Vijay Seshadri

The house collapsed and I was crushed under the rubble, pulverized, but here I am, walking around as if I were alive — the swain, with an oxeye daisy in my buttonhole, the bitter voluptuary, never satisfied, the three-legged dog, the giant under the tiny parasol at the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, the only Abyssinian in the choir of the Abyssinian Baptist Church. (Somebody must have done a self-portrait of me.) Just amazing. I think I could wrap my arms all the way around the 24,901-miles-circumferenced Earth.

That slow person you left behind when, finally, you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command, where is he while you walk around the shaved lawn in your plus fours, organizing with an electric clipboard your big push to tomorrow? Oh, I’ve come across him, yes I have, more than once, coaxing his battered grocery cart down the freeway meridian. Others see in you sundry mythic types distinguished not just in themselves but by the stories we put them in, with beginnings, ends, surprises: the baby Oedipus on the hillside with his broken feet or the dog whose barking saves the grandmother flailing in the millpond beyond the weir, dragged down by her woolen skirt. He doesn’t see you as a story, though. He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines, he chortles. When your barometric pressure drops and the thunderheads gather, he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with the stubby little pencils he steals from the public library. He asks me to look out for you.

1. HELL You’d have to be as crazy as Dante to get those down, the infernal hatreds. Shoot them. Shoot them where they live and then skip town. Or stay and re-engineer the decrepit social contraption to distill the 200-proof elixir of fear and torture the...the what from the what? And didn’t I promise, under threat of self-intubation, not to envision this corridor, coal-tar black, that narrows down and in to a shattering claustrophobia attack before opening out to the lake of frozen shit where the gruesome figure is discerned? Turn around, go home. Just to look at it is to become it. 2. PURGATORY, THE FILM He was chronically out of work, why we don’t know. She was the second born of a set of estranged identical twins. They met, hooked up, and moved in with her mother, who managed a motel on Skyline Drive. But always it was the other, the firstborn, the bad twin, the runaway, he imagined in the shadow of the “Vacancy” sign or watching through the window below the dripping eaves while they made love or slept. The body is relaxed and at rest, the mind is relaxed in its nest, so the self that is and is not itself rises and leaves to peek over the horizon, where it sees all its psychokinetic possibilities resolving into shapely fictions. She was brave, nurturing, kind. She was evil. She was out of her mind. She was a junkie trading sex for a fix, a chief executive, an aviatrix. She was an angel to the blinded and the lamed, the less-than-upright, the infra dig. And she was even a failure. She went to L.A. to make it big and crept back home injured and ashamed. 3. PURGATORY, THE SEQUEL They put him in jail, why we don’t know. They stamped him “Postponed.” But he didn’t mind. The screws were almost kind. He had leisure to get his muscles toned, mental space to regret his crimes, and when he wasn’t fabricating license plates he was free to remember the beauty that not once but a thousand times escaped him forever, and escapes me, too: ghosts of a mist drifting across the face of the stars, Jupiter triangulating with the crescent moon and Mars, prismatic fracturings in a drop of dew... 4. HEAVEN There’s drought on the mountain. Wildfires scour the hills. So the mammal crawls down the desiccated rills searching for the fountain, which it finds, believe it or not, or sort of finds. A thin silver sliver rises from an underground river and makes a few of the hot rocks steam and the pebbles hiss. Soon the mammal will drink, but it has first to stop and think its reflexive, impeccable thought: that thinking comes down to this— mystery, longing, thirst.

I’ve been excited about him as an individual. I’ve met him as a person, emerging from his own shadow. Indeed it is remarkable. Indeed it is to be remarked of my friend Savage that the desolation of hopes not merely deferred but by impracticability brutalized little marred his genial spirit. How such a one, so circumstanced by parentage— the mother crippled by disappointment; the father by rotgut and Percodan— as to blight his prospects, and blacken with untimely frost the buds of those ambitions justly excited by manifest powers, graces, and propensities, should nonetheless display discrimination not inferior to those we deem wise, sympathy judicious and above reproach, is cause for a wonder neither cynicism can besmirch nor incredulity subvert. In and out of juvie, jacking cars at fifteen, snorting lines of Adderall, his nostrils stained blue, kicked out, taken back, kicked out, busted, paroled, busted again, straining to reach the shiny object fallen through the grate, tantalizing, just beyond his fingers, finding and losing God, thinking as he rakes the leaves of the linden tree outside the sublet bungalow that eating, sleeping, dying are what it’s all about, nothing else, maybe a few sunsets, forget about sex.

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed is not big and is not small. Big and small are comparative categories, and to what could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed be compared? Consciousness observes and is appeased. The soul scrambles across the screes. The soul, like the square root of minus 1 , is an impossibility that has its uses.

Dead friends coming back to life, dead family, speaking languages living and dead, their minds retentive, their five senses intact, their footprints like a butterfly’s, mercy shining from their comprehensive faces— this is one of my favorite things. I like it so much I sleep all the time. Moon by day and sun by night find me dispersed deep in the dreams where they appear. In fields of goldenrod, in the city of five pyramids, before the empress with the melting face, under the towering plane tree, they just show up. “It’s all right,” they seem to say. “It always was.” They are diffident and polite. (Who knew the dead were so polite?) They don’t want to scare me; their heads don’t spin like weather vanes. They don’t want to steal my body and possess the earth and wreak vengeance. They’re dead, you understand, they don’t exist. And, besides, why would they care? They’re subatomic, horizontal. Think about it. One of them shyly offers me a pencil. The eyes under the eyelids dart faster and faster. Through the intercom of the house where for so long there was no music, the right Reverend Al Green is singing, “I could never see tomorrow. I was never told about the sorrow.”