The Diviners, Page 2

  Light upon the open sea, the Winslow Homer green of the North Atlantic, upon the blue whale, the right whale, the songs of North Atlantic whales, light upon the fish coming to the surface, light upon the currents of this well-traveled sea, light upon the circulations of the Gulf Stream, the North Equatorial Current, clockwise, into the light now, these currents, light upon Greenland, the light of the Inuits, the light of the many names for light, light upon the Nunavut territory, upon Baffin Island and Baffin Bay, light upon the coming of winter in the arctic, light upon the very end of the hurricane season, light upon the fishing boats coming back empty-handed from the Grand Banks, light coming down the coast now, where Leif Eriksson landed and turned back, light upon Newfoundland, light upon moose frozen in headlights on the highways of Newfoundland, light upon Cape Breton, light upon Nova Scotia, where the tides are so violent that the coast can come and go seventy feet in an afternoon, light upon Campobello, and light upon Eastport, state of Maine, United States of America.

  It’s possible that the sleepers just beginning to wake know nothing beyond Eastport; they have stuff on their mind, there are car payments, there are mortgage payments, there are utilities, there is heat to worry about. It has gotten cold down east already. International concerns are not pressing. On the pier in Eastport, next to that deep water, a pair of teenagers in a pickup, having made out all night, having slept in the truck, hand in hand, are now watching the dawn fretfully. They are going to get yelled at. What a sunrise. The crimson sun beginning to dash itself on the islands. Autumn on the coast of the state of Maine, in New England. The light only tarries here for a brief spell. There have been snow flurries. The best autumn colors are in the past. People are getting their boats out of the harbors, up on stilts, in the Casco and Penobscot bays. Light upon the mariners of the eastern seaboard, light upon the mariners from here down the coast, light upon the fishermen of Kittery and Portsmouth and Newburyport, light upon Provincetown. Light upon the scrub pines. Light upon the towns of the Cape, from which the mariners of yore set out to hunt the whale, light upon the mansions of Newport and the designers of sailboats, and light on the lighthouse, for example, of Narragansett Bay, at Point Judith, the lonely lighthouses whose job was once to augur the dawn, light upon surfers of Point Judith, light upon Watch Hill, and then light upon the casinos of Connecticut, and light upon the nuclear submarine base at Groton, and from here dawn has a straight shot down the coast, a straight shot on the interstate clogged with truckers on amphetamines, infernal all the way through New Haven and Bridgeport. These towns are dead, and the light does nothing but show up the rubble. The light shows up their corrupt politicians, their pedophile mayors, their distracted suburbanites; everybody’s just trying to get past the cities of the dead, bent upon the gates of New York City.

  How fast does it happen on this particular day? How fast does the sunlight rush westerly, dappling the world? The figure is 1,670 kilometers an hour, or about .23 miles per second, which is the speed of the rotation of the third rock from the sun. Day leaves no latitude behind. Therefore, twenty-four hours have elapsed, or twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes, all of this according to the quantum theory of light, as described by Feynman. Suddenly there is the behavior of sunrise on waves, like the light over the Whitestone Bridge, where commuters are trying to get a jump on rush-hour traffic heading in on the Van Wyck, past the airports, the dawn on their left. You can see morning from the bridge. Light upon the Empire State Building, light upon the Chrysler Building, light upon the World Trade Center. Light upon those gruff, show-offy digits. Light upon Shea Stadium, site of the recent Subway Series. Light upon LaGuardia Airport, the most congested airport in the country, light upon the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, light upon Floral Park, light upon Maspeth, light upon Inwood, light upon the Bronx Zoo, light upon Riverdale, light upon Yankee Stadium, light moving apparently instantaneously from here to the isle of Manhattan, its office buildings still illuminated with emergency fluorescence. Manhattan, New York City, beginning of another day.

  New York City, noteworthy for its insomniacs. Light upon all the insomniacs, across this city, metropolis of insomniacs. They are there, in the despair of another night, out on the couch in the living room to avoid waking their husbands or wives, or insomniacs are in the tub, and they are reading, or they are thinking, or the insomniacs are regretting at the instant of the dawn. No one asks how they spend the middle of the night, no one who doesn’t suffer with insomnia wants to know. The insomniacs are the witnesses to the dawn, they are in the tub and looking out on the air shaft, through the one tiny window, where a tiny patch of sky is visible, or they are at the breakfast table, trying to read something so boring that it will put them back to sleep. Every block has insomniacs, and here’s the first light of a day in November breaking over them. A woman whose car is going to be repossessed, a guy who falsified his résumé to get an adjunct teaching position, an artist who cannot make her rent, a dot-com programmer whose company is about to exhaust its financing. The insomniacs! They welcome the day! One of them is about to take the dog out for a walk. One of these insomniacs is listening to the international news to see if the Japanese markets are up. A long, low moan escapes him when the intensity of the decline becomes clear. Whoever it is who made the dawn made it as a gift to these insomniacs, that they wouldn’t feel so alone, that they would have something to do in their apartness, namely watch the celestial display of first light. Some of them do it, some of them go up to the roof just to see the light caroming off the buildings in Jersey City. Even the insomniac will feel some hope at dawn, even the homeless man on the grates in front of the Eye and Ear Hospital may feel a bit of relief, even the guy who hasn’t been out of his apartment in years, even the racially oppressed, even the poor, even the unemployed, even they feel a transitory joy. Even the woman on the ground floor of the brownstone in Park Slope, who yanks back her blindfold, recognizing that she can put off rising no longer, rushes unsteadily from her full-size mattress, and makes a run for it, for the bathroom. A day of dawns. A jubilee. Morning, just after the election, year two thousand.

  1

  Rosa Elisabetta Meandro, in insubstantial light, entrails in flames. Rosa Elisabetta of the hammertoe, Rosa Elisabetta of the corns. Rosa Elisabetta of the afflictions. She has hinted about the nature of her sufferings to certain persons up the block, certain persons on Eleventh Street, Brooklyn. Emilia, whose son sells the raviolis, for example. She has whispered to Emilia about the colitis. She has indicated problems relating to her gallbladder. Stones. Also headaches. These headaches begin with visitations, with rainbows, celestial light, an inability to remember numbers. Rosa Elisabetta might smell the overpowering perfume of cocktail onions, after which there is Technicolor. Two or three days sick in bed, lower than a dog is low. If she’s enumerating the complaints for Emilia, there is the colitis, there are the corns, there is the pancreas, there are the headaches. At least four things. Gas, though it’s not proper to talk about it. On nights when the garlic has not been properly sautéed according to the cuisine of her ancestral homeland, Tuscany, then there is also the gas. Perhaps it is correct to include this in the list of complaints, assembled at 6:13 AM, as she burrows down further into bedcovers, into the folds of her four-poster. She doesn’t know how much longer she can resist the cramps, the pressurized evacuation of her last meal and everything else eaten in the past twenty-four hours, everything, at least, that has not already been evacuated. Best to be pleasant about it; this is what Emilia said when Rosa Elisabetta Meandro was telling her about the scabs. There are these scabs that don’t heal; when she gets a cut, saws into herself accidentally in the kitchen, dicing vegetables, there is the mineralization of the cut. The cut doesn’t heal, not as it should. What’s that all about? She was also going to tell Emilia about the halitosis, that day, which she can smell by cupping her hands and attempting to exhale and inhale quickly, while lying in the four-poster. It is no longer the smell of the garlic sautéed, nor is it the smell of
the cocktail onions, nor is it the smell of port wine, nor is it stewed peppers. It’s some new smell, and this is what Rosa was trying to tell Emilia the other day, no doubt about it. The look in the eyes of Emilia was a look of pity, which is a look that makes Rosa Elisabetta Meandro irritable, though she tries to be pleasant, and this righteous anger, even in the dawn light ebbing into the garden apartment through the windows facing the street, is a refreshing sentiment, a motivator, as she breathes out cupping her hands.

  Consider the formidable Rosa Elisabetta of the past. Consider the archaeology of her phases. Kingmaker in the civic politics of the Fourth Ward, parader with infant ghouls and vampires on Halloween, soup kitchen volunteer; Rosa Elisabetta, institution. Dignified mother of the block, guardian of the parking spaces of longtime residents of the neighborhood, protector of the community, of local parishes, registrar of voters. Once she was all these things. A lover of families. As she enumerates them, however, Rosa Elisabetta can feel the sweat pooling in the folds of her abdomen; she can feel cramps beckoning from south of her equator. What was it that Emilia surely wanted to say about her bad breath? Maybe nothing. Her father had bad breath. Foul breath. It was his guts. She was there with the priest, such a nice priest, and the breath of her father smelled like a gizzard. She won’t talk to Emilia anymore. How can anyone think such a thing? The cupping-hands experiment does not bear out results. Nothing at all like the smell of death.

  She held the little children in the day care center while their mothers worked in Manhattan. She sang songs to these children, songs by important American singers from the age of big bands. Not one of these little children said to her: Your breath smells like something died in your mouth. She liked to present the boys with chocolates; she liked to warn them about the dangers of amorous contact. She told the little boys and girls: Avoid becoming inflamed. Never be alone in a room with a man who is too thin. Never walk near an idling automobile if it has tinted windows. Next she would speak of the constellations, how the constellations were catalogued during the Roman Empire. She knows about the Roman Empire from her father and his father, and she knows about it from the priests in the schoolyard of Dyker Heights, where she lived as a girl. She also once watched a miniseries on the subject of the Roman Empire. The emperors poisoned one another. The emperors knew a lot about poisons. She lifted and carried children, kissed them on their dirty necks. It is not right that Emilia from the ravioli store should even consider saying anything about the colitis, the gas, the headaches, the corns, the scabs, the breath, or the hair that is falling out. Or the blindness, or the incipient deafness, or the fact that Rosa is too skinny. Her dresses hang off her, like sheets draped over furniture in shuttered houses.

  The cat is disturbed by a migrating foot from his spot in a spiral of bedclothes at the end of the bed. The cat resembles the black-and-whites of civic policing, but she does not like the name her daughter has given him and will not utter it. The animal hops gamely to the floor, waits. Will Rosa feed him? Now Rosa Elisabetta smooths her threadbare nightgown over her legs, pulls an old pink sweater from a squeaky dresser drawer just opposing, and wraps it around herself. Winches herself up on swollen knees and hips. This is her submission to the order of aging and infirmity. She knows what is to come now, how long it will take. She passes across the hardwood floor with its inlays of cherry and mahogany, into the sitting room, careful to avoid stacks of reading material beside the chair, some large stacks, in front of the French doors leading out to the garden. She flips on the television on the way past, 6:21AM. A twenty-four-inch monitor that she bought used from a newspaper advertisement. The static of the picture assembling. She doesn’t have time to look because all at once she is doubled over, indelicately emitting pollutants, she’s awake and will be awake, clutching at her insides. She can hear the device, the old television set, from the bathroom. The volume is calibrated to allow this pleasure. Its music is generous from the agony of the bathroom. She bolts the door, leaving the cat on the other side. She begins to weep as the tremors begin. She weeps for the indignity. She hopes she will not bleed. She worries that it will not stop. She could live with it for a while, the colitis, if only she didn’t bleed. She reaches for a magazine on the tank. The wallpaper in the bathroom, floral print, is peeling, and there is paint flaking from the ceiling. She tries to pretend that the concerns of the magazine are her concerns. Allegations about the outgoing president and his wife. His wife’s lesbian secret. A powerful weight-loss program has enabled certain celebrities to shed up to seventy pounds. One chubby actress had her stomach stapled, live on the Internet. Will Rosa Elisabetta faint? Perspiration courses down her brow. She has fainted in the past. An awful embarrassment, the fainting, because then her daughter or the Polish woman who comes to clean will find her on the floor. Another actress, this one too thin, needs to put some weight back on, drinks milk shakes that weight lifters drink. Just the ticket. She thinks she can hear them talking about it on the television. Weight loss. Rosa throws the magazine into the claw-footed bathtub. Her face is slick. The cat is mewling outside the door, beckoning. There is a moment of pain, but then she attends instead to the soothing television voices. In the morning she likes to have on the perky one, the perky one, because the perky one keeps at bay the fear of death, but it doesn’t sound as though she remembered to turn on the perky one, it sounds as though she got the one with the speech impediment. She likes the one with the speech impediment because he might explain things properly. But she prefers the perky one. She is comforted by all overheard voices, especially on mornings like this. And these voices are mixed with discussions from the past, in her head, enmity between her grandfather and her father, for example; she has been known to have a conversation with her estranged husband while shitting her brains out.

  She will need someone from the neighborhood to keep an eye on her parking space. She has no car, but still. People are moving in, young people, they don’t even know. Your car is secure for a total of six days through the kindness of neighbors. The young people don’t understand until they have lived here as long as she has lived here, forty-six years. If she catches one of these young people trying to take her parking space, no matter about the colitis, she will give him or her a talking-to. From time to time, she has put on her robe and pulled open the door and called up the steps in the darkness. “Take your car back to Omaha! Don’t you come around here again!” Imagine taking people’s spaces when these people have lived here since before your parents were born. They move into the neighborhood, these young people, and the girl doesn’t even have a ring on her finger. Honestly. That first September her daughter was in college, she put an advertisement in the paper, apartment to let, like in the old days, when the floozy from the bar performed an incantation on Rosa’s husband. Just like then, renting the room. Except this couple calls to see the apartment. No wedding rings. They are different colors; one is a black man and one is an Italian girl. She shows them around, the original balustrade, cast iron, painted black, finials. She makes remarks about southerly light; she makes remarks about original moldings and plastering; she speaks of the Romanesque and Italianate uses of brownstone, things she has been told to say by a Realtor on Seventh Avenue whose services Rosa did not retain. She doesn’t say anything to this couple that she wouldn’t say to anyone at all, treats them as she would treat anyone, makes pleasantries, even when the black man is offering his know-it-all comments about wiring in the building, asking if the wiring has been rewired since the building went up. When exactly. She says, “You ought to see the garden, honey,” ushers the girl back onto the patio, through her own apartment. She has the tomato vines, some basil and parsley, painted daisies, coneflower. Warm, everything flowers later into the season. Rosa takes the girl by the shoulder, in the dappled sunlight of the patio, where she used to hang the laundry, and she says to her, “I figure out who your mama is, I’ll call her, and I’ll tell her you were here with that man, and I will help her give you a talking-to. So now you get your black
boyfriend and you get out of here same way you came in; don’t let me see you on this street again, do you hear me? And you better hope none of the boys on this block saw you with that boyfriend, not if you want to make it to the subway in one piece.”

  There are couples like this on the block now, all sorts of couples, and the boys on the block, who used to have a sense of honor, they don’t do a thing about it. Maybe the neighbors all treat these couples to a look of chastisement on the way past, but that’s the end of it. A disgrace. Rosa Elisabetta herself is no longer the kind of person who lives on this block. Rosa is a specter, a revenant of a Brooklyn past, someone buried under layers of sediment, which is why she has the smell of death on her.

  The pancreas, the problem with the pancreas, and the corns, and other complaints. She thinks, I will no longer drink the vin ordinaire, I will only drink the white wine and the Communion wine. Voices in the next room, gathering to speak of such terminologies as grave uncertainty, political instability, intervention of the courts, none of it particularly clear to Rosa. She pays the most attention to the school board and the city council, the social clubs, and she only pays attention to these because in the old days she paid attention to them when her father and her father’s friends had an interest in politics. They knew how to look after what was theirs. She would give out leaflets over by the subway. Now she’s not even sure who is running for the school board, if there is even a school board candidate.

  Like trying to evacuate pieces of glass, like glass or maybe pieces of your brain coming out of your posterior, bits of your insides, bits of your organs, like your pancreas, for example, or the gallbladder. Black bile, green bile, stones. All the humors. Such a stink. She moans, while the voices debate about concession and recount, and so Rosa resolves not to give in herself and reaches into the cabinet underneath the sink, if she can just reach from where she is, where she keeps a special something. At the exertion, another molten river floods from her. Usually after an hour or so she feels better. When it is clearing itself up, she doesn’t really need the bottle, the quart bottle purchased from the criminals at the bodega. Doesn’t like to patronize them, because they do not ask after her family. She’s sure that they are selling illegal drugs to schoolchildren, but nonetheless, there’s the fact of convenience. The mildew smell is nauseating, too. When the Polish lady comes, she will have to tell her about the smell. Rosa Elisabetta doesn’t know if she’ll be able to keep down the malt liquor. Sometimes she spits it up. Sometimes she has to spit up some of the malt liquor in order to calm her stomach. Into the sink, sometimes into the tub. It’s like in the miniseries about the Roman emperors. One fellow, he had the sour stomach, and then his grandmother fed him. Rosa unscrews the cap on the malt liquor, a feverish chill overtaking her; she can hear the chatter from the next room, beautiful and serene now that she’s unscrewing the cap of the malt liquor. The voices sound like birds. The flocks of Prospect Park in spring, like that rooster that was crowing in the park last summer, someone left a rooster in the park, and it was doing its job in the mornings. She decides to risk the malt liquor. Everything is nauseating on a morning like this, the old tile floor in the bathroom of the brownstone, the mildew, the stink, the interracial couples of the neighborhood, the diaspora of her contemporaries to Long Island and to Westchester, to the state of Florida. She drinks deep, gags, drinks more, gags. Drinks more. Rosa Elisabetta, the last person in this neighborhood to have officiated in stickball and to have carried lasagna next door when people moved in, the last person to have drunk red wine out of jugs at the block party, where the priest came by and made jokes about baseball. They all drank wine, her family drank wine, even as a girl she drank wine, her friends had wine on Sundays at church, and no one worried about whether the priest was molesting anyone.