Stitch

The shallow bay, rippling earlobe of the 1000-foot-deep lake, pulled on itself like a clue in charades, tugged like boats in their slips. It scooped the quietest decibel out of midnight sky and eased it toward another darkness, where the brain waited to translate. At the bottom of the lake lived 100-year-old sturgeon hovering over broken tackle and aluminum cans, two dozen pairs of lovers, a lost F-9 jet. At the bottom of the brain, all these things listened to radio music streaming from the next galaxy.

The trees never spoke, actually. The car drove straight through their lives, what might have been the richest of conversations, but wind did all the talking around their surfaces, and over the curve of hood, and along the knife edge of window the man had rolled down just enough to hear the world’s velocity in its own language.

Whatever repose existed, falling rock always sought another, down the cliffside, in and out of the grassy borrow pit, across the shoulder, into the lane of traffic. All of this when no one was looking.

Just outside the city, night turned orange, orange as the light behind his eyelids on the brightest day at the beach. In the town square, the man turned a slow circle until he came back finally to where he began. In the movie inside his head at that exact moment, one of two women came into view as he finished. If he made another circle, the other waited at the end. He loved these two equally once, on water, in woods, over the long highway that took him anywhere, dodging the fallen rock. Now they live as compass points, single degrees of imagined reunion, points on a circle inside a square, breathing their orange air.

The morning he died throbbed in his ears until suddenly it was noon. Inside his chest, desert animals came out of hiding to drink. His eye, to the loved one, looked like a blue ring laid over an immaculate beach where, just last night, it had rained.

Along the banks of the estuary at that same moment, a plover turned its ear to the sand, listening for tiny crabs. The trickle of water, what was left of the rush down the mountains, walked quietly toward the crash of waves. A human being tried to listen to this. Not even the bird heard the whisk of thread as it was pulled from whatever had stitched the man to earth.

Memoir

My life isn’t that important, but I remember that afternoon seeing you run away and only get so far. You cried on the lawn next to your lawn. The high hedge grew mountainous between them.

You’d wrapped your things in a bandana and tied them to the end of a stick. Behind you, the shrub bent with its load of pomegranates. On the ground, one of the globes torn open, spilling its red tears.

I left my Chinese elm and crossed the street to sit down with you. The man who owned that lawn, the man we hardly ever saw, flew a biplane along the coast of North Africa. He smuggled guns for Tunisian rebels. He had ripped off the ears of temporary captors. He had left scorpions in the limp gloves of spies. We wondered if his curtains would suddenly open and we’d see him again at his picture window, like that time he sat there all month, his arm in plaster, his forehead stitched, smoking cigarette after cigarette and grinning as he exhaled, grinning as the smoke snaked back into his nose.

We lay on our backs, the grass itching our necks. Now there was the sky deep blue with autumn, and now there was the problem of how to go back home.

In your bandana was a pair of socks, a change of underwear, the missal you received for your First Communion, a Werewolf comic book, a Mars bar, a pencil with a broken tip, a travel comb, a Stardust Hotel ash tray you used to keep coins in before you ran away, one three-cent postcard stamp, a piece of chalk taken from Mrs. McGovern’s classroom, a Charles Atlas ad snipped from the back of another comic book, a length of yarn, a skate key.

Now there was the problem of how to go back home. All your things spread out like items at a sad picnic. Under them, a paisley pattern rippling across the uneven altitudes of grass.

You broke the Mars bar in half and shared it. There were lines on your cheeks where tears had cut trails through the dust. You gathered your bundle together. You broke the stick in half and threw it under the hedge. You made me swear I never saw you cry. We crossed our hearts. The green of that street scratched us. The blue of that street made us shiver. A stranger might have watched through the drapes. I crossed my heart. My life doesn’t add up to much, but that was the moment I betrayed you, even though it took all these years until now to see it through.