M Train, Page 2

  I dug a few inches seeking stones that might have been pressed by the hard-calloused feet of the inmates or the soles of heavy boots worn by the guards. I carefully chose three and put them in an oversized Gitanes matchbox, leaving the bits of earth clinging to them intact. Fred offered his handkerchief to wipe the dirt from my hands, and then shaking it out he made a little sack for the matchbox. He placed it in my hands, the first step toward placing them in the hands of Genet.

  —

  We didn’t stay long in Saint-Laurent. We went seaside but the turtle reserves were off-limits, as they were spawning. Fred spent a lot of time in the bar, talking to the fellows. Despite the heat, Fred wore a shirt and a tie. The men seemed to respect him, regarding him without irony. He had that effect on other men. I was content just sitting on a crate outside the bar staring down an empty street I had never seen and might never see again. Prisoners once were paraded on this same stretch. I closed my eyes, imagining them dragging their chains in the intense heat, cruel entertainment for the few inhabitants of a dusty, forsaken town.

  As I walked from the bar to the hotel I saw no dogs or children at play and no women. For the most part I kept to myself. Occasionally I caught glimpses of the maid, a barefoot girl with long, dark hair, scurrying about the hotel. She smiled and gestured but spoke no English, always in motion. She tidied our room and took our clothes from the patio, then washed and pressed them. In gratitude I gave her one of my bracelets, a gold chain with a four-leaf clover, which I spotted dangling from her wrist as we departed.

  There were no trains in French Guiana, no rail service at all. The fellow from the bar had found us a driver, who carried himself like an extra in The Harder They Come. He wore aviator sunglasses, cocked cap, and a leopard-print shirt. We arranged a price and he agreed to drive us the 268 kilometers to Cayenne. He drove a beat-up tan Peugeot and insisted our bags stay with him in the front seat as chickens were normally transported in the trunk. We drove along Route Nationale through the continuing rains interrupted by fleeting sun, listening to reggae songs on a station riddled with static. When the signal was lost the driver switched to a cassette by a band called Queen Cement.

  Every once in a while I untied the handkerchief to look at the Gitanes matchbox with its silhouette of a Gypsy posturing with her tambourine in a swirl of indigo-tinged smoke. But I did not open it. I pictured a small yet triumphal moment passing the stones to Genet. Fred held my hand as we wordlessly wound through dense forests, and passed short, sturdy Amerindians with broad shoulders, balancing iguanas squarely on their heads. We traveled through tiny communes like Tonate that had just a few houses and one six-foot crucifix. We asked the driver to stop. He got out and examined his tires. Fred took a photograph of the sign that read Tonate. Population 9, and I said a little prayer.

  We were unfettered by any particular desire or expectation. The primary mission accomplished, we had no ultimate destination, no hotel reservations; we were free. But as we approached Kourou we sensed a shift. We were entering a military zone and hit a checkpoint. The driver’s identity card was inspected and after an interminable stretch of silence we were ordered to get out of the car. Two officers searched the front and back seats, finding a switchblade with a broken spring in the glove box. That can’t be so bad, I thought, but as they knocked on the back of the trunk our driver became markedly agitated. Dead chickens? Maybe drugs. They circled around the car, and then asked him for the keys. He threw them in a shallow ravine and bolted but was swiftly wrestled to the ground. I glanced sidelong at Fred. He’d had trouble with the law as a young man and had always been wary of authority. He betrayed no emotion and I followed his lead.

  They opened the trunk of the car. Inside was a man who looked to be in his early thirties curled up like a slug in a rusting conch shell. He seemed terrified as they poked him with a rifle and ordered him to get out. We were all herded to the police headquarters, put in separate rooms, and interrogated in French. I knew enough to answer their simplest questions, and Fred, installed in another room, conversed in bits of barroom French. Suddenly the commander arrived and we were brought before him. He was barrel-chested with dark, sad eyes and a thick mustache that dominated his careworn face browned by sun. Fred quickly took stock of things. I slipped into the role of compliant female, for in this obscure annex of the Foreign Legion it was definitely a man’s world. I watched silently as the human contraband, stripped and shackled, was led away. Fred was ordered into the commander’s office. He turned and looked at me. Stay calm was the message telegraphed from his pale blue eyes.

  Credit 1.6

  An officer brought in our bags, and another wearing white gloves went through everything. I sat there holding the handkerchief sack. I was relieved I was not asked to surrender it, for as an object it had already manifested a sacredness second only to my wedding ring. I sensed no danger but counseled myself to hold my tongue. An interrogator brought me a black coffee on an oval tray with an inlay of a blue butterfly and entered the commander’s office. I could see Fred’s profile. After a time they all came out. They seemed in amiable spirits. The commander gave Fred a manly embrace and we were placed in a private car. Neither of us said a word as we pulled into the capital city of Cayenne, situated on the banks of the estuary of the Cayenne River. Fred had the address of a hotel given to him by the commander. We were dropped off at the foot of a hill, the end of the line. It’s somewhere up there, he motioned, and we carried our bags up the stone steps that led to the path to our next dwelling place.

  —What did you two talk about? I asked.

  —I really can’t say for sure, he only spoke French.

  —How did you communicate?

  —Cognac.

  Fred seemed deep in thought.

  —I know that you are concerned about the fate of the driver, he said, but it’s out of our hands. He placed us in real jeopardy and in the end my concern was for you.

  —Oh, I wasn’t afraid.

  —Yes, he said, that’s why I was concerned.

  —

  The hotel was to our liking. We drank French brandy from a paper sack and slept wrapped in layers of mosquito netting. There was no glass in the windows—neither in our hotel nor in the houses below. No air conditioners, just the wind and sporadic rain providing relief from the heat and dust. We listened to the Coltrane-like cries of simultaneous saxophones wafting from the cement tenements. In the morning we explored Cayenne. The town square was more of a trapezoid, tiled black-and-white and framed with high palms. It was Carnival time, unbeknownst to us, and the city was all but deserted. The city hall, a nineteenth-century whitewashed French colonial, was closed for the holiday. We were drawn to a seemingly abandoned church. When we opened the gate, rust came off on our hands. We dropped coins into an old Chock Full O’ Nuts can with the slogan The Heavenly Coffee placed at the entrance for donations. Dust mites dispersed in beams of light then formed a halo above an angel of glowing alabaster; icons of saints were trapped behind fallen debris, rendered unrecognizable under layers of dark lacquer.

  Credit 1.7

  All things seemed to flow in slow motion. Although strangers we moved about unnoticed. Men haggled over a price for a live iguana with a long, slapping tail. Overcrowded ferries departed for Devil’s Island. Calypso music poured from a mammoth disco in the shape of an armadillo. There were a few small souvenir stands with identical fare: thin, red blankets made in China and metallic blue raincoats. But mostly there were lighters, all kinds of lighters, with images of parrots, spaceships, and men of the Foreign Legion. There was nothing much to keep one there and we thought of applying for a visa to Brazil, having our pictures taken by a mysterious Chinaman called Dr. Lam. His studio was filled with large-format cameras, broken tripods, and rows of herbal remedies in large glass vials. We picked up our visa pictures yet we stayed in Cayenne until our anniversary as if bewitched.

  Credit 1.8

  On the last Sunday of our journey, women in bright dresses and men in top hat
s were celebrating the end of Carnival. Following their makeshift parade on foot, we ended up at Rémire-Montjoly, a commune southeast of the city. The revelers dispersed. Rémire was fairly uninhabited and Fred and I stood mesmerized by the emptiness of the long, sweeping beaches. It was a perfect day for our anniversary and I couldn’t help thinking it was the perfect spot for a beach café. Fred went on before me, whistling to a black dog somewhat up ahead. There was no sign of his master. Fred threw a stick into the water and the dog fetched it. I knelt down in the sand and sketched out plans for an imaginary café with my finger.

  —

  An unwinding spool of obscure angles, a glass of tea, an opened journal, and a round metal table balanced with an empty matchbook. Cafés. Le Rouquet in Paris, Café Josephinum in Vienna, Bluebird Coffeeshop in Amsterdam, Ice Café in Sydney, Café Aquí in Tucson, Wow Café at Point Loma, Caffe Trieste in North Beach, Caffè del Professore in Naples, Café Uroxen in Uppsala, Lula Cafe in Logan Square, Lion Cafe in Shibuya, and Café Zoo in the Berlin train station.

  —

  The café I’ll never realize, the cafés I’ll never know. As if reading my mind, Zak wordlessly brings me a fresh cup.

  —When will your café open? I ask him.

  —When the weather changes, hopefully early spring. A couple of buddies and me. We have to get some things together, and we need a little more capital to buy some equipment.

  I ask him how much, offer to invest.

  —Are you sure, he asks, somewhat surprised, for in truth we don’t know each other very well, complicit solely through our daily coffee ritual.

  —Yeah, I’m sure. I once thought about having a café of my own.

  —You’ll have free coffee for the rest of your life.

  — God willing, I say.

  I sit before Zak’s peerless coffee. Overhead the fans spin, feigning the four directions of a traversing weather vane. High winds, cold rain, or the threat of rain; a looming continuum of calamitous skies that subtly permeate my entire being. Without noticing, I slip into a light yet lingering malaise. Not a depression, more like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue.

  Credit 2.1

  Roberto Bolaño’s chair, Blanes, Spain

  Changing Channels

  I CLIMB THE STAIRS to my room with its lone skylight, a worktable, a bed, my brother’s Navy flag, bundled and tied by his own hand, and a small armchair draped in threadbare linen set back in the corner by the window. I shed my coat, time to get on with it. I have a fine desk but I prefer to work from my bed, as if I’m a convalescent in a Robert Louis Stevenson poem. An optimistic zombie propped by pillows, producing pages of somnambulistic fruit—not quite ripe or overripe. Occasionally I write directly into my small laptop, sheepishly glancing over to the shelf where my typewriter with its antiquated ribbon sits next to an obsolete Brother word processor. A nagging allegiance prevents me from scrapping either of them. Then there are the scores of notebooks, their contents calling—confession, revelation, endless variations of the same paragraph—and piles of napkins scrawled with incomprehensible rants. Dried-out ink bottles, encrusted nibs, cartridges for pens long gone, mechanical pencils emptied of lead. Writer’s debris.

  I skip Thanksgiving, dragging my malaise through December, with a prolonged period of enforced solitude, though sadly without crystalline effect. In the mornings I feed the cats, mutely gather my things, and then make my way across Sixth Avenue to Café ’Ino, sitting at my usual table in the corner drinking coffee, pretending to write, or writing in earnest, with more or less the same questionable results. I avoid social commitments and aggressively arrange to spend the holidays alone. On Christmas Eve I present the cats with catnip-enhanced mice toys and exit aimlessly into the vacant night, finally landing near the Chelsea Hotel at a movie theater offering a late showing of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I buy my ticket and a large black coffee and a bag of organic popcorn at the corner deli, and then settle in my seat in the back of the theater. Just me and a score of slackers, comfortably isolated from the world, attaining our own brand of holiday well-being, no gifts, no Christ child, no tinsel or mistletoe, only a sense of complete freedom. I liked the looks of the movie. I had already seen the Swedish version without subtitles but hadn’t read the books, so now I would be able to piece together the plot and lose myself in the bleak Swedish landscape.

  It was after midnight when I walked home. It was a relatively mild night and I felt an overriding sense of calm that slowly bled into a desire to be home in my own bed. There were few signs of Christmas on my empty street, just some stray tinsel embedded in the wet leaves. I said goodnight to the cats stretched out on the couch, and as I headed upstairs to my room, Cairo, an Abyssinian runt with a coat the color of the pyramids, followed at my heels. There I unlocked a glass cabinet and carefully unwrapped a Flemish crèche consisting of Mary and Joseph, two oxen, and a babe in his cradle, and arranged them on the top of my bookcase. Carved from bone, they had developed a golden patina through two centuries of age. How sad, I thought, admiring the oxen, that they are only displayed at Christmastide. I wished the babe a happy birthday and removed the books and papers from my bed, brushed my teeth, turned down the coverlet, and let Cairo sleep on my stomach.

  —

  New Year’s Eve was pretty much the same story with no particular resolution. As thousands of drunken revelers disbursed in Times Square, my little Abyssinian circled the floor with me as I paced, wrestling with a poem I was aiming to finish to usher in the New Year, in homage to the great Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. In reading his Amulet I noted a passing reference to the hecatomb—an ancient ritualistic slaughter of one hundred oxen. I decided to write a hecatomb for him—a hundred-line poem. It was to be a way to thank him for spending the last stretch of his brief life racing to finish his masterpiece, 2666. If only he could have been given special dispensation, been allowed to live. For 2666 seemed set up to go on forever, as long as he wished to write. Such a sad portion of injustice served to beautiful Bolaño, to die at the height of his powers at fifty years old. The loss of him and his unwritten denying us at least one secret of the world.

  As the last hours of the year ticked away I wrote and rewrote then recited the lines aloud. But as the ball dropped in Times Square I realized I had written 101 lines by mistake and couldn’t face figuring which one to sacrifice. It also occurred to me that I was inadvertently invoking the slaughter of the kin of the glowing bone oxen watching over the Christ child in the crèche on my bookcase. Did it matter the ritual was in word only? Did it matter my oxen were carved in bone? After a few minutes of looping rumination I temporarily laid aside my hecatomb and switched over to a movie. While watching The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, I noticed that Pasolini’s young Mary resembled the equally young Kristen Stewart. I placed it on pause and made a cup of Nescafé, slipped on a hoodie, and went outside and sat on my stoop. It was a cold, clear night. A few drunken kids, probably from New Jersey, called out to me.

  —What the fuck time is it?

  —Time to puke, I answered.

  —Don’t say that around her, she’s been doing it all night.

  She was a barefoot redhead wearing a sequined minidress.

  —Where’s her coat? Should I get her a sweater?

  —She’s all right.

  —Well, happy New Year.

  —Did it happen yet?

  —Yeah, about forty-eight minutes ago.

  They hastily disappeared around the corner, leaving a deflating silver balloon hovering above the sidewalk. I walked over to rescue it just as it limply touched ground.

  —That about sums it up, I said aloud.

  —

  Credit 2.2

  Snow. Just enough snow to scrape off my boots. Donning my black coat and watch cap, I trudge across Sixth Avenue like a faithful postman, delivering myself daily before the orange awning of Café ’Ino. As I labor yet again on variations
of the hecatomb poem for Bolaño, my morning sojourn lengthens well into the afternoon. I order Tuscan bean soup, brown bread with olive oil, and more black coffee. I count the lines of the envisioned one-hundred-line poem, now three lines shy. Ninety-seven clues but nothing solved, another cold-case poem.

  I should get out of here, I am thinking, out of the city. But where would I go that I would not drag my seemingly incurable lethargy along with me, like the worn canvas sack of an angst-driven teenage hockey player? And what would become of my mornings in my little corner and my late nights scanning the TV channels with an obstinate channel changer that needed to be tapped several times into awareness?

  —I changed your batteries, I say pleadingly, so change the damn channel.

  —Aren’t you supposed to be working?

  —I’m watching my crime shows, I murmur unapologetically, not a trifling thing. Yesterday’s poets are today’s detectives. They spend a life sniffing out the hundredth line, wrapping up a case, and limping exhausted into the sunset. They entertain and sustain me. Linden and Holder. Goren and Eames. Horatio Caine. I walk with them, adopt their ways, suffer their failures, and consider their movements long after an episode ends, whether in real time or rerun.

  The haughtiness of a small handheld device! Perhaps I should be concerned as to why I have conversations with inanimate objects. But as it has been part of my waking life since I was a child I have no problem with that. What really bothers me is why I have spring fever in January. Why the coils of my brain seem dusted with a vortex of pollens. Sighing, I meander around my room scanning for cherished things to make certain they haven’t been drawn into that half-dimensional place where things just disappear. Things beyond socks or glasses: Kevin Shields’s EBow, a snapshot of a sleepy-faced Fred, a Burmese offering bowl, Margot Fonteyn’s ballet slippers, a misshapen clay giraffe formed by my daughter’s hands. I pause before my father’s chair.