riverrun, past Eve and Adam's

Constant Flight

A Diaspora where bodies never rest, but are in constant flight, chased through back alleys, past faint images of others that aren’t there, but remain impacted in thought, sketched in memory just the same. Having read my fair share of Freud, I have a reasonable understanding of repressed memories and idic fears, an adult’s conditioned response to a world of torn sheets, scalawags, insecurities and unfulfilled wishes. With this as a bio-social-psychological template, its no wonder there are one-legged dogs, cowering children, and an intangible insistence on getting ‘it’ right. Its no wonder there are heavy sleepless eyes, knees pulled tight into galloping chests, night tremors, wet beds, and an indifference to pain. Remember never to forget; forget never to remember. Memories are all we’re left with when the present disappears. Remember that, and you will be intangible, galloping and never at rest. There is a cost to remembering, a cost many are unwilling to incur. The incurable alcoholic, the track scarred drug addict with blue wen eyes, and the one-legged dog that recalls a time when black bread biscuits, hot from the oven, filled a shiny silver bowl. I will try to forget how to remember, and remember how to forget. Should that fail, I will encourage catatonia, and be done with having vital thoughts all together. Keen as I am to remember, to have my own storehouse of memories, good or bad, the only tangible option is reification, or a slow boat to China. As I will surly come face to face with starving Chinese children, who’s hunger and thirst I could have slaked had I not be so belligerent and small minded, China is a option I care not to exploit. But then again, I will conveniently have forgotten what I have just said, and stuff my gullet with sweetbreads, millet and rice, perfumed with jasmine, saffron and the darkest black cumin imaginable. Should I fail, I will have failed, nothing more.

He gets on the bus with great effort, the thrombosis in his legs causing numbness where pain should be. He asks for a cigarette, should I have one to spare, as he is on his way to the courthouse, he says, to pick strays and half-smoked ones from the sandbox by the doors. His face is a litany of red lines and scratches, left behind, no doubt, after a night spent struggling to keep his legs warm, poached in a wicker of nettles and thorns. They bite my legs, he says, the ants and other bugs and sometimes a rat trying to get at dead skin. I worry they’ll eat their way into my leg, then I’ll need to go to the hospital for a new one or one made from screws and wood. They gave me this thing, he says, pointing at the walker, so as I could get round to the Mission for meals and a card game and such. One of the wheels is choused to the rim, the other worn through, spays of rubber gray as marrowbone. I smile and offer him an unsmoked cigarette; a sad happiness in his eyes that is unbearable beyond words. His life is subcutaneous, nothing living above bone and tendon. No burning sensation or itching, no lice scrabbling, infesting, the yellow skein of his legs, legs gone numb and palsied with grief and bad luck. Better to have lost all feeling than to be at odds with the constant maintenance of toes, shins and knee cups. Better to have no feeling at all, from head to toe, than to smoke half-strays with filter ends stained brown with someone else’s salver and good luck. I had a dog, he says, till it got run over by a car, not a brain in its damn head, poor thing. Always running in and out of traffic like a dervish looking for God knows what. Least when he was around I didn’t need worry ‘bout having my belongings taken away from me, he saw to that, smart, he was, having no brain as he did. He looks out into the road, at the traffic stopped up at the lights, and smiles, stupid, sure, but smarter than you’d think. He knew how to tell when the lights had changed, and when to nudge me into the crosswalk. He could tell what time it was, or when it was gonna rain, the way he shifted his weight from one leg to the other like it was time to go. He could even sniff out smokes for me, some with more than half left. Smart in that way, but dumb as hell when it came to cars and traffic. I sat two seats away from him on the bus, not wanting to see the sad happiness in his eyes, or think of the dog running in traffic, or legs without feeling, rats eating down to bone.