Hysteria

For Ana Menendez It only takes one night with the wind on its knees to imagine Carl Sandburg unfolding a map of Chicago, puzzled, then walking the wrong way. The lines on his face are hard to read. I alternate between the tv, where a plastic surgeon is claiming that every facial expression causes wrinkles, and the newspaper. I picture the surgeon reading the lines on Sandburg’s face, lines that would’ve made more sense if the poet had been, say, a tree growing in a wind orchard. Maybe he simply smiled too much. I’m reading about the All-Star game, thinking that maybe Sandburg saw the White Sox of 1919. . . . I love American newspapers, the way each section is folded independently and believes it owns the world. There’s this brief item in the inter- national pages: the Chinese government has posted signs in Tiananmen Square, forbidding laughter. I’m sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he’d say the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter bursting inside them. I go back to the sports section and a closeup of a rookie in mid-swing, his face keeping all the wrong emotions in check. . . . When I read I bite my lower lip, a habit the plastic surgeon would probably call cosmetic heresy because it accelerates the aging process. I think of Carl Sandburg and the White Sox; I think of wind in Tiananmen Square, how a country deprived of laughter ages invisibly; I think of the Great Walls of North America, each of them a grip on some outfield like a rookie’s hands around a bat when the wind is against him; I bite my lower lip again; I want to learn to think in American, to believe that a headline is a fact and all stories are suspect.