Joseph McElroy: Ancient History: A Paraphrase

Leave your lock off and someone’s going to come in and suicide you.

The elevator came and the steps began and then stopped; and doubting the power of my paraphase I went to the peephole to look. And it is your son as I thought, but he is not magically moving in another time; he is standing halfway down the hall looking at the key.

What time is it?

Once upon a night a lonely former witch

sat alone in her huge house. By the light

of one naked bulb she was poring over

a tome of old dead spells, when suddenly

down the hall the kitchen Minute-Minder

started clicking. Had Darius Dominion

returned?

Is he operating independently of his curator? Einstein may in a way have rescued Lavoisier and Lucretius. My father said so. He said Einstein was twenty-six at the time of his break-through. Russell Pound up on the tarred roof of our apartment house (guarded above the brick barrier by odd cement parapets we tried to hammer off, the night of Poly graduation) looked at the spring sky and the field of harbor lights, the slow glow of Jersey City, a moving ferry bearing its tiers of lights behind a barracks on Governor’s Island — and you know Dom, if I wanted to I’d tell you which constellations my father and his friend pointed out and followed, but at this juncture of my now shaky paraphase the names would seem to mean too much, and I (if not my trivia-scorning step-grandfather) prefer the fact that the roof right across the street from their star-watching is where stingy Bill Smith sold two-minute binocular views of the harbor and, as Tracy told me, had his glasses trained on the Bridge at the moment the famous boomerang was hurled through that diamond cable-weave, and saw the whole thing. And the day of the fight, ditto — though even with his binoculars he couldn’t have seen what happened to Petty, to Bob, to Joey, and to me in the vestibule above those twelve august stone steps though he may have made out something on the face of Hugh Blood who half-reached in but never really did get where he later said he’d wanted to get, namely right into the vestibule.

“But you can’t have everything,” my mother said one evening four or five years after my father died. I’d explained how I would interpret rather freely the Foundation’s understanding of my activities in those alien areas of Brooklyn — Brownsville and Williamsburg — and my mother said, “We’re just ordinary people.” But I bet that meant (say) the “1834” plaque on the Vande Land’s brownstone. In answer to her I nearly said like a blind soothsayer, “But I see tuxedoed adolescents ambling under eucalyptus trees, I see black nannies seated on benches and rocking prams and watching toddlers in Miss White’s exclusive Garden” (an ancient immeasurable area now the mere base of an aging contemporary cube) “and I see a dangerously unorthodox anthropologist himself a Heights native lecturing your women’s club Civitas:” but what I really said to her was that, instead of a people, I was unearthing the customs of a person, whose slowly prospering parents had moved from Brownsville to a small apartment house in Williamsburg, then to Bay Ridge, then to Sea Gate, and who himself had found violent means to maintain yet vary inherited identity myths. My mother said it didn’t sound like anthropology to her, and who was this person. But I said her remark was shrewd, Dom.

I take the measure of my Heights street’s space partly by my two-sewer line-drive which Hugh Blood backpedaled to catch without coming within thirty yards of the harbor-view dead-end whose lamp-post and black-iron fence were roughly in the same plane as the street window of my parents’ third-floor bedroom to my right and Binocular Bill’s station on the roof to my left. As the space of your screen in your late kitchen showing at this hour the Educational Channel’s bright blank can’t be measured apart from your throwaway option to last night’s audience involving your now approaching son Richard: so the space between me and Bob can’t be traced by the down-then onward-bouncing trajectories of my trick pitch to Bob apart from his swinging third strike’s coincidence with the “Look out!” bawled by one of Joey’s pals as if for a car. Who could have foreseen the effect of that interruption on Bob’s anger at striking out and taking such a cut that ten-year-old A.B. let it right through her dark legs and almost forgot to chase it seeing Bob instantly move with his stick toward the Joey Neurohr Three? And Joey dismounted on the sidewalk side.

All three had dark hair, darker than Al’s. Joey’s pals were a big-eyed Italian and a Puerto Rican kid apropos of whom my Irish doorman had said spics don’t use toilet paper. Joey’s broad-boned face built around small eyes could well have used more than its now-arrested adolescent mustache. Joey lowered his forehead eying Bob, the other two raised their chins. Even I could not have foreseen that the vectoral elite, of whom I must have been the sole representative there, pay for their strange power to receive incoming vectors, with a virtually gravitational impulse to launch vectors indirectly perilous to themselves: for without thinking, I called, “You wouldn’t have hit that pitch in a million years”— I , who believed that German Joey Neurohr could well have hooked my Corona as a joke (and a joke with that ending). But I then said, “Don’t worry about these sneaks, they only robbed you of a base-hit.”

Bob said he was not worrying. Joey said to me, “Who robbed you , buddy?” and Bob clattered our broomstick into the gutter and put a hand on Joey’s steel carrier and was about to do something, as Joey’s pals moved in on either side, but a short braking skid whistled our eyes around toward A.B. who, looking back at us had run right into a car that fortunately had already come to a stop after whipping into our block as if headed for the far dead end.

“So don’t worry about some of your friends who—” my father two years later eased off into other words he now saw would not ease our bedroom scene about God—“who expect you to get off these unclever quips. Now I don’t mean Camille, or even Bob, or anybody special. It’s just that I hate to see you get to be a wise guy. Even if you don’t go to church any more. You see, Cy, God is exactly not the one you can tell your petty little side of the story to, He’s beyond that.” My mother had paused in the kitchen long enough — I bet at least fifteen pages of this Outer Paraspace, but because of time there’s no more chance to check than to check all those pages your son-in-law took — and my mother now came audibly to the hall and was about to join us, and my father said with quiet precision and a deadpan wave, “Your pajamas are wide open,” and then, “Maybe you know your Bible but you don’t know Solomon’s concubines,” I subsequently found he was thinking of Solomon’s favorite Abra — quite a Sunday joke for him.

Did you know, Dom, that Richard would get wind of your public remark about TV screens and him? But he probably didn’t read your odd words. But it’s unlike him to come without phoning the police, and they’d demand his key, wouldn’t they?

Or is Richard just coming? That is, just to be here. I could tell him a thing or two about this space and how it’s become mine to become itself.

Abra ran around the car slapping its front fender and chased the ball. The car jumped, and we all divided, and it pushed Bob right up against Joey’s steel carrier with the insignia that Bohack had asked him to take off. Petty and I and some others came across in the wake of the car.

I must get home to Ev in order to wake early, but after tonight perhaps like you Dom I’ll sleep late. That’s what some of us need — a new federal, state, and local Program Oversleep. I’d hoped that my paraphase would be a break-through. Into the unimpeded field beyond the sway of ordinary light: Beyond that foully funny dream in which you Dom ask me to be your Secretary of Field-State and I consent as, simultaneously, though in another congruent kit of coördinates, I frown down on my father’s powdered cheeks that are roughly at right angles to the casket’s satin pillow, and I say, “But I was God.”