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Peter sits in his seat, propped up as stiff as the corpse
in the passenger seat in a Dashiell Hammett mystery.
He tries to cross his legs, but catches his tennis shoe
on the metal frame beneath the seat in front of him.
What’re you thinking, kid? he asks himself, doing Bogart,
How are you going to cross your legs
with this huge sack of meat sitting next to you?
The plane lifts off, but the smell of bodies
and dry, forced air leaves his mind on the ground.
It is that afternoon and this is the smell he steps into
after knocking at the door to Marjorie’s old guest bedroom.
With an IV, a cot, and a view of the park, this is the room
where Marjorie has gone to die.
She used to paint pictures of hands
emerging from people’s brains, large canvases of saturated color,
portraits of suburbanites with headdresses of fingers and palms.
Now the cancer has shrunk her body, and it seems like a child’s limbs
that are moving beneath the blanket. Her withered fingers
pull the blanket’s edge, and one stockinged foot emerges
at the base of the cot.
“See who has come to visit you?”
Her husband asks gently, pushing Peter forward,
palm to the small of his back. Her eyes stray from the ceiling
and fix for a moment on Peter’s face.
“Oh. You? Nice to.
Nice to see you.”
She is underwater, and words
bubble out of her slowly, rising through blue distances
before they reach the surface and pop.
Her eyes wander away again. The thread holding her to her body
is stretched thin. With her withered limbs and shaved head,
she looks like the Jews at Auschwitz liberated by GIs,
skeletons in taut skins, eyes too large for their heads,
grasping American chocolate bars as the soldiers lead them
from the camp. The nurse widens her eyes a little
and tilts her head ever so slightly toward the door.
She mouths the words, It’s time. As he leaves the room,
Marjorie asks, “How’s Bo. How’s Bogart? Kid.”
The computer store manager next to him is saying,
“I come from a long line of crazies and idiots.
My great grandfather is an author, like you, he wrote a book
--I have it at home--called Crossing the Sahara with a Wheelbarrow,
for God’s sake! Now what kind of home life would push a man
into a wacky trip like that?”
What would push a man to stay at home
and stare into the abyss while stars fly by like snowflakes
on the screensaver. What makes him follow a line of words
across the page like a hiker tracing a stream back to its source?
You think you’re somebody, Hemingway asks, huh, bright boy?
Turbulence begins to shake the cabin, and he pictures fathers
shaking crying infants until their tiny necks snap.
“Can’t trust the air up here, I guess,” the captain’s voice says
on the intercom. “Please remain seated, and fasten your seat belts.”
“Here we are, a couple of gimps sitting next to each other.
What are the chances?” the manager says heartily, with a mushy grin.
He gestures at the braces on Peter’s wrists, where the nerve network
blacked out halfway through his last celebrity bio.
What are the chances of reaching this age without being a gimp,
blowing out a disk with one sneeze, discovering strange,
but usually not fatal, lumps in your testicles, melanomas on your skin?
Peter shivers at a sudden sense-memory of the night
when he and Marjorie went on for twelve hours, slowly,
with the help of Vaseline. They were twenty and nineteen
and it was their only time. He would leave for New York
the next morning, manuscripts in hand, and they were
making love against time. After twenty, though,
the body begins to die, its function in the world completed.
It is a hormone or something, some kind of genetic time bomb,
that makes bones thin out, cells cease to replicate.
Clearing the way for the next generation to breed.
None of you are getting out of here alive, Cagney snaps,
with his best sneer. Peter had done a tele-biography of Cagney,
and could do a passable imitation when called upon.
Of course, these days fewer people caught the reference.
“Is that Daffy Duck?” his eight-year-old had asked him.
If he gives up typing, brushing his teeth, and video games,
the doctor said, he might get back enough strength
to grip a glass of water and lift it in one hand.
You learn to take it in stride. He thinks of Marjorie’s husband
leaning his shoulders against the wall and asking “How is your nice wife?”
Over his head a pair of blue hands spread like buzzard wings.
He is very calm, has seen too much to allow this day’s ordinary
disaster to touch him. Better to parcel emotions out slowly,
save them for when they’ll be really needed.
Leaving the room, Peter and the nurse are weeping.
Marjorie’s husband turns away and stands by the picture window.
“You’re a good friend,” the nurse says, and Peter responds
in a swollen voice, “No, please don’t say that.”
The turbulence is getting really bad. Objects are shifting
in the overhead, and the body of the plane is creaking.
“Shaken, not stirred,” his neighbor jokes worriedly,
then spills his Seagrams and 7-Up over his lap
with a slurred “Goddamn Hell!”
A darkened fire flickering
through clouds below suggests drowned cities, ghosts in the sky.
Invisibly, the body of the wind shifts beneath the cloud-cover,
which thins like pulled cotton and bunches up again
as light leaps and falters, then metastasises
to another part of the sky.
He closes his eyes and lets the jet
shoot him through night sky like an arrow, tries to imagine
the wind of passage, to fall through the weightless space
behind his eyes without worrying about destinations,
landing gear emerging or failing to emerge
from his torso. He imagines that if he could
just stay perched on the edge of this moment
without falling off there would be no end
at the end of the story, the story would stretch out
forever, pages turning and turning on the wind.
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