Border Crossings

Bottles on the closet floor, bottles underneath the bed. Of course he thinks he’s caused it all. The hiding places unimaginative, the vodka’s glass sides clear when empty, clear when full, like the cellophane -transparent plastic skin of the model he glued together thirty years ago, The Visible Man, the tiny organs in “authentic colors,” kelly green lungs and scarlet heart. But he’s trying, as they say, to reside in the moment, stuffing the duffel bag to bring her where she’s trembling on the ward, where she’s hating both herself and him, passing four locked doors to reach her, as if each were some frontier checkpoint to a country even farther distant than the one he’s trapped in now. The zebra-striped gate, the guards who hold his documents against the light, peering through the watermarks and faded passport stamps. And he knows his skin is glass, his mission shame, and shame the lingua franca of these lands, the sign language of fingers unzipping compartments with a nylon hiss, to probe her sweaters, jeans, and stockings, (the toothpaste tube uncapped and sniffed) and shame the notebook and the novels he’s brought her, riffled and shut with a strange and final delicacy, and shame the signal that motions him on.