Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

Later, when he learned about it in college, Abrams couldn’t believe how slowly perceptions and conscious sensations move into our attention, outpaced often (always?) by even our own reptilian subsystems. Also in college, Abrams, long suspicious of Mrs. Clowney, ended up looking up the definition of irony, finding its root to be in , meaning “dissimulation” or “feigned ignorance,” which Abrams thought sounded more like it. His body (specifically his foot) knows before he does, but cannot bear to short-circuit his mind’s self-myth of mastery, and so must feign ignorance, must wait until the phrase IED finishes its patient fade into Abrams’ mind, maze of light still echoing in some synaptic hallway.

2.

But does his foot know? Is it reacting? The extraordinary efficiency of the human sole cannot be denied. Think of the things it is capable of — eloquent distribution and redistribution of weight, shifting phalangeal deployment, a notable ability to take the changing physical demands of a normal day (sprinting toward a bus stop in wooden-soled business shoes) in stride. That Abrams has become aware of the contact plate at all is in fact proof of his foot’s intelligence.

And yet. And yet his right foot, encased in its boot, is not stopping, is not pausing in its rolling heel-then-arch-then-toe impression into the dirt. The heel strikes — it has no reason to pause. Even when the mid-sole falls, is pressed into the dirt — still no cause for hesitation. But then, finally, the ball. The hinge of the cuneiform bone (beautiful term) extending into the gentle metatarsal has predetermined Abrams’ fate. The application to the ground of the plantar fascia (horrible term) may not be stopped. And so the ball of the foot, the ball of the boot’s outsole, falls, and Abrams’ weight begins to shift onto its pad, and the strange texture beneath.

But already Abrams’ heel is rising (has risen) from the location of its initial strike, separating itself from the dirt, and the cuneiform bone is pulling at the local terminus of the metatarsal, taking it along in its launch back into the air and light.

This moment Abrams does truly grasp, understanding pluming up through all levels of processing — he can feel it in the arch of muscle between his shoulders. It is a kind of resignation — bodily, mentally — intuitive, but encompassing in its intuition. It is the feeling of helplessness at time passing, of the loss of experience even as it occurs.

Abrams has been aware of various declensions of this moment his whole life — one scene which now cloud-shadows its way across his interior vision.

He stands in an abandoned lakeside dairy, which has been repurposed for the night into an event space for his best friend’s wedding reception. He stands at the edge of the high room, a cuneiform alphabet of pipes still decorating the walls and ceiling; he stands there with Sarah, his girlfriend, who they do not know yet is sick, taking in at once the writhing organism of the dance floor, the large glass windows of what was once (he guesses) a loading bay. Beyond: train tracks, the black expanse of the lake, only a field of absence in the dark. It has been a wonderful wedding, held out of doors in the uncharacteristically brisk late August day, on a grassy knoll outside of a relative’s cabin. Beyond the pastor on the little platform there was the lake, its waters lacerated by the small, sharp edges of wind. And now: the night in the abandoned dairy, the reception. Earlier, someone passed out toy kazoos before the bride and groom arrived and when they finally entered everyone played “A Bicycle Built for Two.” Those without kazoos had sung. And now here Abrams is, standing very still. Sarah is exhausted, draped over a chair beside him. They do not know she is sick yet.

He can feel the mass of experiential detail swelling, as he stands there, a sundae in a Styrofoam bowl from the make-your-own sundae buffet melting in his right hand. He’s waiting for the train. It has come through once, not slowing, very early in the event, right after he and Sarah arrived. The tracks, once laid for easy loading from the dairy, pass within feet of what is now the wall of glass. It is fiercely loud, piercing in its intensity. It is truly a blast of motion, so near and pervasive that one’s body seems a participant in its very direction, to the point where the explosion of dark metal (and sound) seems to be emanating from the atoms of one’s own body. For a few seconds, while your consciousness is still catching up (slow, so slow), you are the train, barreling into the nothingness of the night by some propulsion that is beyond will or intention. The waiting has become excruciating.

The waiting has become torturous, less due to anticipation than the nagging sense that Abrams has understood the experience too late, that it is even now slipping from the grasping electricities of his memory. He will never be in this abandoned dairy again, he knows. There can be only tragic falling-offs from the first world of this night, from the train’s transcendent passage. The passage he is now waiting for, if in fact it ever comes, will be over almost even as it begins, exactly because Abrams has become aware of its singularity. It feels ridiculous to be made panicky by something so abstract and common as the passage of time, but the simple fact of it — Abrams understanding it on a muscular level — deflates the experience for Abrams even as the train does arrive, and the dancers are shattered into fear and surprise, and Abrams tries and fails to itemize his perceptions and observations and the ironies of the moment so extensively as to slow time to the point of cessation. Of course he fails, he must fail, and the rest of the night feels like a letdown, had already felt like a letdown, even before the train noise recurred.

But Abrams’ sense of anticipatory nostalgic loss is not altogether unpleasant, in its way. He doesn’t know when he developed it, how young he was when he first understood. The relaxation that he experiences in the moment of his knowing about the contact plate beneath the ball of his right foot and that same foot’s continued motion, is — it must be said — distinctly pleasurable. Another cloud-shadow of memory darkening the screen of his mind: the sweltering parking lot in Minneapolis, some forgotten road trip with his poor, nervous mother.

He is standing outside one of those old-fashioned Dairy Queen stands, this one planted in the middle of a gray concrete parking lot that seems to Abrams as vast as the sea. He is a little boy, and the stand, with its antiquated retro neon signage, looms above him spectacularly. His mother has let him order for himself, and in something like a fit of pleasure Abrams speaks up and asks wildly for the combination he’s noticed on the menu board, the synthesis of two of his favorite treats — a vanilla ice cream Blizzard, with (the electric quiver of joy) Nerds in it. “Nerds” being the sour, granular candy popular at the time, which came in unexpected marriages of colors, a small mountain spread in the palm of one’s hand turning into a pointillist residual portrait on one’s skin. A great deal of the pleasure for little Abrams is to be had simply in the breathless idea of such a thing: the play of the possible visual alone (the sharp, glossed color of the Nerds, implanted delicately in the creamscape of the vanilla ice cream) making his skin tingle. But also the taste — previously unthinkable — the contrast at once of the milky, cold, sweet vanilla against the eye-squintingly sour acid of the Nerds: an oral chiaroscuro never before conceived of by the staff of all other Dairy Queens Abrams has ever visited. This all not to mention the texture, the queer graininess of the ice cream with its hard secret of Nerds, the sensation carrying with it the unmistakable sense of transgression, as if eating rocks and dirt. And all of this present just in the thought, the galaxy of delight expanding rapidly, anticipatorily in Abrams’ mind and nerve centers as he orders — nervously, having to repeat it again louder for the visored teenager at the till. Abrams speaks his order again anxiously, as if a jealous deity might perhaps strike him down for requesting of the world such a thing as a Nerd-filled Blizzard, offered almost clandestinely by only this particular Dairy Queen.