Joseph McElroy: Night Soul and Other Stories

“Know what he said? ‘You didn’t call on me when I was going to tell about caves along the river.’ He’s mad at me, my wife said. Next day he wasn’t in class. He knows how to cook. We should take him camping.”

Arriving at their block in Newkirk as if I didn’t know what else to do the day after he didn’t come to school — was he at large, was I? — before a guy in a windbreaker saw me down the street and spoke into his phone as the street door popped open like a lid and a man I felt I should know broke free of another and another and the cop phoning moved to intercept him like a strong safety between him and the goal line.

What is my job? To see what a child is seeing.

Ali — I thought of him, if I could save him, but from what? And there he is in the doorway when his uncle — for how did I know it was that irritable, nephew-loving atlas of learning long-legged, a fugitive back home where life at noon like mission accomplished might cost nothing to cancel — swerving off the cement path toward a lone forsythia bush fell headlong tripped up it seemed by a pistol shot’s synchrony and slow-legged into silence as natural as anything?

Police officer killed in line of duty, a news photo of him posted near the B and Q trains, near Ali’s apartment house, near the bus stop. Ali took the bus home.

I waited at the game store.

Once he said, “What do you advertise, Mister Mo?”

MasterCard Glueguns, Digestive Bombs, little yellow plastic teardrop containers of lemon juice. A driving school concern with agencies in Jersey and Maryland.

Asked about his home-study Qur’an, “Jesus didn’t have a father,” Ali replied as if I had asked. Would I have saved him from running to his uncle? From his mother’s scream? From looking up from his uncle shot down to see me near and have to decide what to do even about me? Which was nothing but to ignore me, his friend who doubted Abbod was a good half-brother. When neither the officer who shot his uncle, nor the other with him, nor the plainclothes with the cell, tried to question me.

Abbod had ID in case he had to show it but never had to until he volunteered it at the driving school and was given training even before they checked him out.

Routinely suspect, these people work almost as hard as our Koreans.

“Faquir” (?) a poor person. I waited at the game store.

I had known this neighborhood as a child, a grandchild. Things you know, all over the place. I told you I wanted a poet, she replies, meaning me.

Who were these nomads? These Scythians and other ancient minds. A dual-control driver training car found parked in Astoria sniffed stem to stern by a police dog, a half-empty red Classic Coke can in back with a half-smoked cigarillo awash in it, but certain grains of unburnt powder evidently cleaned from nook and cranny of firearm with compressed-air spray gun commonly used to clean computer keyboards.

Rendezvous though with a wife who likes the things you know and half-know (mostly half) — the ocean weathers, the laughter of Herodotus at map makers who would make Ocean a river running round a circular earth — yet his praise for Solon’s rule that every man once a year should declare the source of his livelihood at risk of death if he can’t prove the source an honest one.

Winds across the water, which hardly gives way…the Narrows…the Verrazano…My head adrift with bridges, we dream along a reach to converge far out at sea where on station a Coast Guard weather ship will plunge onward in a twelve-mile-by-twelve-mile square…

To go from thing to thing, not too afraid — knowing truth has a better chance to trespass sudden and interrupting…

The Bridge in pieces and angles of itself — adrift like our seasons.

“Mister Mo.”

Mo thinks of what it is his wife wants. To travel. More than anything. She pores over a map of Asia. We make decisions together, don’t we? What is a map? I think I actually asked her. We’re still young, she not yet thirty-seven. (Home-schooled in California, when she grew up she had understandably come east.)

I must read only children’s books (Mandelstam writes),

Cherish only children’s thoughts,

Scatter all big things far and wide,

Rise up from the deep-rooted sadness.

I know what he means, but…

Employment: that’s number one right now…

What is my job? The future. Helping this boy…

“I know who you are,” Ali said, standing at such a distance that I stopped trying to close it, his uncle bleeding at his feet, arms fallen apart, his mother joining Ali distraught and then seeing me, seeing me retreat.

…a poet who died in prison: to be scattered through this history.

To go from thing to thing unafraid, that’s all: knowing the truth has a better chance sudden and interrupting or may come round again.

…pasturing your life…

New nomad waiting for it to come to me…

For nomad is the movement of others from me as if it made little difference who was the mover.

I did not need to die in my own country; and then I did not die at all.

Close, she said. She and I, she meant. She said Ali would speak without raising his hand — like you, my wife said. Has it come to that? — and once she failed to recognize him when he did raise his hand. She understood that I missed him.

He knows Ska, she informs me fondly.

Nomaderie nowadays. Did she get that from me? You could get into a state about it. You didn’t need to go anywhere anymore: it came to you , though nomaderie…A writer pausing at a village in Crete: “total absence of anything approaching a communal existence. We have become spiritual nomads; whatever pertains to the soul is derelict, tossed about by the winds like…”

A woman to whom I confessed comes back for more, having half-heard. For nomad is the movement of others from you as if it made little difference, if I could ever tell Ali this, who’s gone now.

Salat, five-times-a-day prayer.

We serviced the sites on a seasonal basis until the seasons began to come to us which would have made the job easier but the seasons changed in nature, pushing out from within: we were on the move but much more regular than our friends who stayed put; and the sites were everything you would have expected of a site, manned, unmanned.

Time we break into seasons briefer and briefer now like space where we are restless and think ourselves on the move. Until, having pulled the seasons along with us we turn to one long season its length no longer long or relative, no longer even length.

Seasons don’t wait for us but come along in us now and also speed away from us. I try, clocking in on my own (timeless, I hoped) job, to build on others’ work, John Clare’s “I Am”—“the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; / Even the dearest, that I love the best, / Are strange — nay, rather stranger than the rest.”

The nomad state: nomad nation.

Nomaderie, the form of “pieces.”

I believe the boy was in the end blamed for telling about his shepherd cousin.

I recalled my lost father largely self-taught reciting Emily Dickinson years before I knew who that was and as if she — for me now a foundling spirit, Founding Mother — were a card-carrying Christian: my father, a job printer on Vanderbilt Avenue near Grand Central, urging me to close the Arabian Nights, a tale of two unexpectedly linked dreams, as it happened, and open a book of fact, yet speaking to me as I to Ali like an equal.

Your God as a nomad.

I did not need to die in my own country; and then I did not die at all.

A woman who knows what to overlook yet seems to have overlooked nothing, was my thought about my wife, her map of world foods she discussed with her children.