Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Tom must be confused, thinking her gone, thinking that she has left the apartment when she has only been spending a few necessary moments elsewhere. (Could she have missed Mr. Hub’s call?) And why shouldn’t he have such thoughts? Hasn’t she been avoiding him? Indeed she has. As of late, she finds she can’t remain in the same room with him for more than a few minutes at a time. She sees only the outline of his body or his back hunched over food when she enters a room and just as quickly leaves it. Whenever he leans for her, she leans away, until with each passing day he becomes more and more remote, disappearing into the crevices of forgetting until he squeezes through again to remind her. Who would think that he should miss her so for a few unimportant hours taken on the fly?

Now Tom is standing firm in the middle of the room, hurting her in his way, all impatience to have her sit beside him on the bench and listen to a new song. She gives in to his excitment, not unbearably at first, pours herself into being another person since this is what he will accept as compromise, conscious to make no open display of her need for distance.

His an expression of the most steady attention. Smiles, the shine of teeth, strong urges to burrow into her whenever she is comfortably seated on cushions and pillows. He occupies the apartment completely, from the lines of the walls to the edges of the doors to the joints in the floors. Tom brimming in the doorways. Tom stationed on the chairs. Tom framed in the windows, venetian blinds sectioning both him and time into lit rectangular hours.

Turning on the movements of his face, the motion of his limbs, her life repeats itself every time Tom takes her by the hand and insists that she follow where he pulls her. Agitated breaths. Bumps and bruises. Sleight-of-hand reflections that go skimming over solid surfaces and disappear. Anything to keep him still.

Why not here at the piano, where one can enjoy the firm feel of wood while watching one’s image trembling in clear particular silence, a dark glaze of laminate? Where one may study the deep hollow with strings cast in tight suspension like a fisherman’s net. More than three years now since the correcting fingers of the tuner have paid a visit, but each key sounds the pitch it should. What keeps them in tune? Some memory of the tuner’s hands caught in the layered depths of shine? Or is the piano itself the tuner’s petrified shadow (soul), severed from the flesh where it rightfully belongs and (caught) forever here?

Slow heavy notes and stalled chords hold in the air somewhere above her head and hang bat-like from the ceiling, teaching her longing and loathing in equal measure.

Even the music has turned against her. (No, he has turned it against her.)

How ugly it makes her feel to be simply sitting here, doing nothing, day after day, like an anchor rusting in water. Easy to drift from one room to the next. Space before her, space to her left and right, space behind her. Her life a muddle in this way. Easy to turn a familiar corner only to lose your grasp on the known world and collide with another body coming into the room you are leaving and see your twin sitting on the floor trying to clear her head.

Is she any less alone with Tom? How meagerly she opens her heart to him. For his own good, she must set some boundaries, limit contact to mere glimpses of his grumpy silhouette. She feels angry, capable of causing pain. Just the other day, she was sullen and spoke too quickly at him, her tone harsh, thinking it might cause some change in his manner, ease his demands and contentions, bring an end to his finding her wherever she is. He seized her by the hand, as is his custom, and generated a deep pressure on her flesh. Began touching and pulling her, and when she resisted — No, Tom — took her neck in the crook of his heavy arm and tried to wrestle her out of herself, drag her down to the floor to sit with him. She shoved her palm in his face with something more than annoyance, something closer to hatred, and freed herself, rising up from the floor, gaining the settee and hastening to the other side of the room. Then he was on her again, his hands quick and warm. She pried them from her dress, one finger at a time.

She doesn’t want his ugly touches. So much else she doesn’t want anymore, some point of definition in the past from which she is receding, some point of embarkation in the future where she is or isn’t heading, Eliza glowing distinctly in her own lessening light, sparklingly aware of that world cut off from her. Never so alone.

Tired of always being cooped up with her thoughts, she opens a window and sticks her head out into the open. Takes in air that brings a welcome fragrance and taste into her nose and mouth. She’ll take it, this air, take it for what it’s worth, even if it gives her trouble. Undoes what’s done. Her hair shifting sideways from the full-on breeze blowing at her. She catches up the shiny-dart strands with both hands, wind so hard she can’t see a thing, can’t keep her eyes open, hair, eyes giving her trouble. Using both hands she scoops hair forward from the sides of her face, head tilted downward. Is it that she is leaning out the window, her untended hair hanging like rope? If she extends her tresses full length she can climb down them to the street.

Her mind furling, rolling on its own into some unchartable dark sanctum. Hair, eyes, mind — what are they telling her? She has taken her ease long enough. If she is to be any good to Tom, good to herself, she will have to step for a spell (again) beyond the confines of walls, no farther than the street below, into the air.

Taking up her shawl, she quits the apartment, her desperation no less deep for its suddenness. Color is noticeably absent. Only the same brown of barren trees and gray of empty sidewalks and streets. (Autumn over already?) Still, standing here is good. Under open sky. The day overcast. Secondhand light. Dusty and old.

Is she to trust her eyes? Since starting out, not another person has crossed her sight. Can it be that they’ve all gone away and left the city to her? Worse, some destruction has reached each and every one of them in their homes? She will continue on to the first canal.

Advancing at a quicker pace fails to ease the sourness of her suspicion. The thought of them all dead. Hardly a satisfying outcome even if a just one given what she has endured, changes enough for several lifetimes. (The body never forgets.) Just like that the world chooses to end but not before spoiling her with a short taste of normalcy. She is like anyone else: a satisfying taste creates expectations for more. Has she not already begun forecasting, making plans? (Before the weather changes, winter arrives, each day she will have her walk, two or three or four modest hours at a time. Stroll along the canals. Through the park. Take in the museums. Where’s the harm? What trouble can Tom come to while she is away?) So what is she to do now?

She reaches the fourth canal and still no sign of people. (Dogs yes. Cats yes. Birds yes. Squirrels and the lesser forms.) She senses the air standing out against the cloth of her shawl. What’s the point in venturing farther? Something futile. Something nostalgic. Something stupid. But she can neither stop nor turn around. In fact, the impulse to advance, push ahead all the way downtown, to the harbor, comes over her. When had she last seen the harbor, the beautiful waters and ships there?

Soon she crosses the sixth canal, takes a corner, and chances upon a fantastic sight: a Great Wall of backs, elbows, napes, formed along the boulevard less than a hundred paces ahead. A scene that overpowers her as much for its unexpectedness as for the total un-accompaniment of sound. Thousands of people standing in complete silence, straining calves and necks to see over the heads in front of them some display of public celebration. Has her grip on time become so lax that she has forgotten this holiday?