Page 47 - WTP Vol. XIII #1

imagined was the dust of the loved.
Relativity
Three time zones east, while I slept in one room of my travel-vouchered hotel suite, the ambulance, red- pulsing, but muted, arrived for my father. My sister, discreet, waited for what she believed was a decent hour in California, her morning nearly ended before she called. As we talked, the first of six job-candidate interviews I was scheduled to conduct was eight min- utes from beginning. My colleague carried the morn- ing’s conversations; I made phone calls during lunch.
When, during the afternoon, I seasoned my questions with banter, the nervous candidates smiled. Later,
the hotel rooms were swept and scoured while I listened to strangers from other colleges and univer- sities toast each other before dinner in an expensive restaurant so close to the hotel I could walk there alone, then back to where each hour, its voice hushed, offered condolences during my all-night sleepless- ness that ended while the early morning plane taxied to its gate. It waited for me to board, just after sun- rise. I exited, in late afternoon, to a second version of winter, its light, altered by accumulated snow.
Time Dilation
In my fiftieth high-school-reunion booklet, the first name was Lyle An...’s twin sister Lorraine. She sent
a note that included her struggles with lung cancer. Susan Ar... did not respond. What followed were retirements and grandchildren and occasional health reports. A few of us, still working, extended ourselves as if career achievements were still sought, or even still possible.
The list of our “classmates passed” was displayed where we gathered for dinner. All of the names were used as captions for their enlarged yearbook photo-
graphs. I found Janet P, decades dead, I’d heard, from abuse of alcohol. I settled for remembering her brief, small spectaculars of touch. The next name was Sha- ron R, dead from cancer. We had been so young we were tentative and awkward, barely touching at all.
I ordered mixed drinks, embalming myself against anxiety and fear. Later, I bowed my head throughout the silence the living agreed upon, preserving both of them and all the rest with an inclusive recollec- tion.
Next door, a class years younger danced under swirls of color that blinked in sync with the pulse of disco. A gate-crasher from their future, I loitered in the doorway while two women squinted at my name
to make out which one of the boys they’d loved had prematurely aged.
Dark Matter
My friend said a day without news was impossible. One morning’s lead story was his untimely death, only his son surviving the head-on two miles from their home. For days, my near-misses were an embar- rassment of luck inherited like wealth.
My friend believed the news was a woman so beauti- ful he would never tire of her body. It was like his love of drinking, returning daily to that desire, sometimes seeking my company for an evening that extended toward the blackout of any sort of news. Maybe that need was a form of loneliness that caught in the throat like a concealed confession for the disquiet of restraint, a moment when he was, at least, in under- standing’s vicinity.
Since then, I have learned that at 20:45, April 18, 1930, the Wagner being played on the BBC, as sched- uled, was interrupted for fifteen minutes of news. Those listening to the radio were worried, most likely, about financial affairs, the way the world was teetering toward another war, but they heard “There is no news,” and a piano began to play as if nothing outside of their lives had happened, and they could speak to each other softly as the piano continued. The length and width of their living rooms were
the extent of what mattered enough to record and repeat, something like the somber music after Ken- nedy’s assassination, each station suddenly gone to cathedral organs, bagpipes, and military bands, all the instrumental ways to indicate the news of loss in the interlude between death and its details through the static of a distant station or the hum that lives between frequencies.
(continued on next page)
40