Wish You Were Here (1)

How I wish, how I wish you were here. We're just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl, Year after year... -Pink Floyd

I Will Follow You Into the Dark�"

For Her

 

-1-

Wish You Were Here

 

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.

-Pink Floyd

 

I’m on a train with a hundred strange faces- wanting what, who knows- tumbling down this steel rail back to our island and our cheap cabana, where I will lie on a Berber rug typing up a manuscript involving the dead, the long dead, the soon to be dead, the one day dead.  I’d rather drift, not face it, let it all pass.  I’d rather rot on the ash tray street where I sell the eel and squid I catch down in the bay, where there is no tomorrow or today, where I’ve spent a decade in self-exile letting my heart soak in the acid water of memory, all in a glass tile effort to forget I once knew joy.

And the pain.  The pain is only a color now.

But I owe it to him, to us, and my heart’s grown too heavy from all the cold rust, the rust of remembrance, rust the color of the sun I’m baking my eyes in…

Today’s sun, a bullet of a sun, a deck of cards sun, a bowl of Peruvian tangerines on a dais in a garden of asphodels sun, hanging like a naked body in a sweaty attic, strung up on something like lost love.

Tomorrow, it could be the same, could be different, could be gone.

If he was here I know he’d say something about it.  He’d look away and touch his wrist like he always did right before he said something brilliant and beautiful, something with a salt, lemon, and Ezra Pound flavor, a Cezanne in words.  And I’d sit across from him and wait and it’d feel like centuries before he’d turn back to me, grab my eyes, and finally say it, something like ‘You ever wonder about the now, about you and I, sitting here under a paper cut sun wearing the afternoon like a wedding dress, breathing, thinking.  You know we’re everything to ourselves, we’re the only story we ever get to star in, but in the end we’re only words in an endless memoir certain of one thing and one thing only, that the now will expire and one day, you and I will die.’

That. 

That is the ruin I get for what I’m doing, for digging up the bones of my past, for tangoing with the ghosts of memory and regret, for travelling miles and miles out here under this sun, to pen our story, the one of me and the man buried at the end of this railroad, a few feet under, shallow just like he wanted it, so he could feel the rain, the milkweed moonlight, and the warmth of the sun-

 

“I think I’m going to marry this girl.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” Cale laughed and started fidgeting with the fried rice on his plate.

Aden said nothing and snatched the eel sushi off the conveyor belt before the old man in the booth behind them could grab it.  “He’s been hogging all the eel.”

“It’s not even that good, let him.”

“It’s not that, he’s doing it on purpose, I know it.  Look, he and his hag of a wife haven’t even started on the last three plates they grabbed.”

Cale sighed and leaned back in the booth. This is how it always ends up, Aden picking at all the little scabs in any place they go, killing the joy, getting trashed at noon.

“You always do this.”

“Do what?” Aden spit through a mouthful of sushi, shoulders like a savannah vulture craning over the table, acting like he sincerely had no idea what Cale was talking about.

“Prate about this and that, pretend like the whole world is always conspiring against you, divulging into some diatribe-”

“I’m sorry.” Aden cut him off, looked up temporally, smirked, and then grabbed another plate of sushi.

Cale glared.  He wouldn’t let this go.  Aden was his closest friend, he should be ecstatic for his proposal; after all, he’s going to be best man.

 “It’s not just that, it’s-”

“Well, what else is it?” Aden threw down his chopsticks and gestured for the bill with royal pomp. “What other gripes do you have with me? Do continue dousing me with petrol, doctor Cambridge, for divulging into diatribes instead of accolading you on your regalia and cherry romance.”

“So that’s what it is to you? Some cherry romance.” Cale pulled out his wallet, threw down a wad of won, and started to slide out of the booth. 

He wouldn’t sit here, again, like yesterday and the day before, choking on Aden’s vinegar and salt water, he couldn’t take it anymore.  He wanted the kid he once knew, the one who used to sit with him on the dock drinking beer, skipping stones, and dreaming, the one who’d lay back under the stars, stick his thumb over the spaces in between, and swear- ‘One day I’m going to climb up there and paint over all that black.’

“Wait, Cale, wait.” Aden grabbed his arm, his tone turning from ash to nectar. “I’m sorry, I am, it’s rough, you know, you’re going back to the states in a month, you’ll be a married man, I’ll be here.”

  Cale sighed and moved back into the booth.  He folded his arms and waited for Aden to sugar his words, to pretty it all up like a cinnamon-haired girl in an eggshell blouse on her first day of school.  He could be as eloquent as a Kennedy, baiting almost anyone with a speech.  He knew what you wanted to hear and he knew how to bend it, desalinize it, straight down to the syllables.  It didn’t matter if you were Marilyn Monroe, the American press, or a buzzed Mentofreeist, Aden had a talent when it came to words, a talent which he often abused.

“I’m sorry, I am, it’s rough, you know, you’re going back to the states in a month, you’ll be a married man, I’ll be here with all those dreams we had when were still kids, to rove around, to hike in Nepal, saddle up and ride across Mongolia, play acoustic in a square in Venice…”

Aden leaned back, let it taper off coolly and sink in like a coin dancing in a medium of melted glass, settling to the bottom of the Trevi Fountain with frottola grace.   

“But those are only dreams.  One day we’ve got to all grow up and wake to a bare ceiling and yellow wallpaper, right?  Anyway, I’m happy for you two, I really am.”

Aden poured two shots of soju and slid one glass across the table.

“To my brother Cale and his girl Aurora.”

Cale managed a weak smile, he’d made it a habit to guard himself against Aden’s calculated sermons, but he touched Aden’s glass and pounded back the drink.

“Why don’t you come back with me?” Cale asked as he set the glass down on the table and chased back the poison with salmon.

“Can’t.”

“And why can’t you?”

“Too many ghosts in that town, Cale, you know that.  Besides, I hate that damn place and I want to see the world.” Aden traced the rim of the shot glass with a flat finger before reaching for the soju bottle again.

“Least come back for the wedding.”

“Another shot?” Cale shook his head and waited while Aden poured himself another glass. “I might.”

But he knew he wouldn’t.  Ever.  He couldn’t go back to that town.  He hated it, all the familiar faces, everyone’s fingers in everyone else’s business, pretending the whole world exists right there and only there on their front stoop, with the hardest decision anybody ever has to make being what turn to take at the one intersection in what they swear is ‘downtown’, or what barber of two to tip extra, or what movie to see in the cinema forty miles away over the coyote-colored mountains.

Besides, that town drained his childhood.  It was always the same nights and same days, packing an old tin can full of Carolina dirt and worms to fish off the dock, sitting around bonfires with everyone from the block, eating pepper chili with potatoes, sour cream, and mozzarella, making wet, puppy love down by the river under a satin moon, selling out existence to be what my father did and my father and his father before him.

“You might? Come on, I want you to be my best man.  It won’t be the same without you.  Besides, everyone will be expecting you.”

“That’s the other problem, everyone and their expectations.  I’ll go back to that town and they’ll all look down their noses at me and they won’t have the balls to say it but they’ll all be thinking it- ‘Why’d you go? Why’d you leave your father by himself? So what, so you could grow out your hair and run across an ocean?’”

Aden downed another shot and lit up a Camel cigarette. 

Cale watched him uneasily through folded eyes.  His closest friend was becoming a body bag, an envelope with a broken seal, a corpse rain drop in a street puddle losing life to a rising sun, and it was only getting worse with the drinking, insomnia, cynicism, and hate.  He had no idea what to say or do, the man sitting in front of him with a withered face and dredged look was a stranger, a stranger in a nightmare sitting under a dead streetlight smoking dry barrel tobacco out of a clay pipe, grinning, because he’s about to plant a powder keg under the storehouse where everything that’s ever mattered to him and everyone he loves lies.

“You know it’s true, don’t you Cale?”

“So what? So it is?” Cale leaned forward and snatched the bottle of soju. “So you’re going to let it trump me? You’re going to let it lead you to this?”

“Don’t be so goddamn dramatic Cale.” Aden took a soft drag and reached for the bottle. “Tell me, though, tell me why you’re so sure about Aurora?”

Cale let the bottle go and leaned back.  Aden had that smirk again, that chiseled look that made him unsure of his real intention in asking.  Was it to prove a point? Was it for amusement? Was he going to take his words and shove it back down his throat? Or was he going to do what the old Aden would have done, help him think it all through constructively?

“She’s the world to me, she’s the reason I wake up in the morning, the music I fall asleep to at night, I don’t know, Aden, she makes me feel like outer space, like everything will be and was alright, like the world could burn and I wouldn’t care as long as I have her.”

“Beautiful, Cale, beautiful, I’m happy for you.” Aden let the smile hang for a second before dropping his face and pouring another drink. “You want a shot?”

“It’s one in the afternoon.”

“Right, right, we’ve got lead shoes to fill and expectations to meet.”

“That or some of us are still interested in living.” Cale cracked a hurt smile and stood to leave. “I’ve to go meet with some of the bar owners downtown to figure out pay and gig times.  See you back at the apartment tonight.”

“Yep, yep.  I got the bill, my treat.”  Aden grabbed the wadded won and offered it up to Cale.

“Take it.”

Cale left Aden sitting there with an open fist and a fresh shot glass of soju.  He scattered the won across the table top, groped the glass like a fleeting Venetian lover, and let it hang before him, to cheers an old ghost.

“I’epoux infernal.”

He pounded the shot and sat there, a faceless body in a crowd of no one. 

Two middle aged couples leaned into the counter, laughing, reminiscing, trading words in hand baskets, wrinkled palms in wrinkled palms.  A young couple melted opposite them, their pupils flaring like stars on a crystallized night, laughing at every shallow joke they poured onto one another like Tuscan wine into holed chalices, lost in the Lethe of what they think is a last love, or a first love, or a final love in between, in the end, most likely, becoming that stale love you find under wooden benches on  cold November days.  An old man sat cross-legged in the corner, thumbing through a paper, with nothing but bloated sugar packets and coffee lying before him, perhaps trying to escape loneliness by needling his way into a joint packed with warm bodies, or perhaps this was his wife’s favorite place and he comes here every day to saturate his worth with the news of this turning world and remember the days and nights when they sat in here and she smiled like a rose garden and all the darkness seemed to bleed.

                To bleed.

                Aden wondered what that really felt like, the magic of some true, potent love.  Was it real? Or did people convince themselves desperately, like they do when it comes to prayer and politics, that this is it? 

                He’d known Cale all his life.  Sometimes he felt like he knew him better then he knew himself.  And that’s what killed him.  Cale had been the skeptic for as long as he could remember and he’d always played the role of the lighthouse, promising Cale there’d be a calm after the storm, a dawn, a reason for all this and for all that, but now, when Cale’s finally found it, he’s ended up acting like the one caught in the deep end. 

And so what made him bitter? Was it selfish rage at Cale for finding the remedy before him? Or something far more acidic, maybe a disgust with Cale for giving into the plastic world and believing that love was or could be anything more than a paper cup of hormones and second rate poetry?

He’d already decided anyway.  He wouldn’t go back to that town.  Not even for Cale.  And certainly not to christen some clay romance or satiate all the cookie cut fifth generation nobodies who wanted to see his soul cemented like theirs in the permanence of an uninteresting, insular life. 

Cale, of course, couldn’t understand.  He grew up somewhere else, everywhere else, only ending up in the town when he was thirteen and his father retired from the military.  Cale wasn’t rooted to the compost like he was with a family that had built and made the town what it was.  Cale didn’t have to feed all those expectations, to keep the veins of the community flowing, to rot there all his life like his father and his father before him placating the people, playing Moses, saving the plastic family reputation from guano and disgrace.   

Cale even had the nerve once to tell him to stay, to save the family business, to keep the salt and sugar gunning, but Aden wouldn’t take that.

‘You don’t know what it’s like! It’s easy for you to say, you haven’t had to put with the same walls and faces your entire life!’

‘No, you’re right, but I never got to grow up in the same house either and have my father chalk my height on the door frame and grow up with the same people under the same warm nights in the same warm bed.’

‘You’re right; you didn’t, so you won’t ever understand.’

And what bothered Aden was what Cale had said after, through lips shaped like a crescent moon, smiling, knowing he’d be the one to deliver the closer, because afterward Aden could only sit with his head against folded forearms, staring up into the stars, listening to the locust rubbing dry bows against cat strings in a Carolina field far, far away from here.

‘I won’t- and neither will you.’

“Bill?”

Aden smiled and took the bill from the waitress.  He collected Cale’s won from the table, slid out of the booth, and staggered between the tables to the front of the restaurant. 

It was an interesting place, one of their favorite haunts in down Daegu, rather all of Korea, with good food and a good atmosphere. It was a second floor joint with bamboo plants in the corners, Shanghai, Hanoi, and Tokyo black and whites in Dalmatian frames on every wall in staggered lineup, mulberry leather booths with pencil lead tables, and a conveyor belt running through the whole joint carrying plate after plate of eel, salmon, beef, squid, and tuna sushi.  He handed the bill and won over to the cashier, hacked out the difference, then stumbled down the front stairwell and into the city streets.   

Hammered, sloshed, eyebrows bent like window wipers, he walked down the throat of the city in machete strides, passed yellow trash bags filled with old kitchen carpets, take out boxes , foil wrappers, and used napkins with gut oil and cocoa lip imprints, across fire brick sidewalks split by saw grass like lipstick in an envelope fold reserved for some foreign lover, between broken door frames, gutted shops, and tandem cultural stores. All under some sun blowing through the clouds like a butterfly knife through the gut of a nectarine or the torso of a lower east side junkie bending rose stems on a street corner just trying to feed his mother and sister- just trying to make ends meet.

And even with all this detail, all this color, all this flesh, it fell dry, aimless, futile.  What was left for him?  Another tomorrow?  Another lonely night where rain fell like Picasso streaks against a cold pane?  Another drunk evening spent pretending the smile was for the dame in the damp wet sock of a dream full of clowns and Jacobins cracked out and sipping on rye beer and hacked up sarcasm?

Aden rolled up the sleeves of his myrtle button-up, tearing passed the lamp posts pregnant with wanted signs, missing signs, lead signs, felt marker signs, across the socket of lost souls who spilled their day into selling cell phones and fried pork and DVDs and lingerie signs, the day heavy as a the barrel of a hot glue gun or a wet pillow case, salted and perfumed after last night’s rain…

Anyway, who wants to know? Why is he so caught up in the web of Cale and Aurora? Why does it feel like a cob drill whenever it’s brought up or mentioned? Is it jealousy, rage, an inability to cope with Cale’s content, or something far more sinister and human, a ferocity, knowing that the little Cale he once mentored and watered had grown into someone centuries beyond his capability of understanding…

No, not understanding, he just became a body of fog obsessed with some Pre-Madonna who could feed him dry ice and stale nicotine during a midnight showing of some drugged, third class French film involving Jennifer North and…

Whatever. He was ranting in cycles again.

“Eh, eh, you have, you have.”

A hag of a woman with rural sideburns and a tapestry long sleeve handed Aden a flyer with Cupid trimming to some love hotel, some DVD room, some gritty hole-in-a-wall with a window and a rack of reels directed by empty shells, starring empty skulls, trying to preserve empty hearts and candy canes for a couple of bucks here and there.

Aden grinned, tossed the card into the gutter, and moved on.  Weak men, men who like baboons, satiate themselves with bubbles and live for that, but not Aden. 

 He was interested in the street, the open market full of watermelon, freckled green apple, and sandbag potato, and the smell, loaded with belly dancer feet, boiling concrete, the scraped deck of a fishing vessel, and tarred fruit, the soundtrack a Bach chorus with street peddlers, popped tires, and cicadas sounding like gutter water straining off the street and into wells reserved for wishes and ancient kisses.

Aden passed all the wicker bodies, different, slightly, only because they grew up on rice, Confucian lectures, with flat faces the color of papyrus, and burned out American shows like Sex and the City and the Simpsons.  Otherwise, they fell down the same holes, soaked up the same fears, let the same tears drip down pebble faces, collapsing in the same corners, in the same shadows, staring into the same depthless oblivion.

He descended into the metro, hands pocketed, until he reached the bottom level where he could lean against some plastic commercial sign and sulk until the subway train came to grab his body and carry it back to the borough. 

But it would carry him nowhere, not from the drunk, the pain, or the memory- or the ghost of the Italian girl with blue eyes like a Boston alley in December, with silk hair the color of an autumn valley, with laughter deep as a canvas painting, and love stretched like sunlight across a broken dock full of seagulls and salt and shattered bottles home to some swollen MOS or wet dream.  She was- the beautiful tragedy, the harpsichord scar hot as steel ash on his heart, on his soul, the first love he had to break and scatter into sailor winds, the conscious voice and lungs that poisoned his hope and kept him miles and miles from the shore where promise lay.

The train arrived; Aden clambered inside and dropped his body into a felt seat in the center of the car.  He let his sloshed eyes wonder, across the old Korean ladies with their sled faces and velvet handbags, across the young men with eager pupils, burning palms, collared shirts ironed and prettied, across the bodies who’d abandoned their souls to Parisian writers, portraits, and sunsets long, long ago, across plastic dolls with lapel lips and raised cheeks and eyebrows trimmed like palace orchards, until, he found her.

Knees tucked under scabbed elbows with fat headphones, full and old school, arced over oak hair, wavy as a bay at dusk.  And she sat there, reading some torn-up paperback, frayed, bit and shagged, with muddied chucks, a ‘Wizard of Oz’ T, looking deep, deep, deep, and all he could do was stare and imagine and wish and want that she’d maybe look up, maybe smile, maybe hand him a word, give him a sign, a second, so he could smile back and save her, from anything, from whatever, from the dark realization that they will never be here again.

And should he say something? I mean, what could he say anyway? You’re a goddess, you’re gorgeous, you’re the color in my dream?  Isn’t that what any other shallow cob head would say?  Wouldn’t they google Shakespeare on their cell phone and act like they were deep all along, like they cared, like they’d climb and light some wick on a mountain top in the cataclysmic liver of Nepal- for her?  No, no, no- they couldn’t be like him, he’d invent his own fire, all for her, that’s true, deep love…

                Anyway, he wondered, how beautiful she felt, how beautiful she knew she was, how beautiful she could become, and he imagined them, an old couple, the silver in her hair, twisting against an April sun, with children, with promise, with years and years and years of private passion, reserved romance, candlelight dinners between two quiet, delicate souls, and scrolls and scrolls of words and silence exchanged between the closest souls the world as ever felt.

                Could it be that? Aden wondered.  The purpose in being, a calm in the content of unconditional love?  Could it be that?

                But it wouldn’t matter anymore.  They were at her station and she had pocketed her yellowed novel, stood, and drifted out of the car like a shade, his eyes desperate and she, disappearing forever from his life and he from hers, like every other face and body bag and doll you collide with, falling into, and falling out of, the now becoming nothing more than a needle prick in the sand dune of your being, with no going back, no going back.

 

           … a dream pang.