Groundwork, p.55
Groundwork, page 55
* * *
Cataloguing your travels ninety pages ago, you forgot to mention your journeys between Brooklyn and Manhattan, thirty-one years of traveling within your own city since your removal to Kings County in 1980, on average two or three times a week, which would add up to several thousand trips, many of them underground by subway, but many others back and forth across the Brooklyn Bridge in cars and taxis, a thousand crossings, two thousand crossings, five thousand crossings, it is impossible to know how many, but surely it is the trip you have taken more often than any other in your life, and not once have you failed to admire the architecture of the bridge, the curious but altogether satisfying blend of old and new that distinguishes this bridge from all others, the thick stone of the medieval Gothic arches at odds with and yet in harmony with the delicate spider webs of steel cables, once the tallest man-made structure in North America, and back in the days before the suicidal murderers visited New York, it was always the crossing from Brooklyn to Manhattan that you preferred, the anticipation of reaching the exact point where you could simultaneously see the Statue of Liberty in the harbor to your left and the downtown skyline looming in front of you, the immense buildings that would suddenly jump into sight, among them the Towers, of course, the unbeautiful Towers that gradually became a familiar part of the landscape, and even though you still marvel at the skyline whenever you approach Manhattan, now that the Towers are gone you can no longer make the crossing without thinking about the dead, about seeing the Towers burn from your daughter’s bedroom window on the top floor of your house, about the smoke and ashes that fell onto the streets of your neighborhood for three days following the attack, and the bitter, unbreathable stench that forced you to shut all the windows of your house until the winds finally shifted away from Brooklyn on Friday, and even though you have continued to cross the bridge two or three times a week in the nine and a half years since then, the journey is no longer the same, the dead are still there, and the Towers are there as well—pulsating in memory, still present as an empty hole in the sky.
* * *
You heard the dead calling out to you—but only once, once in all the years you have been alive. You are not someone who sees things that are not there, and while you have often been confused by what you are seeing, you are not prone to hallucinations or fantastical alterations of reality. The same with your ears. Every now and then, while out on one of your walks through the city, you think you hear someone calling to you, think you hear the voice of your wife or daughter or son shouting your name from across the street, but when you turn around to look for them, it is always someone else saying Paul or Dad or Daddy. Twenty years ago, however, perhaps twenty-five years ago, under circumstances far removed from the flow of your daily life, you experienced an auditory hallucination that continues to bewilder you with its vividness and power, the sheer volume of the voices you heard, even though the chorus of the dead screamed out in you for no more than five or ten seconds. You were in Germany, spending the weekend in Hamburg, and on Sunday morning your friend Michael Naumann, who was also your German publisher, suggested that the two of you pay a visit to Bergen-Belsen—or, rather, to the site where Bergen-Belsen had once stood. You wanted to go, even if a part of you was reluctant to go, and you remember the drive there on the nearly empty autobahn that overcast Sunday morning, a white-gray sky hanging over mile after mile of flat land, seeing a car that had crashed into a tree by the side of the road and the corpse of the driver lying on the grass, a body so inert and twisted that you immediately knew the man was dead, and there you were, sitting in the car and thinking about Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, who had both died in Bergen-Belsen, along with tens of thousands of others, the many thousands of others who perished there from typhus and starvation, random beatings, murder. The dozens of films and newsreels you had seen of the death camps were spooling through your head as you sat in the passenger seat of the car, and as you and Michael approached your destination, you found yourself growing more and more anxious and withdrawn. Nothing was left of the camp itself. The buildings had been torn down, the barracks had been demolished and carted away, the barbed-wire fences had vanished, and what stood there now was a small museum, a one-story structure filled with poster-sized black-and-white photographs along with explanatory texts, a grim place, an awful place, but so denuded and antiseptic that you found it hard to imagine the reality of the place as it had been during the war. You couldn’t feel the presence of the dead, the horror of so many thousands crammed into that nightmare village surrounded by barbed wire, and as you walked through the museum with Michael (in your memory, you were the only people there), you wished the camp had been left intact so the world could have seen what the architecture of barbarism had looked like. Then you went outside, onto the grounds where the death camp had stood, but it was a grassy field now, a domain of lovely, well-tended grass stretching for several hundred yards in all directions, and if not for the various markers planted in the ground that indicated where the barracks had once been, where certain buildings had once been, there would have been no way to guess what had gone on there several decades earlier. Then you came to a patch of grass that was slightly elevated, three or four inches higher than the rest of the field, a perfect rectangle that measured about twenty feet by thirty feet, the size of a large room, and in one corner there was a marker in the ground that read: Here lie the bodies of 50,000 Russian soldiers. You were standing on top of the grave of fifty thousand men. It didn’t seem possible that so many dead bodies could fit into such a small space, and when you tried to imagine those bodies beneath you, the tangled corpses of fifty thousand young men packed into what must have been the deepest of deep holes, you began to grow dizzy at the thought of so much death, so much death concentrated in such a small patch of ground, and a moment later you heard the screams, a tremendous surge of voices rose up from the ground beneath you, and you heard the bones of the dead howl in anguish, howl in pain, howl in a roaring cascade of full-throated, earsplitting torment. The earth was screaming. For five or ten seconds you heard them, and then they went silent.
* * *
Talking to your father in your dreams. For many years now, he has been visiting you in a dark room on the other side of consciousness, sitting down at a table with you for long, unhurried conversations, calm and circumspect, always treating you with kindness and goodwill, always listening carefully to what you say to him, but once the dream is over and you wake up, you can’t recall a single word either one of you said.
* * *
Sneezing and laughing, yawning and crying, burping and coughing, scratching your ears, rubbing your eyes, blowing your nose, clearing your throat, chewing your lips, rolling your tongue over the backs of your lower teeth, shuddering, farting, hiccuping, wiping sweat from your forehead, running your hands through your hair—how many times have you done those things? How many stubbed toes, smashed fingers, and knocks on the head? How many stumbles, slips, and falls? How many blinks of your eyes? How many steps taken? How many hours spent with a pen in your hand? How many kisses given and received?
* * *
Holding your infant children in your arms.
* * *
Holding your wife in your arms.
* * *
Your bare feet on the cold floor as you climb out of bed and walk to the window. You are sixty-four years old. Outside, the air is gray, almost white, with no sun visible. You ask yourself: How many mornings are left?
* * *
A door has closed. Another door has opened.
* * *
You have entered the winter of your life.
REPORT FROM THE INTERIOR
{2012}
In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts, and even the clouds had names. Scissors could walk, telephones and teapots were first cousins, eyes and eyeglasses were brothers. The face of the clock was a human face, each pea in your bowl had a different personality, and the grille on the front of your parents’ car was a grinning mouth with many teeth. Pens were airships. Coins were flying saucers. The branches of trees were arms. Stones could think, and God was everywhere.
* * *
There was no problem in believing that the man in the moon was an actual man. You could see his face looking down at you from the night sky, and without question it was the face of a man. Little matter that this man had no body—he was still a man as far as you were concerned, and the possibility that there might be a contradiction in all this never once entered your thoughts. At the same time, it seemed perfectly credible that a cow could jump over the moon. And that a dish could run away with a spoon.
* * *
Your earliest thoughts, remnants of how you lived inside yourself as a small boy. You can remember only some of it, isolated bits and pieces, brief flashes of recognition that surge up in you unexpectedly at random moments—brought on by the smell of something, or the touch of something, or the way the light falls on something in the here and now of adulthood. At least you think you can remember, you believe you remember, but perhaps you are not remembering at all, or remembering only a later remembrance of what you think you thought in that distant time which is all but lost to you now.
* * *
January 3, 2012, exactly one year to the day after you started composing your last book, your now-finished winter journal. It was one thing to write about your body, to catalogue the manifold knocks and pleasures experienced by your physical self, but exploring your mind as you remember it from childhood will no doubt be a more difficult task—perhaps an impossible one. Still, you feel compelled to give it a try. Not because you find yourself a rare or exceptional object of study, but precisely because you don’t, because you think of yourself as anyone, as everyone.
* * *
The only proof you have that your memories are not entirely deceptive is the fact that you still occasionally fall into the old ways of thinking. Vestiges have lingered well into your sixties, the animism of early childhood has not been fully purged from your mind, and each summer, as you lie on your back in the grass, you look up at the drifting clouds and watch them turn into faces, into birds and animals, into states and countries and imaginary kingdoms. The grilles of cars still make you think of teeth, and the corkscrew is still a dancing ballerina. In spite of the outward evidence, you are still who you were, even if you are no longer the same person.
* * *
In thinking about where you want to go with this, you have decided not to cross the boundary of twelve, for after the age of twelve you were no longer a child, adolescence was looming, glimmers of adulthood had already begun to flicker in your brain, and you were transformed into a different kind of being from the small person whose life was a constant plunge into the new, who every day did something for the first time, even several things, or many things, and it is this slow progress from ignorance toward something less than ignorance that concerns you now. Who were you, little man? How did you become a person who could think, and if you could think, where did your thoughts take you? Dig up the old stories, scratch around for whatever you can find, then hold up the shards to the light and have a look at them. Do that. Try to do that.
* * *
The world was of course flat. When someone tried to explain to you that the earth was a sphere, a planet orbiting the sun with eight other planets in something called a solar system, you couldn’t grasp what the older boy was saying. If the earth was round, then everyone below the equator would fall off, since it was inconceivable that a person could live his life upside down. The older boy tried to explain the concept of gravity to you, but that was beyond your grasp as well. You imagined millions of people plunging headlong through the darkness of an infinite, all-devouring night. If the earth was indeed round, you said to yourself, then the only safe place to be was the North Pole.
* * *
No doubt influenced by the cartoons you loved to watch, you thought there was a pole jutting out from the North Pole. Similar to one of those striped, revolving columns that stood in front of barbershops.
* * *
Stars, on the other hand, were inexplicable. Not holes in the sky, not candles, not electric lights, not anything that resembled what you knew. The immensity of the black air overhead, the vastness of the space that stood between you and those small luminosities, was something that resisted all understanding. Benign and beautiful presences hovering in the night, there because they were there and for no other reason. The work of God’s hand, yes, but what in the world had he been thinking?
* * *
Your circumstances at the time were as follows: midcentury America; mother and father; tricycles, bicycles, and wagons; radios and black-and-white televisions; standard-shift cars; two small apartments and then a house in the suburbs; fragile health early on, then normal boyhood strength; public school; a family from the striving middle class; a town of fifteen thousand populated by Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, all white except for a smattering of black people, but no Buddhists, Hindus, or Muslims; a little sister and eight first cousins; comic books; Rootie Kazootie and Pinky Lee; “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”; Campbell’s soup, Wonder bread, and canned peas; souped-up cars (hot rods) and cigarettes for twenty-three cents a pack; a little world inside the big world, which was the entire world for you back then, since the big world was not yet visible.
* * *
Armed with a pitchfork, an angry Farmer Gray runs across a cornfield in pursuit of Felix the Cat. Neither one of them can talk, but their actions are accompanied by a steady clang of jaunty, high-speed music, and as you watch the two of them engage in yet another battle of their never-ending war, you are convinced they are real, that these raggedly drawn black-and-white figures are no less alive than you are. They appear every afternoon on a television program called Junior Frolics, hosted by a man named Fred Sayles, who is known to you simply as Uncle Fred, the silver-haired gatekeeper to this land of marvels, and because you understand nothing about the production of animated films, cannot even begin to fathom the process by which drawings are made to move, you figure there must be some sort of alternate universe in which characters like Farmer Gray and Felix the Cat can exist—not as pen scratches dancing across a television screen, but as fully embodied, three-dimensional creatures as large as adults. Logic demands that they be large, since the people who appear on television are always larger than their images on-screen, and logic also demands that they belong to an alternate universe, since the universe you live in is not populated by cartoon characters, much as you might wish it was. One day when you are five years old, your mother announces that she will be taking you and your friend Billy to the studio in Newark where Junior Frolics is broadcast. You will get to see Uncle Fred in person, she tells you, and be a part of the show. All this is exciting to you, inordinately exciting, but even more exciting is the thought that finally, after months of speculation, you will be able to set eyes on Farmer Gray and Felix the Cat. At long last you will discover what they really look like. In your mind, you see the action unfolding on an enormous stage, a stage the size of a football field, as the crotchety old farmer and the wily black cat chase each other back and forth in one of their epic skirmishes. On the appointed day, however, none of it happens as you thought it would. The studio is small, Uncle Fred has makeup on his face, and after you are given a bag of mints to keep you company during the show, you take your seat in the grandstand with Billy and the other children. You look down at what should be a stage, but which in fact is nothing more than the concrete floor of the studio, and what you see there is a television set. Not even a special television set, but one no bigger or smaller than the set you have at home. The farmer and the cat are nowhere in the vicinity. After Uncle Fred welcomes the audience to the show, he introduces the first cartoon. The television comes on, and there are Farmer Gray and Felix the Cat, bouncing around in the same way they always have, still trapped inside the box, still as small as they ever were. You are thoroughly confused. What error have you made? you ask yourself. Where has your thinking gone wrong? The real is so defiantly at odds with the imagined, you can’t help feeling that a nasty trick has been played on you. Stunned with disappointment, you can barely bring yourself to look at the show. Afterward, walking back to the car with Billy and your mother, you toss away the mints in disgust.
* * *
Grass and trees, insects and birds, small animals, and the sounds of those animals as their invisible bodies thrashed through the surrounding bushes. You were five and a half when your family left the cramped garden apartment in Union and installed itself in the old white house on Irving Avenue in South Orange. Not a big house, but the first house your parents had ever lived in, which made it your first house as well, and even though the interior was not spacious, the yard behind the house seemed vast to you, for in fact it was two yards, the first one a small grassy area directly behind the house, bordered by your mother’s crescent-shaped flower garden, and then, because a white wooden garage stood just beyond the flowers, bisecting the property into independent terrains, there was a second yard behind it, the back backyard, which was wilder and bigger than the front backyard, a secluded realm in which you conducted your most intense investigations into the flora and fauna of your new kingdom. The only sign of man back there was your father’s vegetable garden, which was essentially a tomato garden, planted not long after your family moved into the house in 1952, and every year for the twenty-six and a half years that remained of his life, your father spent his summers cultivating tomatoes, the reddest, plumpest New Jersey tomatoes anyone had ever seen, baskets overflowing with tomatoes every August, so many tomatoes that he would have to give them away before they went bad. Your father’s garden, running along a side of the garage in the back backyard. His patch of ground, but your world—and there you lived until you were twelve.
