from Rider: [14. In the Wake]

14 In the Wake Riding north on the bus after hours in cars or in the air or airports or bus stations, I felt almost happy for a moment as the tires hissed over the wet highway, I was both in the rain and protected from it, distracted from grief by the sensual pressure of the instant, water beading on the glass, the darkening hills. But how glad I was to be riding north! Sunoco on one side, Mobil on the other. His best friend was from Mobile. I always wanted to go there. He died too soon, or I left home, I can’t remember. Two days ago my stepfather’s body was laid to rest. Comatose, sucking air through a respirator, I can’t say he was resting; I saw him underground when I closed my eyes at night and went to bury the clock under mounds of towels and pillows—I had not heard it ticking so ferociously while he lived—and it would not quiet down. And the rain tonight, it’s not like any other, and I wish the bus would go faster. I saw the rain in the heavy hanging clouds. That’s a lie. Immense factories blackening under a charcoal sky— and rivers whose names I’ll never remember. I saw a sign reflected in my window: Milwaukee Light. * Whenever the Chicago White Sox beat the Braves it made his day. The Braves were in Milwaukee then, with lefty Warren Spahn and slugger Hank Aaron. The bus company is Peter Pan, and the Peter Pan coffee shop was our first stop in Chicago when we drove in; and that’s where I was when, though I didn’t know it then, he married my mother in Bermuda— watching Peter Pan in New York with my “real” father… And oh those prophetic lines, not to grow up, never to go to school. Never then to die! Only the living are immortal. Like these rain clouds. * The fact of death—a silence attends it; an absence with which we’re all He was the lightest sleeper I’d ever known; he’d open one eye if I merely peeked into his room. intimate. He’s there when I close my eyes but not when I reach out in the dark. At his bedside I peeled back his eyelids, rubbed his blue feet, his bloated hands, almost screamed in his ear, wake up, man, I’ll be lonely without you, I’ll be ANGRY if you don’t wake up; and in the silence of our nearness to death— the grinding hum of the generators working at their limit for too long to pump cool air in the killing heat; the glug of him swallowing through the respirator. * AT THE BUS STATION IN SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS The lateness of the bus angers a tough young woman from Montana travelling with her toddler son. And yet she knows the way: I can see it in her green peaked cap, her direct taut anger—bus late, I kill the driver—boy knock over suitcase—I kill him too. * BUS BOARDED The water bubbles on the windows break; there is less and less outside to see… And he was not even my real father. That should put a cap on it. It’s like knowing the name of the lake you pass never seeing it again and yet finding it tough to forget, that jagged square of black water just off the highway— that lake, and not another. * Baudelaire boasted that he laughed at funerals and wept at feasts. Now in the bus it’s only early evening; I turn around and everyone’s sleeping— mother and son, matron and magician. Half-awake, I stare at the tree line, and the blessing of rain, and I would like to lie down on the roadside and drink and drink and roll in the mud. * Mortifying, one’s presence in the face of nature’s sanguine gaze, green whitewashing the past. Whatever grooms the body for the afterlife pitches in this life like a tent in a night encampment before the dawn storming of the fortress. The yellow day lilies wag their heads at the first touch of wind and I see what others have always seen in flowers, a sign marked TRANSIENTS that keeps them awake; see now, as, standing catatonic at the kitchen sink, the overhead fluorescent light strip sinks into the pitch dark bottom of a coffee mug. Seeing is native to us and yet we stupefy our native sight. Not the eye’s sight. * Some mourners hurl dirt stiffly on the coffin because it seems the right thing to do. Some hold back. The flag-draped casket honors the first Army chaplain in the Pacific Theater, for praying good prayers above the bodies of the dead and of the living. Prelude to an Afterword Why should I feel compelled to write a thousand postscripts when I don’t work from life, but to hear the testimonials of people who knew the rider, the “little Rabbi,” moves me to tears while I am here to attend my mother who lies in bed with her stomach reaching toward the sky—(where Sam talks calmly to his “grandpa in heaven,” matter-of-fact celestial discourse)— and I listen to this Baptist preacher and hospice worker as he crouches beside my chair in her hospital room talk about his work with mourning; how difficult it is to get people to understand the element of surprise-over-time…; how he kissed the little Rabbi the first time he met him and the last time he saw him before “death took him so swiftly” there were no “last words” and he was enveloped in silence, in absence—“the way death often comes...” I see him more clearly through this stranger’s eyes. I wouldn’t have thought that he could help confirm my sense of what is real, but this man who knew him less than two years feels so indebted that I allow myself to think of the rider’s life in terms of the people he affected, the bizarre love he could elicit—not standard preacherly fare by any means but some connection by being entirely present for others— promiscuously present— meanwhile, as the nurses haul my mother from wheelchair to bed why do I feel impelled to turn away… (we think we have the answers) … and flash to an image of my friend caring for her father—bathing him?—but she didn’t come out of his penis, did she? or is that another wrong turning in my thought? The hospice preacher offers a prayer. He holds my mother’s swollen, psoriatic hand, the arthritic clumps poling from her fingers, and as the dry, flaky patches blaze in the unforgiving light, I find not a word to object to—except two— “religion” and “churches.” I tell him that I left home as soon as I could because I couldn’t stand being around the two of them; he admits he always felt sick “for hours afterward” when he’d been with them together; it wasn’t just quarreling, I have to add, seeking absolution for my absence, but hatred (can’t let my mother milk the bereaved widow role). He nods— matter-of-factly. And sets me free.