His Beautiful Marbled Palace

He shifts from one foot to another, the load is heavy today, and his
shoes bite hungrily into his ankles. The sun hangs like a swollen
tumor in the sky, red, ready to explode, its languid rays streaming
outwards like slow deliberate tenticles. The steam from the vent is
soothing, but the cold air still stings his fingers. Inevitably the
steam condenses in his clothes, shaking slumbering odors
awake. Pungent odors, an archive of his vanished days, peel off his
clothes like a tree-bark. The cold air cracks open tiny seams between
threads, creeps down unlikely pathways, feeling its way through the
dark folds until it collides head on into his flesh. He moves on,
shivers emanating deep within his body like gigantic geological
tremors.

Today's going to be a busy day. The usual rounds, maybe say "Hello" to
Jack (that old bastard, he wonders how he is doing?), spend the night on
Broadway and Locust. He loves that area. Then maybe he'll catch a bite
at the Ritz, or somewhere around there. He thinks he will skip on the
cigar though. It was fully twenty years ago when they closed the deal
up in the dining room. "One for us, one for you, Mr. Jackson. I think
we will find this to be mutually beneficial." All he remembers now of
that evening is white teeth peering smilingly at him from behind a bushy
moustache, and yes, of course, the gold watch with a long chain. It
closed with a nice click. Click. No, Cl-lick. Too much to do, where is
his pocket-book? Looks like Chestnut Street just ended, silently
flowed like a tributary into a larger one. Left or right? He shifts
the load around.

The street lamps are almost asleep, their heavy eyelids straining to
stay open against the weight of powdery snow. He was a child when he
learnt of the exile. Forty years of circling round the block, one
weary step in from of another. A whole nation, condemned, looking for
a parking spot on a Saturday evening. Forty years, and then there was
manna. Drifting down from the heavens, white and sweet. He sticks out
his tongue to receive the gift, it's white but it isn't sweet. But
then it hasn't been forty years yet. Do you remember him when he was
young? Body tense as a bow, intense eyes set behind a hawkish
beak. Today even the windows are draped in white, his present world has no
mirrors. The road flows into a building, gets confused, parts and
flows around the steady foundation stones. He keeps on walking
straight, through a small door, through a dark corridor, through an
open courtyard with steep walls, through another corridor before
meeting up with the road again. Tiny trickle in a dam.

Finally it is the corner where she waits. Mary Magdalene or Suzie?

"Hannah darling, how are you? Did you have to wait long? I am so sorry,
I got detained by my work, and we had to drive forever to find a
parking spot."

They are late. By a few decades. In the meantime, things have found a
way to flow around them, eyes seem to see through them. In a cramped
universe, they occupy no space. How very fortunate that she was free
today though. Hannah cannot speak, or rather does not speak. Frankly
she does not miss it much. Over-rated and over-sold. Too bad, there's
no money back guarantee though.

They walk through the haze that is their world. Manna drops heavily,
thick flakes encrusted with white sugar. Buildings loom like silent
giants, some crouching, some standing. The flags are frozen stiff. She
clasps to her bag, her hair is covered in a dark shawl, her trousers
are white to their knees. Cars slither by, their headlights pairs of
jaundiced eyes, glowing yellow with curiosity. The doorman is away,
they will have to open the door themselves. They step into a world of
high ceilings and piano music. And a lot less white.

He stepped into a lobby very much like this many years ago. He still
remembers a reflection of himself in a wall mirror. Hair slicked back,
grey tweed coat, Suzie by his side. That was when they signed in as
Mr. and Mrs. Benchich. Or was it Leonard? She dressed in blue, he
can still almost smell her perfume. They had taken an elevator
somewhere. The haze is still inside him. He sits down on the sofa,
Hannah across him. His bags are next to him, full and distended
like a cow's stomach. Life fodder.

It must be a convention of sanitation engineers, you know the ones
that design toilets that you can talk to. ("Good morning sir, how do
you do. Thank you for using me today.") They are all over the place,
tightly clenched brief-cases, jittery eyes and conversations quickly
flushed. He laughs, she chuckles and opens her handbag. Her mirror
never lies, so she stopped asking. Ever so often she checks if it has
learnt to be wiser. It hasn't.

"Ah Hannah darling, do you remember when we went on the cruise?"

They never did. She looks back at him intently while he removes his
gloves purposefully.

"We had a grand old time. We weren't happy with the chauffeur, but it
still turned out pretty well."

She's lost in a remote farm-house where a freckled girl once
dreamt. New York, the far-away paradise, the city of lights. Not
unlike the six-pack of park lights she goes to sleep under now. Somewhere
was a kitchen where meats used to broil, and kettles used to sing. And
in between the jingle of dinner plates and cups was a voice that
called out to her.

Then life took her out to dinner. First there was Broadway, and then it
wasn't. A husband and a child. Funerals. Fights. And then the party
ended, everyone departed, and she was stuck with the bill. All of that
and more is now carried carefully in a Neiman Marcus bag. Every
morning, the bag is opened and items counted, tagged, recalled and put
away. A quick check-list of a ghost. And the rest of the day spent
recalling how many items were counted. A piece of a picture frame, a
crystal horse, a photograph (one man, one woman and one child), a book
(she used to read it to Johnny every night), a pressed rose preserved
in the book (she picked this the day he slept in a casket), a tie-pin,
a ... pieces left over after the crash, that horrible fist to her
skull whose echo is still trapped inside of her.

She woke up one day, still dizzy and vowed never to travel again. That
was a long time ago. She forgot all directions, all roads and finally
all words. Years later, one sunny day he had knocked on her door and
she had let him in. He wanted to travel with her, and she went along
as long as she just followed.

"Do you remember our trip to the Appalachians?"

He leans back on the sofa. Was Jack with them? They drove down the
highway, skirting a horizon where blue mountains rested like sleeping
whales. Over the graying fields, the remote mountain mist seen through
racing power lines, over the frothy rivers, beyond the contemplative
cows and their sombre looking sheds, beyond the green seas of
grass, every second framed by the shiny chrome of the car's interior, its
windshield and its windows. It rained on some days, the windshield
wipers waving their arms, emphatically saying "No" to the rain. "No,
no, no more. You must not come here". And all the while they sat
silently in the car, eating sandwiches to their rythmic sound. No one
wanted to turn on the radio.

He stands up and looks around. There is no one who would serve
them. The lobby seems eerily quiet. Eyes slip down them like water on
wax. He sits down. Where was he? Ah yes, sandwiches. Then there were
the country inns and colorfully embroided aprons. Jack asleep in the
front seat and Suzie's long flowing hair dancing in the wind. The purr
of the engine, the forward lunge and they glided over the asphalt
road. Somewhere in this journey was also a house where he had a
room. A window that peered into a field, and his desk where he spent
long hours scribbling frantically. He would wake up and not recognize
his own words. And then the same eyes, slipping down his unshaven face
and his dishevelled clothes. A rush down the stairs, that got more and
more unrushed with every passing day, telephone calls, sobs, tablets,
sleep. And sometimes days of clarity.

"Can I help you?"

An unfamiliar face keeps its distance. He wonders silently yet again
what happened to Jack. He sees him asleep on a steam vent, the narrow
alley closing in on him like a jaw. Jack was cold. What happened then?
It was the road, the drive, and beyond the mountains was the dark dead
end of the street, with a flickering fire and cardboard houses. Houses
of cards, he chuckles again. The rap of metal on metal, the stale odor
that followed him faithfully like a dog, barking at the unfamiliar
trespassers into his world.

"You must leave now."

Unfamiliar faces multiply in unfamiliar ways. Wasn't there just one
only a few moments ago? Hannah is busy taking an inventory of her bags
again, a used theater ticket, a letter envelope, a spoon, ... she
counts the items on her fingers and argues with herself. She looks up
at him inquiringly as white gloved hands coil around her arms.

"I closed a big deal here. We just want to rest."

The unfamiliar faces are chanting now. Their voices descend upon him
in an undifferentiated drone, a colony of bees discussing the going
price of honey. That reminds him, he just closed a bad deal. He does
not want to sell any more.

"I don't want to sell. Call them back."

But the walls are not listening, they are already getting up and
walking past him. So are the tables, chairs, lamps, mirrors, and
faces, lots of unfamiliar gawking faces. Where do they come from?
Where are my bags? His arms are pinned, and then he is flying, flying
back into the white.

"Bloody bums. Ever since the looney bin overflowed they are
everywhere."

He lands hard on the pavement. Somewhere a pain rises impulsively but
quickly changes its mind and disappears. He props himself on his
elbows and swears. The warm steam from his nostrils has cleared a pear shaped patch of gray in the
white. He remembers him now, yes, the gray. A white day very much like this, a sterile wall and silent Jack. Crouched in a
corner, his blue eyes riveted to a wall across the street, still, very still, and
gray, the same shade of gray, pasted upon his bearded face. He was too cold to shiver.