Joseph McElroy: Ancient History: A Paraphrase

As if absently, Bob stands in the middle of a living room he himself built far from this dark city. Gold rims ring the eyes of man and boy caught between contemplation and violence; this midpoint equals speech, and he asks if I recall how in the Poly days he could stun Akkie Backus the Spanish-teaching lacrosse coach.

Wait, Bob, and I put my hand across my eyes to rub it down over my nose and cheeks — but he can’t sense I know better than he, I not only recall but having often observed Bob’s famous window-leap from the fifth-form study hall I know better than he what it looked like and what Akkie the proctor looked like once again surprised by Bob’s savage run at the bright sill, feet then up at the last careless instant in the silent room, the air-borne body slid proneward through the open third-floor window and Bob’s arms neatly up from the body so the hands catch the cross-frame and stopping him ram him back in.

That happened. He recalls applause and far away on the podium Akkie’s trapped grin behind his desk, but I recall also Akkie’s Times spread to the sports, and at his elbow as solid as if I could see them from my seat at the back of the room his scissors with black finger holes; and I silently recall after a long second a great caw of irritation in the spring air outside as our school’s hairy blond athletic director with the fearful and powerful limp, having heard Bob’s hands slap wood and looked up to see headless flannels extended and then legs retracting from the third-floor window, condemned the encroachment. Our geometry teacher Mr. Cohn got wind of these leaps and said if Bob tried it again he’d get him suspended, it was just plain unfair to the school.

Yes, your suicide tonight is almost a blow, Dom. Almost the last thing I meant to address myself to. The biggest bore of all. Though a subject inevitably in the air when Cora introduced us last week. The heartfelt sinews parted stiff. The brain’s tentative disorder resolved to absence. No, Dom, suicide was not in my plan tonight. I think Cora doesn’t really know you except through her dig friends. Returning from my trip to the peephole I was diverted to the kitchen. I heard the drip. But you have a stainless steel sink and this drip lacked that special plank-plank. I tried each tap, but both were tight, yet now the drip was behind me, and turning back toward the kitchen door I saw that what I mistook for a drip was coming from the kitchen wall phone you’d left off the hook. The white receiver straddles the top of your Admiral portable TV. You should have left a movie silently on in this dark kitchen to complete whatever the effect is. I’m doing the best I can explaining.

Today’s bizarre events aside, I’d soon be normally in bed with Ev facing an easy assault on the palisades of sleep. My puzzle with sleep, Dom, was never falling into it but out. I wake too soon, I sleep too fast. My fall from sleep — I’m a de somn — brings not just the solitary shock that, as I pivot from one locus to another, I can’t ever get ready for; no, in all fairness to the rhythms that be, this pivotal precipice reveals, often for as much as a minute or more, my chairs and walls, shadows and shelves, optical irritants or my favorite print, as if they were newly unknown. And that unholy plummet-swing of waking revalues these phenomenal possessions of mine by wily new balances. Am I making it out of my head, Dom? making it any place? making sense? In winter dark, to think I’m seeing from my hollow of our bed a long glimmer of the River Lune as Gray described it with its “hanging banks” to his sometime friend Wharton — this is nothing compared to some of the pre-dawn finds I feel sure I shall dig you up. But a likelier truth about these desomniac alarms is how these scenes respond to me . (I’ve never told a soul, Dom, but I tell you now and am no doubt glad to write it in lieu of speech and in a way that asks at last no answer from you, you are a great man and no doubt have suffered inhuman taxes on your time.) My eye— one not two it often seems — seems when I fall thus out of sleep to have been open for a long while upon, let us say, a livid bone profile arrested at the point of, and on account of, my fall from sleep. It is no addict thief or random murderer there in Ev’s kitchen, but it honors my paralyzed alert as if it were. I tell myself the profile leaning across the wedge of kitchen available to me across the front hall from our bed must be something else, I even will it to be, but there it hangs from a body whose dark or unseen hands hold its angle of arrest by gripping the sink or refrigerator I can’t see, or Ev’s ten-foot butcher-block, one of her admirable acquisitions which can age — unlike the off-lime walls and appointments of my step-son Ted’s classrooms which soil but never grow old in the old way. When after half a minute I’ve given up willing the intrusor-profile to be something else — which in my precipitately pivoted state of just-waking I can’t conceive could be anything but the profile — he pivots, like me coming out of sleep, and I see instead a familiar perspective spread by night and moonlight on the glass that covers a small drawing the lines of whose delicate wood frame have faded into the live dark and the moonshine, and at that pivotal dissolution of illusion into truth (as if I willed it, though unsure what it was I wished to will) one last new signature of that illusion appears in what my waking eye stares at, a heretofore unseen hand’s shadow above the intrusor-profile slyly fixed so rigid as to go unnoticed, and as I see Ev’s quilted potholder, which is all this hand in fact is, I now again can’t see the hand. Look, Dom, I meant to speak of Al and Bob, it’s what I was aiming to do even I think when I set out for your apartment telling Ev I was headed for the basement. Your places begins to get into my head but nothing is displaced.

Over that pale phone-box in your kitchen were words which in the pearly verge of light from your hall I didn’t really see. But I’m now aware some of them are quite alive, almost a message.

Well, I got up and had another look, and this is what I found, Dom, over your kitchen phone penciled on a sheet of this paper:

CAN’T COME NOW CAN’T TALK NOW

aged cousin staying night prior to entering Memorial for exploratory

busy last-minute writing memorial tribute for former Zionist

uncle to meet copy deadline for inclusion in Bulletin of

Association of Regional Casualty Assurance Managers

A. called for help with gushing faucet OR for electric drill to make holes for wing-nut screws

(the pencil softens, the hand is erratic)

B. just phoned at Underground intermission to ask me to meet right away in Chinatown

cut arm on sharp hunks of ancient paint

stretching around window to tear off hanging

strips of insulation; going to doc downstairs

in building

about to receive overseas call Energy Release

Committee Geneva/Brussels/Cairo

(then, irrelevantly though with a freshly sharpened point:)

EARTH = SPACECRAFT

So I gather people were getting to you. Yet such ready excuses aren’t the mark of the man who in last year’s book argued that we must welcome Interruption. But if I’ve met you only once, I know you not so much from what you’ve publicly said as from your person. Today our super had a book about Egypt on his hip, but what’s in his head is something else.

Al, unlike Bob, courted interruption. Bike tread furrows the shoulder gravel, then as if to underscore the skid his rear wheel slides sideways (though in fact diagonally because of forward motion). Al is springing from his right pedal vaulting as off a horse from left to right and before I can glance back to see if a car is coming he’s down in the ditch scrambling up into the thick sweet field after a brown woodchuck bumping away — but no: a little American flag. Al trots back through goldenrod, his flag held up on its stick.