Page 49 - WTP Vol. XIII #1

dream of building the impossible. The dream of these words I use, believing they sound like something that goes on as perfectly as singing in my head the old songs I love, sounding exactly like Ivory Joe Hunter, like Jessie Belvin, like Johnny Ace, names from an- other kind of children’s story.
I have blueprints on my desk. I begin with snow and my father preaching the stars into shapes that hold us as we pass. I’m writing to scale, and I’m failing to form all sides at once as if the blind spots of mi- graine pinwheel through my translation. And I think there is failure in this paper and ink, the letters level as always, precise as store displays, nothing for sale or use though I believe them immortal voices, time lines drawn from page to page to page like hammer wheels and satellites, the extrapolation dreams.
Time
My high school class’s sixtieth reunion year is about to begin. No one has contacted me. Though I have been retired for six years, I occasionally teach, spend- ing so little time at the university that I feel I have be- come a stranger, enough to pause me inside my office in this refurbished house where priests once lived within a set of rooms so small anyone would perceive them as a suite of cells. During my last semester of full-time teaching, in that office transfigured by stu- dents, I would often put aside work for the leisure of thankfulness, keeping fear and doubt priest-secret.
Always, I had been told by a parishioner, the last of those priests had terriers, two at a time, and, for a year, cancer no amount of praying could cure. By then, a mile to the east, ground had been broken, foundation laid for the reconstruction of faith. The rectory, vacant a year, went dank and mildewed, cu- bicles of shadows eventually lifted by the university’s carpenters, electricians, and plumbers. The discard- ed church became a clinic, its large lot a gallery of patients’ cars, the near rows for the handicapped and pregnant, a space fire-lane wide for vans that trans- port the helpless. It took just short of a year to erase the history of those buildings from the awareness of strangers.
The most common noun, according to researchers, is Time. Recently, someone wrote to our local newspa- per claiming to know the way in which God prioritiz- es our prayers, responding from innocence to brutal- ity symbolized, the writer explained, by children and Russia’s neo-czar. He estimated five billion prayers
were mouthed per day. He said that Time, happily, was a concept different for God. Or Einstein, he might have said, who declared that Time, if we approached the speed of light, would slow until, after decades, we would arc back younger than our grandchildren as
if we had gained the limitless advantage of a now- shaken God.
In the months before he died, my father, past ninety, remembered only what he had seen first-hand, loneli- ness his last lesson by example, of how we disappear into Time.
Brouwer’s Theorem
In our kitchen, some nights, my wife walks back- wards, but mostly she does her retreats in the living room, where there is room for additional steps. She says this exercise postpones the arrival of unsteady, mustering a smile when she manages back and back again with grace. Mobility is vital now that we are in past our mid-seventies. A friend’s hip-breaking fall is already stored on our anxiety’s flash-drive.
Smiling, I’ve cited “Giant Steps,” that childhood game where, very often, as the players neared the fin-
ish line, whoever was “It” repeated “baby steps” or “backward steps” to keep things tense and extend the game. My wife said she had never played.
What she knows is that I fill my mornings with fitness-room exercise to relieve my spells of forebod- ing. What she doesn’t know is how often I pedal my digital pulse into the age-calibrated red zone before backing off, thrilled and terrified, momentarily, to escape my age.
But lately there are evenings when her walking has called me from my chair, joining her to count back- ward steps together without feeling behind ourselves for the bookcase or the wall we devote to art. We do this simple line dance to the rhythm of apprehen- sion, hearing time’s chorus hummed into our ears, the one so familiar we automatically mouth the lyrics. And yet, walking backwards to its music, we waltz
in a tempo so comfortable we barely sense the tiny increments of change, and balance, for a time, seems enough for joy.
Fincke’s essay “After the Three-Moon Era” was reprinted in Best American Essays 2020 and featured in the collection The Mayan Syndrome (Madhat Press, 2023). Madville Press will publish a “New and Selected” collection in the spring of 2025.
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