Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

“AIDS, grawk ! Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome, grawk !”

“You're not listening to me. This is one of the movements from the piece. I will perform it with Andrew at the Alternative Space, or at the Alternative Alternative Space. I have only a month to rehearse. You walked in on a rehearsal. You could have knocked.”

“Rehearsal. Rehearsal?” The parrot swoops at Ilyana in the bed. “I'm a fucking helicopter, grawk .”

“Andrew, please don't think I was… not with your Andrew,” Ilyana pleads. She whips her hands from under the covers, and lifts them as if in prayer, both hands aglow. The air around her is bright with goosedown. It's a snow scene sealed in a globe. It's love thwarted by dandruff.

“What were the pickles for?” I whisper into nowhere, as I turn back down the stairs.

I take to my half-lotus position on my meditation cushion.

I sit.

Who am I to intervene? I love them both. I bless them both.

I sit.

Andrew circles my head, coming down in a tight spiral, and paces back and forth in front of me as if weighing some issues. Finally he stops to look at me.

“Andrew,” says he. “So did you talk to the president?”

“I talked to him, Andrew.”

“Did you mention the plight of the parrot, particularly the African Grey?”

“I asked him whether he thought that in order to defeat the beast, we had to become the beast?”

“Did he say African Grey?”

“He said, ‘What are you talking about? God is on our side, and our weapons have pinpoint accuracy.’”

“And the parrot, Andrew? How about it?”

“I asked him how he and his posse could sleep at night, having gone to war on a gamble, and having put so many peoples’ lives in jeopardy, both American and otherwise. Did they ever have second thoughts?” I asked.

“And what did he say about the African Grey?”

“He said our weapons are precise, and God is on our side. So I asked him when he spoke to God, did he ever run into the pope, who says God is not on our side in this war. Perhaps he talked with him on a conference call with the Almighty?”

“Did he say anything about the parrot's dilemma?”

“I asked him what he would do if bin Laden were near a hospital, a school, an orphanage, a middle class neighborhood, a slum, a marketplace, a concert, a hammam, a coffeehouse. Would he fire his missile?”

“What did he say, Andrew?”

“He said God was with us, on our side, and our weapons have pinpoint.”

Andrew beat his wings. I pitied Andrew, his problems so specific. “I asked him how long he figured the War would take, and he told me to stop asking stupid questions. I told him that anyone who has a loved one in the war, or anyone who has feelings for humanity, wants some kind of reassurance, some kind of handle on the thing. It's not a stupid question. He says it will take as long as it takes, and to stop whining.”

“Was he willing to talk about parrots?”

“I told him we weren't some children in the back of a car complaining to know when we would get there. I told him he should put on a uniform himself, put one on Condoleeza, put one on Ari Fleischer, on the young Rumsfelds and Cheneys. Can Ashcroft have kids? Put them out there in the sandstorms.”

“About the African Grey, what did he say?”

“I asked what if they found bin Laden, and Osama was in bed with his wife, with Laura? Would he fire his weapon then?”

“Grawk .” Andrew lifted himself off floor, dropping some tail feathers as he flew to his perch. Grey feathers, fringed with black.

“He said he trusted his wife, the weapons were precise, could penetrate a bunker through a small hole. And God was on his side.”

I sit. And I know that throughout the city, and throughout many cities in this time zone and later in the other time zones, many people will have settled onto their cushions, and are and will be sitting with me. Let us all sit. Sit ’til we fit.

The noise of the street barely reaches my cushion, hardly makes it through the insulation. A fan circulates warm air down. Many people freeze in the night on the streets. I am not yet them. I visualize the countryside, the beauty of it. I see a waterfall. I see long blond beaches with perfect waves. I look into my thoughts and see off the side of a mountain that wears a necklace of small sapphire lakes. This is refreshing. This gives a sense of well-being. From somewhere, as if a solitary bee were grazing in and out of earshot through the blossoming clover, a sound of war buzzes, gleaned from TVs in my building, and radios, and pulled down from satellites.

I sit, despite all, I sit.

A muffled scream from out there. An argument. Thoughts. Send them away. That could have been a gunshot? Yeah. I have, I know, an illusion of separation from the misery out there by this thin green veil of money. This is money I have earned. We have seen how volatile the green veil is. How quickly we can be exposed, and onto the street. A moment of conflagration, and it's gone, all security. I live here in a world of bubble wrap and Styrofoam peanuts. Andrew lives with me. Ilyana is here sometimes. Outside of where I live the life blisters, the life of others. Inside, the pressures are slight, and have little significance. But what is outside, and what is inside all is taken into the heart, weighed and measured there, and it does weigh, and that is what is meant when the heart is heavy.

“The heart is heavy. The heart is heavy. Grawk .”

He escaped, chasing after his shadow, broken from his losses. The mango tree that had once protected him was ripped from the earth, its pale rootlets drying in the sun. Tignee had twined his legs into the branches trying to hold onto his wife, but the flood-tide was brutal. It tore her from his hands, and then baby floated out of her arms and away, like a bubble. His son too lost his grip, sank and rose and sank again ’til he was out of sight. One of his wife's sandals had snagged in the roots, the blue stones that decorated its straps still shining. He buckled its strap to his wrist.

The ones returning now to the nowhere paradise he was leaving dragged their shadows behind them.

He tried to speak with one or another, but no one responded, as if those who had once been his neighbors were too numbed now to recognize someone they had lived with all their lives. As they returned to the sea they passed through what remained of this impoverished empire of stuff, some of it small as threads, some as large as the wrecks of fishing boats. They gathered the shards and flecks of the former shrines in order, he guessed, to make an offering when they took themselves back to the water's edge.

He was leaving a place he thought he remembered, but perhaps he remembered incorrectly. The pain he felt was correct, somehow. Perhaps he was a tourist. Did he come from there, a place now erased? Was he moving in the right direction away from or towards a somewhere? He didn't want to look behind. Had he ever lived in the nowhere he was leaving? The questions were sad jokes. Perhaps he had been a tourist, just a tourist in a paradise that has been erased. Village, gone. Family, gone. He lifted his hands to examine scars and calluses from spinning fiber and knotting nets. He had been an architect of the nets. That memory was incised on his palms.

In the midst of the stragglers coming towards him he spotted a boy, handsome and slim as his son. He looked to be eight or nine, the age of his own boy. Perhaps he had escaped or had been rescued from the tide. He wasn't sure this was Ekey, not absolutely sure. Perhaps his vision was fading. That he couldn't with certainty distinguish his son from the flow of young people returning troubled him. Nonetheless, as the boy approached he readied himself to greet him. The boy had seemed to spot Tignee from afar, and seemed to be happily rushing towards him. As he drew closer Tignee still wasn't sure, absolutely sure, this was his son. A man should know his own son, he scolded himself. He should easily distinguish him from anyone else. They approached, and were within reach of each other as Tignee held out his arms. Without a glance, without a smile or a high five, the boy passed him by. He totally ignored the man who might have been his father. Now Tignee faced the quandary of whether or not to turn back and grab the boy. Or should he keep going, assume he had been mistaken? Youth would go its own way, had to have its own destiny. He soon had to accept that there was no way out of his quandary, no way to answer his questions, so he continued walking into the shadows. His own shadow shortened in front of him, as if it was his to consume. The light pinked into evening as he went. The bulbuls and flowerpeckers and babblers sang into the retreating light, bright shadows jumping branch to branch. He had been only a tourist, he decided, like all the tourists, only a visitor, a spinner and weaver of nets in this deleted paradise. Anyone could be no more than a visitor in paradise.