The Last Two Seconds (3 page)

disquieting. She looked at it over and over until whatever

was was letter perfect with no corrections. This,

while outside a talking hammered hailstorm bounced up

and domed a column of men coming down the sidewalk.

It was relatively painless except for being

all she could see: a world made of dinner, very pleasant; a lunch

at something called a table in the dining room; an endless night;

a half-day; another lunch, this on Tuesday. Yesterday. Today.

Pieces propped up with supports. The therapist tapped his cigar.

He no longer accepted her general opposition to myth, marriage,

Olympic Games, and the course of decades. He said it was as if

she were engaged in an eternal war, either watching a movie

or acting in one, depending on the situation and time of day.

She sat in silence, the sky above a half-baked blue, a blank-

face dying of awkwardness. The simple explanation boiled down

to the too-easy explanation. He was smart and charming then;

and later, much less so. Behind his head, pictures were crammed

together with the top layer hung so high she had to crane her neck

to see the details. He said to please pretend she was listening.

Sandwiched between the sidewalk and an upper floor,

she was drinking in an afternoon that was making her

uneasy. The situation was further complicated

by the proximity to the dilemma

of whether to chance the unstable elevator.

How else to get back to where she’d begun?

It occurred to her that every dilemma

goes into the river of consciousness with lipstick on

a tissue, a rat in the basement, a man on the street.

Meanwhile, someone was talking to her

while first names kept flashing by in a cracked mirror

whenever she blinked. Across the room, a man

who looked like a younger form of Freud was saying,

“—consciousness-wise, the doctor is no worse

and no better than a novel

that wants you to know every chapter

once was titled ‘The Moment Is the State Suspended.’”

There had been a particularly disturbing dream

the night before. Awake, the associations led to something

she’d read about the Audubon Society in the
Times
, which led

to years ago, when she came down from the city and saw A—

in Philadelphia, A—saying she hadn’t liked her daughter

until later. The shock of that. The shock also of what someone

can become. She said she gardened now. She was surprised

she still remembered that. Blind slats let in an inch or so of sun

times the length of the window. Outside the sigh of a braking bus,

the length of the street times once upon a time. The story began,

“This is the corner where the murder took place.” Of course, corner

could be parking garage, or an off-track betting parlor. Murders

happen everywhere, even inside the brain, a moment of anger

and just like that the other is over.

She began with the premise that the world was

an unbroken overlay of dust motes

and added to that only what she could see:

a bird eats corn and becomes.

It’s true if you see a platypus in a glass case,

you remember. A layer of thinking makes ideas

go forward until the latch at the end of the day

where sleep gets attached to fading,

the loop set on auto-alert for a future waking.

She knew she was one of countless others,

any of which one might meet and soon forget.

There was no reason it should be otherwise.

The essay mentioned a man, an interview,

a train, fingerprints, photo, shoes, and

a red sweater. The future was quite irresistible,

it washed over you. Because, she said, is a way

of pointing to the apparent reason that,

in a trial in which the complaint concerns

the terms of human behavior.

She didn’t notice the year’s ending. Then

shortly after midnight, she heard noises outside

and realized it was the muffled repetitive boom

of distant fireworks. Good-bye to that, she said.

I love pictures. Scene after scene

shooting to a brain. Messages on waves.

But suddenly, in the middle of day, an arrow

like a knife through a perpetual instant.

The only gift was instinct:

a cat’s plodding, a glove of nothing.

White dawn. This idiocy. Throw of the dice

but not this red upright jar,

this violent explosion,

a dove-grey shop like a cloud, falling upon faces.

Whose? Nobody. A standstill,

the throb of a pulse,

a curious pattern. Some horror-world

blocking the pavement but for the cars

on both sides. The symbol

of a grass-grown path hurrying along,

at the top, copies of wheels.

A crowd of thighs without occupation.

High up the sound of white smoke for a moment.

Awestricken, perfectly still,

a grasshopper’s rasped spine transfixed,

shut eyes, alive but robbed of suspense.

The outlines gone, the night is full of daylight.

Midnight boundaries lost.

Animals stretched over the zoo.

The cricket voice of the suffering. Stone men,

women, spread out on the steps of society.

The traffic. The swish

of exquisite moments, while by her, trying

to calm, a weapon sliced the surface,

ripped the man and woman confessing to some

sudden revelation, an illumination.

Blood in veins had to be amazing.

The sponge of feeling. Pink evening.

A granite wall. Falling.

Exactly, thought. Here she is having a mind,

a moon ghastly light on a person. To suffer

emotion, throat stiff, child grown larger.

A whole. Summoned so one can have a look.

Summoned to husband what’s happened.

The light challenged the powers

of feeling: frightening, exhilarating, surprise,

shame. It was over. Plaster and litter alone.

Five acts that had been.

Over and over. A strange power speaking.

Some concern for the half-past. Ring after ring

like something coming. It is thought,

this bell like a bee striking.

The future lies in a patter like a wood drummed.

A sensual traffic: what, where, and why.

Three emotions. Shutters and avenues.

The red burning. A lizard’s color in her eyes.

Evening wearing the fringes in the windows.

The light wavering in the darkness streets.

Atoms turned. Thinking like the pulse—

punctually, noiselessly silk.

Ridiculous. Her mother grown big.

She, like most mothers, a swept shuffle

of traffic and dress and nothing

except the flutter of absolution.

Such are things merged. The cupboard outline

becomes soft. A table. Cigarette smoke.

A baby bright pink. Daring with being.

That dog. Lots of coldness. Yet, some power

to preside with her head, with her shoulders,

through dinner. A sort of maternal politics.

Her dress disappearing. Sweeping off for bed

with headaches. Still, the sun. The squirrels.

Pebbles to the pebble collection. She blinks

at the crack of a twig behind the bedroom walls.

The nerve fibers, a veil on red music clanging,

cannoned from columns. An anthem bubbling.

Scientifically stretching over the cheeks

at the edge of one moment. The grey suit passed,

the overcoat, impressions everywhere.

Watching a negligible dog fetch as if it were human—

his hind legs so honest, so independent—

she stood in a doorway, not beautiful, never

specially clever, remote from herself. Over and over—

twist, turn, wake up, set going. Doomed to sinking—

decorate the dungeon, be decent.

The edge of her mind turning meaning for hours

at a time. Hours and days. A sound like a sickle.

Her head a bunch of heather. Then over.

The matted and tangled message, a red square.

The thinking nerves. The door of the room.

Dante : the Inferno. The English : London.

A piston thumping mechanically behind the screen.

Mixed clouds and seagulls, grey circles interlocked.

Grey to grey nothing nervous system.

A sister adoring shrouds,

Some institutions, uneasiness. Likeness

in a type of story. A photograph,
Table
—

by the Committee of the Physically Existent.

The answer is to go beneath life:

here was the door opened,

the door ajar. And outside was history:

engraving of a sofa, a factory, violin sound.

The dwindling impulse. The gigantic clock.

The clock was her mind.

She had prepared a looking-glass: hair, dress, thought,

sofa in the glow of dogs barking.

Beautifully close up. And once, flames

eating the edge of the sofa.

Her eyelashes blurred. Chin, nose, forehead, some lips.

The cheek. The glass looking first at one thing,

then another: nose, eyes, evening.

She sat looking at the map of her hands.

The window, the clock, her pulse.

The body was busy thinking, conjuring

the museum of a moment: emotion, scenes, people,

bags of treasures. Heaps of theories.

Theories to explain feeling the here and the back of the hand.

A theory allowed one thing after another.

First, dinner, then morning.

Her hand was the world.

To get to it she had to look at herself.

To get at the truth one would have to disregard

anything false. Yet the truth was intangible.

One eye on the horizon: a long indeterminable,

mere straightness, a few plants,

that indescribable purple.

Doors being opened. Visual impressions—

as if the eye were the brain, the body entering the house.

The house stood. The cars were standing.

She was walking over to the dog

which had to be remembered.

“Shake hands,” she said. He straightened,

bent, straightened.

His manner was irreproachable,

that being with a tail.

It was extraordinary, life was.

Furs being petted, people standing upright,

panic, fear, tight skirts, ankles, thought.

The creature standing, her giving little pats.

She was enjoying standing there.

She had forgotten this feeling.

Ordinary things—curtains, biscuits, bones,

a creature raising one foreleg, the movies.

She stood looking as if she would solidify—

Darwin draped in black

remembering the flora or fauna.

Of course, she would really only

be remembering a garden, trees, wallpaper,

a sea-lion barking, a doctor of misery

on the verge of difficulty. A boy gone. Death.

Death without life. Terror. Fear. Disaster.

Punishment. Profound darkness. Evening.

She walked to the window: sky,

clouds coming into the room.

How odd, she thought, to be.

Individuate the particular

and you get a slice of totality: the car, for instance,

becomes a composite of separate parts: gears,

tank, hubcaps, paint coat, mudflaps, a clock,

a divided dash. New example: a neuron.

You could say the brain works

from knowledge and ambiguity.

Radical fundamentalism is not supportable

by appeal to the best.

Why then is fundamentalism common:

reductive explanations induce the pleasure

of misunderstanding?

A weak ego lacks distinct boundaries?

There are other ways of thinking?

Take Aristotle’s example of a rooster and the sun

and substitute a shadow and a flagpole.

The brain has elements in common with cameras

but isn’t one. A collection of biochemical cascades

over components that span the membrane

results in behavior at the fundamental level.

Sometimes one is wrong.

a seismic storm that knocked down

buildings—the buildings teetering before falling

the way ideologies might sway back and forth

if they were preserved in a glass tower

that was about to be toppled. In any storm,

one hopes he or she is bound in advance

by the story line to escape at the end. In speech,

the mouth becomes a wheelbarrow

that can assert its contents.

The tool-and-die exactitude of pre-packaged thought

is estranging because it suggests

the discrete elements can’t be teased apart.

Blind faith relies on an obedience that verges

on boredom. Any disquiet, however slight, might

define a moment like a character’s obsessive cough

might define a character by exploding

when it shouldn’t. It keeps exploding

and when it does it acts in the story

like a glass box cracked by a hammer that breaks

and becomes a broken box. In both situations,

action releases the stale air encased there.

And now the question: what do we do with the longing

for what can destroy us? You’re free to think:

logic can change even the most obstinate person; or,