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May. 4th, 2006 10:26 pmTalking with my brother about people who have died. Tobin Cook fell off a balcony in drunkenness. He was the same age as me. Jamal, who in my first grade class stabbed Tobin in the shoulder with a pencil, was shot in a drug deal. Dustin Rakestraw. I can't comprehend it. It is a nothing. Walter, my brother's "old nemesis"--in jail. Me. Sitting with my brother. Safe, sage. Kyle asks me a pop quiz: Who shot John F. Kennedy? I know it, dig it out of me slowly, don't let him tell me. Who shot his brother? I don't know but it would sound familiar. Sindhar Sindhar he says, or something like that. He shakes his shoulders. We know it was someone with the same first and last name.
The other half of me is fixed. It is protean, submarine, unaffectable. I can't control what it does. I wake up and feel fractured, or puddled, or absolutely gray, and I can't predict or affect which it will be. It moves in me like an ocean current, like an icthysaur, unstoppable, unpredictable, ominous, invisible. It can override any external stimulus and then instantly disappear. Half of me is a knife. Stainless, incisive, able to extract and separate down to the smallest essence of things. Half of me is a fossil. Stark, terrifying, buried, unknowable. The negative of something else.
Four women on the bus. Three sit together—the fattest one has to sit apart. Light comes through the windows like water. I sit pressed so close to the pane, I’m practically out over the next lane of pavement, running the wind through my mouth. He says When the revenant/came down. Revenant, re-venant. I have no idea what it means. Cosmic, huge magic, old monks magic, ziggurats and observatories. I sit on his chest, my legs buttressing. I bend, he sings the word No into my ear, his falsetto like a musical saw. In the front of the bus, four men sit all at once, like a night flower blooming. Outside, a bell ringing far away. I look at everyone’s hair. There is a red wet stain on the steps. I tell him the names of trees.
The other half of me is fixed. It is protean, submarine, unaffectable. I can't control what it does. I wake up and feel fractured, or puddled, or absolutely gray, and I can't predict or affect which it will be. It moves in me like an ocean current, like an icthysaur, unstoppable, unpredictable, ominous, invisible. It can override any external stimulus and then instantly disappear. Half of me is a knife. Stainless, incisive, able to extract and separate down to the smallest essence of things. Half of me is a fossil. Stark, terrifying, buried, unknowable. The negative of something else.
Four women on the bus. Three sit together—the fattest one has to sit apart. Light comes through the windows like water. I sit pressed so close to the pane, I’m practically out over the next lane of pavement, running the wind through my mouth. He says When the revenant/came down. Revenant, re-venant. I have no idea what it means. Cosmic, huge magic, old monks magic, ziggurats and observatories. I sit on his chest, my legs buttressing. I bend, he sings the word No into my ear, his falsetto like a musical saw. In the front of the bus, four men sit all at once, like a night flower blooming. Outside, a bell ringing far away. I look at everyone’s hair. There is a red wet stain on the steps. I tell him the names of trees.
