Irving Feldman

to Pete Foss, God give him good berth! Shipped deckhand June of ’fifty-one aboard the freighter Willis Kerrigan,

Here or there hundreds of them, phantom-like, bobbing in place at street corners, then lifting their knees suddenly and leaping into the densest, loudest traffic (of briefest trajectories, of shortest views), in transit yet at ease, breathing, loping, like bearers of distance and pure direction, darting half naked out of nowhere and where, where in the world are they running to? swift and solitary, silent beings who, should you now step into the path, have dodged away, or, if you raise a hand to stay them to speak, immediately are gone: who are these runners who create in their gliding such fine, singular spaces among the street’s vociferous jargons? —as if each one were a still, wordless message or question one would answer if one could grasp it, this one, that one, sliding past, going away, while you stand there, your hand raised to no purpose, your hidden heart rejoicing that the quick heel won’t soon, won’t ever, be overtaken, although you, as you have longed to, suddenly disburden yourself and follow follow.

I set out now in a box upon the sea.

1 He got taken quick. Then he hung around. And anyway, he never really wanted to be anywhere he was—so why not? Then from out there and for years the prodigal wrote back to them—indolent letters, lying about jobs, a wife he found, kids they had. Things he used to hear people talking about. He never even bothered to make it up. Or tried to keep his stories straight. His wife? A harem of hair colors. Kids fizzed up like bugs, then fizzled out. Well, that’s the way his life was, in pieces. Sometimes his head flashed on something fat and beautiful. He watched it shoot by. Then he listened for the crash. Mostly, he was in the dark, drifting. And, within limits, less of a chump. He walked away from a lot of stuff. There were some things he did. This and that. Lucky, real dirty work never came looking. Once he dumped a woman. Later she dumped him back. That’s how the game was played out there, where he was. So that was that. Well, just say he was down on his luck. Or starting now to get it together. Or he was taking things one day at a time. Sure, one day at a time—for years on end. One more also-ran playing out the string. Or, staring straight ahead, out of the blue he’d tell whoever was drinking alongside him, Don’t look back, champ, your crap could be gaining. To which—years later—he took to adding, And don’t look up—you could be overtaking the next guy’s you-know-what . . . (Solo guffaws.) So, what did they think of him, out there? Joke. Embarrassment. Eyesore. Take your pick. But how could it matter what anyone said in that rasping, hissing, clanging tongue of theirs? To tell the truth, since he’d first come to their country he hadn’t heard a thing that stuck to his bones. Then every once in a while he sat down and wrote. 2 His words returned—in another’s hand: everyday things people put in their letters, and howlers only a mother would believe, and reassuring fluff about the weather, as if sun were sun, and his rain, like theirs, could fill the cistern and make green things grow. And here they were, grinning back at him, every pitiful, dumb phrase he wrote, copied over like a holy scripture in his mother’s homespun penmanship that made his snarled, uncontrollable scrawl round and plan and easy to read. Her ABCs were good enough to eat —bits of dough she’d squeezed, patted, baked slowly in the little oven of her hands and strung into necklaces of script. But if he read those letters at all, his eyes scribbled some glare before he fed the page, balled up, to the dark, muttering demon of trash chained in the corner, when, drunk or stoned, he plummeted straight down —with the bulb he never extinguished burning above his swollen, already aging face. 3 And then. And then. And then. And then no letter came back. And soon no letter went forward. Why listen now to people talking? The demon settled into self-consumption. And everything was still. Dust silted over the phantom children he’d never wanted anyhow; at the end of its rainbow his wife’s hair came to rest on red—forever; their house faded in the manuscripts. Though old now, he was still a son —though no one’s son. A promise, then, without witnesses anywhere to say if the promise had been kept or not kept. But didn’t he, having no lands, no house, no wife, no child, no works, didn’t he know what he had done with his heritage? Then let their silence mute the judgment, hush the accusation against him! And now this little corner where he sat need be no worse than any other little corner of the universe. 4 And then one day a witness came forward —from an old pair of pants, from the pocket. An old piece of paper. Wrinkled. Worn. Smudged with the dregs of big numbers. And under their blur, in palest blue —blue of the veins of a vanished wrist— his mother’s hand at its homework was being true to the words it found. But there, between the words, in the smeared void he saw his sentence spelled out. Of his waste life: pain. Of falsity: pain. It was a lash. A lifeline.His lifeline —flung out to him, laid on his hands,in his hand. With a pencil stub he traced the faint line of her letters across the yellowed page. As faithfully as she, as patiently —as if he need never reach their end and the words might now become his life—he wrote. He wrote the date. He wrote, “Dear Son.” He wrote, “We’re glad the children all are well again and getting A’s.” He wrote, “We’re also happy that you like your job . . .” He, too, was happy. He, too, was glad. He wrote.

How wonderful to be understood, to just sit here while some kind person relieves you of the awful burden of having to explain yourself, of having to find other words to say what you meant, or what you think you thought you meant, and of the worse burden of finding no words, of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person has found just the right words for you—and you have only to sit here and be grateful for words so quiet so discerning they seem not words but literate light, in which your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous. How wonderful that is! And how altogether wonderful it is not to be understood, not at all, to, well, just sit here while someone not unkindly is saying those impossibly wrong things, or quite possibly they’re the right things if you are, which you’re not, that someone —a difference, finally, so indifferent it would be conceit not to let it pass, unkindness, really, to spoil someone’s fun. And so you don’t mind, you welcome the umbrage of those high murmurings over your head, having found, after all, you are grateful —and you understand this, how wonderful!— that you’ve been led to be quietly yourself, like a root growing wise in darkness under the light litter, the falling words.

So there’s a cabbie in Cairo named Deif. So he found 5,000 bucks in the back seat. So meanwhile his daughter was very sick. So he needed the money for medicine bad. So never mind. So he looked for the fare and gave it back. So then the kid died. So they fired him for doing good deeds on company time. So the President heard it on the radio. So he gave him a locally built Fiat. So I read it in the papers. So you read it here. A poor man has less than weight, has negative gravity, his life a slow explosion. Barely he makes the days meet. Like doors they burst open. Money, job, daughter fly away from him. Irony, injustice, bits of horror come close, cohere. They are with us, the poor, like the inner life which is wantless too; our souls’ white globes float somehow in the blue, levitating and bobbing gently at middle height over the bubbling fleshpots. Our effort to remake the found world as the lost reverie is desire. So, little Yasmin was sick, sick to the point of dying. She was like a garden coughing and drying. And suddenly her salvation was there, a sheepskin, yes, a satchel of money meekly baaing from the rear. A miracle in the offing? That famous retired philanthropist named God was back in business? was starting to take a hand? directing things maybe from the back seat? Maybe. Restored to its rich owner (he tipped a fig and a fart, a raspberry of plump nil), lying safely on his lap, the money was mute again, was superfluity, and root and sum and symbol, both lettuce and lump, of all evil. She too approaching that state, Yasmin, a flower, meantime, dying. For the locally assembled daughter a locally assembled Fiat. Too wantless to imagine the money his? Spurned the miracle and thwarted the grace? So loved the law he gave it his only begotten daughter? Effed and offed his own kid? Saint and monster, poor man and fool, slowly exploding, Deif all this. Yes, one melts at his meekness, scoffs at the folly, trembles for his stupor of bliss of obedience, gasps at his pride, weeps for his wantlessness, grunts when irony that twists the mouth jabs the gut. Then horror—the dark miracle—roaring, leaps into the front seat, grabs the wheel and runs you down in the street —while you sit on a café terrace innocently reading the paper or, bent above a radio, feel the news waves break against your teeth. Deif in grief. Deif in mourning. Deif bereaved. Deif in the driver’s seat. Deif without a beef. And daily in four editions and every hour on the hour, the media heap your dish with images of sorrows and suffering, cruelty, maiming, death. (Our real griefs in their imaginary jargons.) And you cannot touch a single sufferer, comfort one victim, or stay any murderous hand. Consumer of woes, the news confirms you in guilt, your guilt becomes complicity, your complicity paralysis, paralysis your guilt; elsewhere always, your life becomes an alibi, your best innocence a shrug, your shrug an unacknowledged rage, your rage is for reality, nothing less. Yes, you feel, murder would be better than hanging around; if only your fist could penetrate the print, you too might enter the reality of news .... You switch the radio on, hungrily turn the page of sorrows and suffering, cruelty, maiming, death. Pasha, President, playboy swing masterfully above our heads—what style! what heroes!—fling themselves over the headlines into the empyrean beyond our lowly weather—ah, there all the news is blue and blank, those soarings, those mock descents are them writing their own tickets in heaven. Fortune, true, is spiteful and fickle, and glamour itself must stalk them—but cannot shoot so high as impotence dreams, as resentment wishes. Gorgeous, limber, and free, like our consciences, a law unto themselves, a darker law to us —in their suntans our shadow. And where they fly, the lines of force accompany, the patterns of deference continue to comfort, a maggotism distracting irony. Their rods flatten others, their staffs flatter them