely miserable. Was I in love? Or did I lust after her? Wasn’t love just the fancy name for sex? Oh, I wanted her and needed her as I’d never needed a woman in my life. I could kiss her for hours and suck her life out. I could press my body against her and dissolve into her. Yes, I was desperately in love and in a wrong time of my life—when my hair was falling out and invisible hands pushed me out. Where was she when I was young? Where was she when I was in my sweet summer?

i slept only a few hours that night and woke at four o’clock in absolute horror. My chest burned and I panted, as if I’d run a long distance. The images of a dream passed through my head and I sat on the edge of my bed, unable to move. I was a boy of eight or nine, visiting my grandmother’s house in Llano. The house was even bigger than it is in reality and I saw all nine dim rooms and the bathroom with a yellow lion-clawed tub. There was a veranda opening to a garden on a hill, but the garden was wild and all kinds of trees had grown in tangled chaos. At the bottom of the hill a river ran in its stone bed. The water was transparent and glowed like silver. I saw myself running down the hilly garden, looking for my father. When I reached the river I stopped. There was a huge magnolia tree, heavy with large blossoms. I plucked as many as I could and held them in my arms. I wanted to find my father and give him the flowers. Then, for no reason, I went to the edge of the river and began to throw the blossoms in the water. But each one that landed on the water turned into a piece of excrement and this way the river’s silvery water became blurred and yellow. I had contaminated the river and ruined it forever.

Looking at my thin legs hanging from the bed, I thought about this strange dream and its symbols. The river was my life. I had soiled it. Magnolia was my intense love for my father and then for Roya, and it was my first present to her. But I’d turned the heavenly blossoms into excrement. All I had done in my life—all, all . . . was human waste floating on a rushing river, turning pure water into an open sewer.

Day Four

She hid from me for a week and I didn’t even see her shadow behind the window. The blinds were down. I knew that she had two jobs now—came from the painting job, changed, and went to the restaurant. As for the little girl, she was left to herself, alone. One morning I saw her going to Bobby’s apartment. I spied on her and the second day I saw her again behind Bobby Palomo’s window. She was a child, but was growing small buds of breasts and was capable of sex and Bobby (if not a faggot) was definitely capable of fucking her. So I thought that warning the mother like a good old friend would be just that appropriate move to restore my reputation. I waited patiently to see her. But I saw her only twice and at wrong moments. Once, early in the morning I went to the bus stop to see her, but Mr. Thompson was there and she was complaining to him about her air conditioner. When Thompson left, her bus came, she ran toward it, and ignored me. The second time I saw her with her daughter, both carrying heavy grocery bags. I couldn’t talk in front of the girl. I said “hi” from my window and she said “hi” back.

Then I didn’t see her for a few more days and early morning fevers prevented me from going to the bus stop. I didn’t feel well these days and now I was not sure which pain was real and which imaginary. I had joint pain, fever, chills, head-splitting headaches, and I vomited at least once a day. I was ill like hell and needed to see the doctor.

After the usual exam Dr. Haas informed me that I had lost more weight, then she invited me to the hospital’s smelly cafeteria. I’m not sure why this woman paid special attention to me. I was one of her ten AIDS patients and I was sure she didn’t invite all of them to lunch. She bought me food—turd-shaped smelly meatloaf—which turned my stomach and we sat surrounded by people as miserable as myself. A young girl in a blue gown, with a shaven head the size and color of a cantaloupe, held an older woman’s hand and they prayed with their eyes shut. An old couple sat at the opposite table and the man spoon-fed the old lady like a baby. A TV set hung on the wall, showing a soap opera. On the screen a tall, blond woman, a bit chubby for the kind of dress she wore—a shimmering gold gown—argued with a younger woman, a brunette in black. They waved their hands and shouted. The blond wiped her tears. The commotion was about a man, who appeared in the next scene, wearing a white trench coat, smoking in the rain. I was immersed in the show. The volume was not high enough to be able to hear the dialogue clearly and I had to imagine it.

“Why are you so quiet, Madison?” Marlina Haas asked.

A nurse pushed a bald child on a wheelchair and planted him next to our table. The kid was yellow and in his thin pale face a pair of large blue eyes glowed with life.

“How do you feel, Madison?” Dr. Haas asked.

“I’m willing to die, Doctor.”

“Nonsense.” She gulped her coffee and took a big bite of her cheesecake. “No one is willing to die.”

“I am.”

“I’m using your poem, Madison.”

“My poem?”

“The poem you gave me once. That D. H. Lawrence poem. I’m using it.”

“What do you mean, using it?”

“I’m doing a painting of it. The Ship of Death, that’s what my painting is called.”

“I didn’t know you painted that well.”

“I don’t know how good it is, but it makes me happy.”

“Good for you, Doc.”

“I want you to see it some day. There is this stormy black water with people drowning in it. The ship is waiting. I’m standing on the deck.”

“Why did you put yourself there? You’re not dying.”

“How do you know?”

“You say you’re sick, but I don’t think you’re dying.”

Marlina Haas laughed; her lipless mouth opened like a large hole. “Do I look any better than, let’s say, a few months ago?”

I glanced at her reluctantly. She was less than one hundred pounds, a dried-up plum, emaciated, shrunken, and jaundiced. Clumsily, she’d covered the red spots on her cheeks with a white powder. Her eyes were circular holes, open in eternal wonder. A larger scar, fresh and crimson, like an Indian mole, sat between her eyebrows.

“So why are you so quiet? Do I look better?”

She looked worse than ever. She was Death personified and belonged on the deck of that damned ship. But in a low voice I said, “You won’t die, Doctor.”

“No, I won’t, because I defy gravity. I’m taking dance classes. Ballet. The real thing.”

“You’re telling me to take ballet?”

“Why not? There is this fifty-year-old professor, this physicist who wears a leotard and stands at the barre with us. He bends and rises on his toes; he moves with the music. He’s a sight!”

“He’s out of his mind. I know his type—these crazy academics. I’ve lived with them all my life.”

“I don’t think he’s crazy. He told me walking on a treadmill bored him to death. This way he’s doing his cardiovascular while enjoying some Chopin. They have live music at the Houston Ballet.”

“I’m not interested in music.”

“You were talking to me about Wagner once. You impressed me with your knowledge.”

“Does it mean that I listen to music?”

“Who are you angry at, Madison?” she suddenly asked. “Yourself? God? It’s not that I don’t understand. When I lost everything because of this untimely disease, I was angry. I couldn’t find anyone or anything to be mad at. There was no one except myself. I hated myself and thought that I’d done something awful. You know what I mean?”

“But in my case, Doc, I have done something awful. I’ve contaminated my life.”

“No one knew what AIDS was back then, when you shared needles. Which means you shouldn’t blame yourself. The first cases of HIV were reported in 1981. And it wasn’t public news. Now let me finish. When I hated myself, I decided to change my life. I began painting. I took dance classes. I hadn’t touched my flute since I was in high school. I began to play again. I joined group therapy. We talk.”

“Oh, Doctor. Please!”

“Do you want to join us?”

“You’re a bunch of professionals with a streak of bad luck in your privileged lives. Who am I? Huh? A former night watchman. A marginal person. A bum. And now I’m being pushed out. That’s it. No, thanks, Doc. I don’t need group therapy and I don’t dance.” I spat all this out and stood up to leave.

“No one asked you to dance, Madison. You cannot dance.”

“No, Doc. I cannot. And I hate music. But I did something for myself last week. You want to hear it?”

“Sit down and tell me.” She plucked at my sleeve to make me sit.

“It’s not worth sitting. It’s not really a story. Nothing like you see up there.” I pointed at the TV screen. “I screwed up the possibility of a relationship.”

“Oh—” She covered her mouth like a little girl.

“Yes, oh. Indeed, oh. I’ve always been like this, Doc. I don’t know how to treat women. I say something that hurts their feelings and turns them off. You want to hear a side story? When I was in grad school, I had a real girlfriend for the first time. I mean a steady one. Her name was Cindy. She became pregnant and we were both confused for a couple of months. Until she went and got rid of the baby and I went to visit her in the hospital. I was sensitive enough to buy her some flowers. I sat there by her bed, held her hand, and told her that I was happy that we’d got rid of the problem, that we were alone again. That was the last thing I ever told her because she didn’t want to see me anymore. I turned her off somehow. Now this woman—my neighbor—I bought her a present and went to her place to give it to her. When she rejected my gift, I called her a lesbo and stormed out.”

“Madison, you were angry at something.”

“Angry at that unsmiling, suspicious-looking brat of hers who clings to her mother like a leech. Angry at the woman’s books and her stupid memoir on that ridiculous door sitting on orange crates. Angry at her beauty, her innocence, her muscled thighs—yeah, I was angry. See you later, Doc.” I left and on my way stood close to the hanging TV for a second. The young man in the white trench coat and the young woman in black were kissing in the rain. The plump blond woman watched them from an upstairs window, wiping her tears.

“Don’t you realize they’re feeding you shit? They feed you shit from morning to night,” I said loudly to the people and left.

i decided to see Roya and apologize. So I went to her place later that day and knocked. I could hear Vivaldi’s Four Seasons playing on a cheap portable stereo. The little brat opened the door without asking who it was or looking through the peephole. Through the wide-open door I saw my Persian in her black tights, head on the floor, legs up in the air, against the wall. She looked like a sharp arrow sent by gods, piercing the ground. She saw me from her upside-down position and jumped on her legs like a cat.

“I’m so sorry to bother you—”

“It’s okay. I’m exercising—for my back.” She stood in the frame of the door, slightly panting. She didn’t invite me in.

“I need to talk to you for a second.”

“Can we talk some other time?” she asked. She was definitely cold. Cold as a corpse. Dead and gone.

“It’s important and it’s not about me.” I said this to relieve her.

“Okay. Could you wait for me downstairs? I’ll come down in a minute. We can talk in the parking lot.”

She didn’t want me in her apartment anymore and this was as clear as daylight. I went down and stood in the middle of the hot lot like an idiot. The afternoon sun was strong and my head was bare.

She came down and we walked toward the bus shelter. The woman with the bundle sat on the bench looking through the binoculars of her fingers, murmuring something under her breath. We sat next to her. The merciless heat of June brought the rotten stench of death out of the woman’s flesh. This was the worst setting for my purpose. But how could I change my damn fate?

“It’s hot here. Can we go in?”

“Please tell me what you want to talk about. I have only a short time to get ready for my second job.”

“I wanted to talk to you about your daughter. Did you see the counselor?”

“Yes. But what is it you want to say?”

“I saw her in Bobby Palomo’s apartment. It’s not good. You get me? How old is she? Twelve? Thirteen?”

“Twelve.” She paused. “She was in Bobby’s apartment?”

“Yes. At least twice.”

“Thank you.” She got up.

“I’m very much concerned about you and your daughter. This is America. You get me? It seems that you trust everybody.”

“Bobby is a good boy. I rely on my gut feelings a lot.” When she said, “gut feelings,” she put the flat of her palm on her belly. “Something tells me that Bobby is a good boy. He helps us. I’m sure they chat or play.”

“Play? Bobby is twenty years old!”

“I know. I’m not saying it’s all right. I’ll talk to Tala. But I’m sure it’s nothing like what you imagine.”

She began walking toward home and I followed her like a dog, panting. Now she thought I had dirty thoughts about her daughter. She had a gut feeling that Bobby was good and I was bad. How else could I interpret this coldness?

“I just felt that I should tell you.”

“Thanks,” she said coldly.

“I’m sorry about that night.”

“Which night?” She stopped in the middle of the burning parking lot.

“The earrings and all—”

“Oh. It’s not that I don’t wear earrings. I’m dealing with so many problems right now. We have a hard life. No time for earrings.” She said this and entered the building.

“I know. I know.” I said this before she closed the screen door on me. “It was a bad time. Can you forget?”

“Forget what?”

“What I said about your hair. I was a bit upset.”

She laughed behind the screen door, banged it, and ran up the steps. I couldn’t see her from where I was. The afternoon was too bright and I saw black spots in front of my eyes; I had to go home before I passed out.

now each day I dreaded the coming night. Days passed more easily, because I spent them at the hospital, cafés, and bus stops. In the long afternoons I took short naps in my bedroom, but at night I was frightened of the house. Shadows and shapes danced around and between the unpacked boxes, and I knew that they were my old enemies who appeared at each turning point of my life. I sat sleepless on my bed looking at the dusty kitchen table covered with unwashed dishes, medicine bottles, and yellowing newspapers. I murmured that morbid poem in delirium.

Then a day came when the moon covered the sun and the sky darkened as if it were doomsday. I sat next to the dark woman and we watched the pale disc, the sun-moon, for hours. She whispered meaningless words and talked to the sun and the moon that were one and neither and I kept her company. I was used to her stench—the odor of death.

The days after the eclipse I sat on the same bench and watched the silent radiance of the sun and dreaded another eclipse. I knew that it wouldn’t happen again in my lifetime but I couldn’t stop the choking fear. Bobby Palomo joined me most of the nights. We chatted and strolled toward the apartments. He urged me to get some sleep and went to run around the block. I didn’t accuse him of drug use anymore. He was anorexic, I decided. He wanted to burn the fat he didn’t have.

He told me more about Roya. She had been a gymnast before she was arrested. Her back was injured when they hung her in that jail and she could never do gymnastics again. These days, he said, she was suffering from back pain again.

“Did you say they hung her?” I asked.

“Upside down,” Bobby said. “From her feet. Her ligaments are pulled.”

I didn’t mention Bobby’s visits with Tala. I didn’t really care what went on between the kids. I even secretly wished he’d do something stupid and put himself and the mother and the girl in big trouble so that I could tell the woman, “Didn’t I warn you?”

And they did something stupid, but not what I was thinking. More horrible? Less? It depends on the interpretation of the incident. It happened on the Fourth of July, but before that I talked to my cold angel one more time, and that was when I poured everything out on the table (literally on my dusty table). But let me start from the beginning of that endless day.

Day Five

A tall, bald doctor entered the room, introduced himself, and informed me that my doctor was hospitalized. After the examination, I rushed to find Marlina Haas. I’m not sure why I felt the way I did. Maybe because I’d never acknowledged her illness. Maybe because I’d been unkind to her, ungrateful; or simply because she was my only caretaker. Who cared for me in this world except this jaundiced woman? What if she should die? What if she should leave me orphaned in the short life left for me?

I found her room on the thirteenth floor and the nurses didn’t let me in. I insisted. They said she was sleeping. I said that I just wanted to leave a note next to her bed—I was her patient. They looked at my yellow face and let me in.

She was sleeping soundly on a narrow bed, a hose running into her nose, her twig-like arms resting on her sides, ending at wide, thick-veined hands. Her knuckles were large and knotted, her nails short and dried up—a working man’s hands. I gazed at her for a long moment and thought that she was dying. I didn’t want the bald doctor to see me. I wanted Marlina back. Now I had this urge to touch her head where pink scalp showed. I saw specks of paint on her short hair—blue and red. This meant that she had been taken to the hospital when she was painting. I looked at her chapped lips, half open in wonder, and the dried blood that smeared at the corner of her mouth. Could I kiss that bloody spot? I gazed at the fresh, open blisters spattering her face. I sighed and murmured, “The voyage of oblivion awaits you, Marlina, so build your ship of death, oh, build it!”

I glanced out the window and saw the window of another hospital. A woman wearing a black scarf bent over someone’s bed. She either sprinkled water on the person or threw white petals. Jasmine? Then she lay her head on the body and didn’t rise again. Now with an unusual clarity, as if under the influence of a drug, I saw myself in 1978 sitting in my small cubicle in the library of the University of Texas, reading Heidegger. I recalled the philosopher’s long-forgotten words. “Dasein,” I repeated. Being there. Being-in-the-world. I am, therefore I think. And anxiety comes when one realizes that anything one does has already been defined for him in advance by “The One.” And then, “Fallen-ness” comes and that’s when one cannot bear the possibility of the “Nothing,” of being pushed out of life, out of being.

A short, bald man, a librarian, knocked on the window and called me out. From the library I went to the scene of the accident, where my father’s car had fallen down a cliff. They had cleared the bodies, but the car was there. Bodies, I say, because he was not alone. They’d found a naked girl—not a woman, not a secretary or a middle-aged clerk, but a girl, and not a mature graduate student, but a young girl, a freshman out of high school—they’d found an underaged freshman in his car, wearing almost nothing. The old rat was having a secret affair with a girl-child.

I took my mother to the morgue that evening and we sat watching him in his coffin until all the candles burnt. His face looked innocent, like when he had recited Shakespeare for me with tears in his eyes. Mother wept calmly and steadily in her white handkerchief.

Fallen. Fallen-ness. Pushed out of life. My life. Father. Dad. Oh, Dad, what had I done to you? Huh? What?

I sobbed for my long-dead father and for myself, then took the small box of earrings out of my pocket and left it on Marlina’s pillow with a little note: “Get well and dance, Doc! And paint the whole world!”

the rest of the day I walked aimlessly around the Houston streets. I walked like a madman in the heat of June when even the homeless sought shelter and poor dark maids held umbrellas over their heads. I walked until the sun slipped behind tall glass towers. I was a mourner all over again, as if it was yesterday that I had lost my father. I recalled his image in the open coffin and Marlina’s on the narrow bed and tears gathered in my eyes. I sat on a bench to watch the falling sun.

There are certain locations in Houston where swallows gather in the hundreds, soar above treetops, sit on them, fly in different directions, almost collide with each other, then vanish. Before you know it, they appear again in the hundreds. Bell Park on Montrose Avenue is one of these mysterious spots. I thought either these birds were playing, or they were lost. Sometimes they sat on a treetop, absolutely motionless, as if thinking, as if having a silent conference, then flew away. Then I remembered “The Conference of the Birds” by Attar of Nayshabour, a Persian Sufi poet I had read many years ago. I tried to remember the story, but I couldn’t. I left the darkening park, fearing the shadows that approached me.

On the bus going home, I decided to talk with Roya and tell her the truth. I practiced the sentences in my head over and over to pick the best one: “Look, I’m dying, stay with me for a little while,” or “I won’t bother you for long, stay with me,” or “Roya, I can relieve you of all this work. You can get your degree. Just stay with me for a short time. I’m dying.” I noticed that in each phrase I repeated, “Stay with me,” and “I’m dying.” This pleading tone disgusted me. I needed to think more. When I saw the sign of Saint Ann’s Catholic Church from the window, I got off. I needed to speak to God.

I hadn’t been in a church since I was a child and I felt awkward. The chapel was empty. It didn’t feel like a holy place. I could hear the uproar of laughter from a classroom behind the wall. In the school yard children played and screamed with joy. I knelt and prayed. I stared at the wounded body of Christ on the cross and murmured in delirium, “O Lord. You’re granting me my deserved death. A dying that will come slow, but soon, and will extinguish my life—an empty life, insignificant, on hold. What am I, my Lord? But a husk, a leaf? The great death will lift me, but it won’t take me that high.”

I wept and didn’t mention Roya.

In an early evening nap I dreamed of her for the first time. She uncovered me and lay on top of me. She was there to offer me solace. God had sent her to me. There was no doubt. She kissed my face and neck, then rubbed my body to warm me up. I was a cold corpse and she touched me with her benevolent hands. Now she put her mouth on my mouth and blew her breath into my body. I breathed with her and we breathed together in a rhythm that led to ecstasy. I moaned and she moaned, little breathy moans, and this way I was not scared anymore. I awoke and found myself surrounded by the shapes and shadows. They were visiting me again. I rushed out of the house.

I sat on the bench of the bus stop and waited. Going home from the restaurant she would pass by me. I was in flames; my evening fever had risen up. I sat and sat and sat but she didn’t come. At midnight, Bobby Palomo pedaled toward me.

“Hey, Madison, how do you feel tonight?”

“Not good. Fever.”

“Did you take anything? Your medication?”

He had grown into the habit of acting like a son, seeing me as an old father.

“Yes.”

“Is it worse?”

“What?”

“Your fever?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.” He lay his bike against the bench and sat. He took a cigarette out but didn’t light it.”

“Where is she?” I said.

“Who?”

“Roya.”

“Didn’t I tell you? They fired her. My manager, this bastard Tony, fired her a few days ago. But, fortunately, she found another job. They’ve opened a sidewalk café downtown. One of our waitresses took her there.”

“Downtown?”

“Yeah. A real cool place. Right in front of the Alley Theater. If I didn’t make such good money here, I’d go there too. But the customers know me here and tip me well.”

“How does she get home from downtown?”

“I don’t know. Haven’t thought about it.”

“What about her girl?”

“Oh, you know? One good thing about this café is that she can take the girl with her. She sits there in a corner, I guess. It’s a sidewalk, it’s not really a restaurant.”

“A sidewalk.”

“Yeah. Hey, Madison, you’re really hooked on her, huh?”

“Hooked?”

“So to speak. Don’t be offended.”

“What else has she told you?”

“About what?”

“Anything about me?”

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

“Come on. Why would I lie to you? Why would she say anything about you?”

“Does she know that I’m ill?”

“She hasn’t mentioned it. But I guess everybody knows.”

“Everybody?”

“It’s okay, buddy. Cheer up. You’ll get better and feel fine.”

“Shut up!”

“You’re in a bad mood, man. Need some food?” He pointed to a plastic bag hanging on the handlebar of his bike.

“No, I don’t need food. Go!”

“Don’t you want to walk home with me?”

“No. Not tonight.”

“It’s kind of late.”

“Go, boy. Go!”

She came past midnight. An old Chevy dropped her off and a young man behind the wheel said something and she laughed. A loud burst. The man yelled, “See you tomorrow, Lola!” She laughed again and said, “Roya, not Lola! See you tomorrow, Carlos.” Her daughter was not with her (the poor bastard was alone again—the wretched brat). She didn’t look at the bench and passed. She wore a short black skirt and a white shirt and walked awkwardly, almost limping. She was afraid of the night, and wanted to walk faster, but she couldn’t. I followed her. She reached the screen door and I approached her before she opened it.

“Isn’t it a bit too late for a young lady to come home?”

“Ah!” She gasped and grabbed her chest. I’d startled her. “Is that you, Mr. Kirby?”

“I was taking my night walk.”

“I work, you know?” she explained. “I work at the Sidewalk Café.”

“The sidewalk? What an appropriate place!”

I was spitting venom again. She must have blushed in the dark. She pulled the screen door to enter.

“Did I offend you again?”

“It’s late, Mr. Kirby. I have to go up. Tala is alone.”

“The girl is sleeping now. I need to talk to you.”

“About her?”

“No, about me.”

“I’m sorry. I have a backache, Mr. Kirby—”

“Madison. Madison.” I repeated my name loudly like a madman.

“It’s late,” she said desperately. “My back hurts.”

“Come with me.”

“Where?”

“To my apartment. I just want to talk to you. We can&rsqu