Orange Suitcase (2 page)

I
woke early; still black beyond the bedroom curtains. Rain dripped from the roof gutters and ricocheted across the restaurant courtyard. I rose and dressed; I listened to the rain and her breathing and tried not to wake her. In the kitchen I filled a dirty wine glass with tap water. I gathered my folders and the laptop from the table, checked the clock above the stove. I hurried back to the bedroom for my sweater and tie, watched her roll to my side of the bed, clutch the pillow. The best part of this day, I knew, would be bending to kiss her goodbye and sliding the comforter up to her chin. She would smile and murmur to have a great day, good luck with your presentation, I miss you. I would whisper back something the same. I reached for the sweater pinned beneath her shoulder. The courtyard beyond the window grew silent, and dawn outlined the roof of the restaurant white against the sky. By the time I left the apartment, rain had turned to snow.

T
here used to be a fishing supply store on West 22nd and Tenth Avenue where the owner would demonstrate fly-fishing in the street. Whenever he was at it, the people walking past would slow or stop to watch the orange-glittering fly, alive at the end of the salesman's line, sail in long arcs across the surface of the road. One almost expected a great stony fish to leap from the asphalt in a hard spray of gravel, only to disappear again through a pothole with the fly in its mouth. But no fish ever did, and so the store closed down.

1

S
ometimes I pass them with their tapping white sticks on the sidewalk and I'll think of Borges. Yesterday I watched a man in black sunglasses at the Starbucks on Eighth Avenue reading Braille. He seemed to be staring out the window at the butcher's shop, petting a cat. Does he write, too? Maybe with one of those complicated typewriters. I watched him run his old fingers back and forth across the pages for a long time. It made me a little jealous—I would like to know what a Borges story feels like. I'd like to know what the word goosebumps feels like. This morning I thought of him when I passed five men tapping their sticks together, almost in unison, moving past the art supply store on 23rd. They weren't speaking, which seemed odd. I remember a cousin once gave me a book for my birthday called The Book of Questions. One of the questions was, Would you rather be blind or deaf? Another question was, Would you rather be burned alive or drowned?

2

I had a dream in which an army of blind men and women tried to beat me to death with their sticks outside the Chelsea Hotel. Tap! Tap! Tap! I didn't see if Borges was among them before I ran inside and hid. I don't know why I needed to hide. I woke and decided I would rather be blind than deaf; people could read to me while I learned Braille. I would write stories that felt like the sidewalk or a rash or a basketball. I would write a novel called Acne; my memoir would be called Listening.

3

In Borges' “The South,” a man gets in a knife fight with his country. The story ends with us not knowing who wins. I suppose his country wins; just by the act of fighting I suppose he is beaten. In the sixth grade my next-door neighbor Ben punched me in the face when I teased him for liking the neighbor girl. The three of us were walking home from the bus stop and I told the girl: Ben wants to suck your pussy. I didn't know what the words meant but I knew they were powerful and would make the kids at school laugh. Ben punched me in the face and the girl ran home when she saw all the blood. We were never friends again; that was the last day we walked home together. Sometimes, not often, I wonder where he lives. If one day we meet on the street, in New York or Seattle, maybe I'll ask him to get a drink. Will we shake hands? Hug? Maybe he will pull a knife; maybe he will lead an army of the blind and they will beat me to death. I suppose I deserve not knowing—it was me who ruined everything. I was the one who took him for granted; I was the one who moved away.

S
o he isn't dead. That's what I thought when I saw Ben Jensen today. It happened on the bus, the 14D. I was sitting with my feet against the back wheel-well and trying to read someone else's poems. I kept getting distracted—there was a paper sac on the floor next to me, of beer and the frozen turbot filets I would make for dinner later. I kept picturing the bottom of the bag getting wet. We would brake to a stop and I would stand and lift the bag by its brown paper handles, not thinking to lift from the bottom. The fish and beer would spill out across the floor, fizzing and spitting, ruining everything while everyone stared.

Even now, having just eaten, drinking this beer, the thought gets my eyes pinching.

Jensen got on at Fifth Avenue. I recognized him by his height and knit fingerless gloves. I'd remembered his gloves being red, but these were blue. He made his way toward me and he looked like he'd lost weight. I couldn't be sure, and I don't think he saw me. I hope he didn't see me. I wondered if I looked different, too.

I thought of calling out, but there were too many strangers between us, and I didn't want to move until my stop. Almost everyone would be off the bus by then and if my bag spilled fewer people would stare. I watched him over my book. I peered. I remember thinking that word, peered. I remember my foot fell asleep against the wheel well. I remember wanting to say, I've missed you.

Jensen was reading advertisements for skin cream and cable channels; he held the metal pole and rocked back and forth with everyone else. I wanted to ask him where he'd been the last three years, if that last story he'd told me was true, about the guys beating the shit out of him in Washington Heights.

He got off at Seventh Avenue. I didn't chase. I didn't even put down my book.

The bus pushed forward with the rest. Only then did I get the courage to look back. I thought I might get a glimpse of him, entering a coffee shop or electronics store, a church or synagogue—something that might give a clue as to what he's been doing. There have been no new poems. No cryptic emails from Europe or the Bosporus or the Caspian Sea. No sightings in the usual bars, restaurants, bookstores, parks, streets, readings, grocery stores, avenues, benches.

We kept moving forward and I didn't have a choice; I accepted he'd disappeared again.

Three years ago was the last time. I got an email he'd been attacked by four men in hoods. Somewhere up by City College.

The sun wasn't even down yet, he'd written. Somebody should make a rule.

I tried to picture a person being mugged at 136th and Amsterdam in the middle of the day. There would be so many people. I pictured the old Dominican man selling sneakers and underwear in front of the bodega, the women sitting in neon lawn chairs by the ball field. The long accordion-bellied buses, pigeons fleeing barking dogs, children running from landing pigeons. And then Jensen, a guy just like me, just exactly like me, being attacked right there in the heart of it all. Jensen wrote that he'd been able to roll away and outrun them, even after getting punched in the back of the head, even after getting kicked in the corners of his ribs. Even then, they still hadn't gotten his phone or wallet. I remember reading his email right here, at this same kitchen table.

I am still trying to picture it. I've never seen Ben Jensen run. I drink this beer and try.

When I think of Jensen I think of red fingerless gloves rolling cigarettes and us arguing about other poets behind their backs.

I don't deny I loved him.

When I picture the mugging, I picture a man selling sneakers and those women in lawn chairs and a black patch where Jensen should be; he's a patch burnt from a newspaper I can't read.

I remember a time Jensen and I met for wine somewhere. When he arrived he had a patch of bruise beneath his left eye. He'd been in Berlin for a week and an Austrian woman had thrown his own boots at him; one had kicked him in the face.

I remember he laughed as he told the story. Then he took a pack of rolling papers from his pocket and started making cigarettes with his red gloves and fingers.

I can still picture the boots. The purple bruise-stamp of the heel beneath his eye. I can picture it very clearly.

When I got off the bus at Eleventh Avenue I was so distracted I almost let the bag of fish and beer spill out across the floor.

I started to cry and the bus driver stared at me until I cried harder.

I hope that was him. I still can't accept the story the others told. That there was an explosion and he just disappeared.

1

T
he first was called Paddles for a year. After the love interest appeared it lost the quotation marks and paragraph breaks and became We Love Harder. I'm proud of one scene: the photographer walks down 22nd street and watches the edges of gray sidewalk fold down and separate to become the backs of long gray whales. Geysers shoot from blowholes to become pear blossom trees. Buildings fall away into flat, transatlantic horizon. Pigeons are seagulls or flying fish. The sun is setting and the photographer walks along the backs of the whales as they slumber and breathe. Maybe the streetlight is the setting sun and maybe the road is the current. I forget exactly.

2

The next was called Heart! Heart! Heart! and then Love! Love! Love!. One of these was Whitman, I think, or Carson McCullers. Regardless, I am still trying to save the mother:

Her son is born in Queens Hospital at the stroke of midnight September 12, 2001. He has hemophilia and is a very delicate joy in her life. When the anxiety of keeping him safe overwhelms her she retreats to the small extra bedroom in the Seattle house they bought in November.

She closes the door and shuts the blinds and turns off the lights and baby monitor.

In this complete dark she sheds her clothes, her underwear, and she feels her way to the treadmill. The treadmill is the only thing in the room besides bookshelves full of non-fiction. She presses a button she knows by touch and begins to walk in the dark. She accelerates into a jog, a run, a sprint. Fast, faster, and then she is running as fast as she can in a room like a black hole. She can smell her deodorant and the slight burn of the motor. She is a beating heart in flesh and nothing more—that's what she thinks—and then there's the rhythm of her heart repeating: a-heart, a-heart, a-heart, until it stops, which it will, because a heart, a heart stops.

That is where the first title came from.

3

Searching For The Heart Of It All was one title. Who Art In Heaven? another. A book about a boy with a suitcase. He is on a journey in the beginning, and maybe it ends with a war, or a return, or maybe he falls in love with a woman who takes him on a different journey, one more terrifying and exciting than the original. (This one is still growing). Maybe the boy opens the suitcase and there is a great reveal, or an explosion, a bus with a bomb on it. Maybe there is just disappointment, when he realizes how unoriginal he's become, or is, and then.

O
n weekend afternoons in the spring I sometimes walk to the Chelsea market to buy flowers and a cup of coffee. The way home passes a loud neighborhood park; from over a block away I can hear high-pitched girls on squeaky swing sets, their laughs and giggles, and their mothers or nannies yelling for them to Hold on tight! Sometimes walking that way reminds me of a dancer I dated before I met my fiancée. I remember little about her, save for a joke she liked to tell:

Why did the girl fall off the swing set?

Because she didn't have any arms.

I sometimes wonder if one of these days I'll be walking that way with a bunch of gladiolas. From down the street I'll see one tiny girl soar high above the leafy trees and across Tenth Avenue, smiling and armless, like a yellow-haired doll some bully vandalized and tossed over a fence.

I
t's a few years ago and I'm drinking at El Sombrero on Ludlow with the great poet Ben Jensen when he tells me: The thing about your book is that people only read for fun nowadays. And your book, well—. My book isn't much fun, I interject. He nods. Reading your book was like fucking a knothole, he says. He pauses, lets the comment settle. Then he takes a drink from his beer and nods again in affirmation. I feel ready to throw up, my throat thickens; but then he laughs and slaps me hard on the shoulder. I say that with a great deal of admiration, he assures me.