The Memory of Water
Note: This story contains some adult situations. It may not be suitable for younger readers. If it were a movie, I would rate it PG 13.
I
My face was wet. Suddenly. Not just my face, but my body, my bed, my everything.
Yes, I was asleep at the time, but this isn't a subtle image for dreaming of a toilet and awakening to a piss in my bed. And I’m not talking about another type of dream that involves wetness, a dream that thirteen-year-old boys like me tend to have.
I opened my eyes.
The wetness didn’t come from my mind; it came from a bucket held by my oldest brother Tijon. He'd dumped a gallon of fluid on my sleeping body. (Please let it just be water, I prayed. Please be water! Tijon has always been a practical joker with an immature sense of humor.)
Tijon was the one with the bucket, but he wasn’t the only one in my room to greet me when I opened my eyes. All my brothers were there. There are eleven of them in all. As far as I could recall, they’d never before crammed themselves into my small room all at once. Something was up.
My brothers stood arrayed around my bed, their dyed-white mohawks spiked upwards and shining brightly in the early morning sun. Seeing the presence of my many brothers packed shoulder to shoulder with their sharp, aggressive hair made me think of cactus spines. Both my brothers and their hair were designed to cause nothing but pain.
Except for Tijon, all of my brothers held guns of different makes, calibers, and descriptions. Tijon, in the hand not holding the empty bucket, held a butterfly knife which he flipped open and closed over and over again. He stood looking at me; he never looked at the knife. I was impressed Tijon could blindly flip the knife so well with so little room in which to operate, but he was always full of such small, scary surprises. And Tijon was always impressive.
Then he spoke to me. It was always Tijon who spoke for us to others. And, within our brotherhood, it was always Tijon who delivered edicts from on high. That was just the way.
He spoke to me in that oddly formal manner he used, especially when making pronouncements about the family business and about which people in our town would be allowed to live and which would – regrettably – have to die.
"Youngest Brother, our love for you is wide and deep. And, brother, you are still young, a child not yet debased, so we come to you this morning as one voice – as The White – to say that by this time tomorrow you must be gone."
"Why now?" I said.
"Because The Green is coming to our side of town Wednesday. Worry not. We are fully armed and ready. There will be blood – mostly there's, of course." Tijon gave me an exaggerated wink and tousled my hair in a way that didn’t match the severity of his speech. "Still the time for you to go is now. Momma couldn't handle it if you were lost. And so you go."
"But who has the police?" I asked.
"We own the police south of Merchant Street. The Green has them north of there. But none of this matters to you, Brother Jomen. You leave. Today."
Tijon nodded and then each of my older brothers shuffled forward one by one. When they reached me, each in turn bent over my still, prone body, and kissed me on my cheeks – right then left, one after the other, twenty-two kisses in all. Our tears mixed and puddled in the corners of my eyes.
It was Tijon who kissed me last. Then he pressed a full canteen into my hands. "Water is life, Brother Jomen. When you drink it, when you cross it into safety, water is life."
Then my eyes closed, and I faded back into sleep. It was like my brothers' kisses were chloroform and I was a butterfly to be preserved in my innocence, if not in amber.
II
Over the last stretch of days I'd become accustomed to a certain way of awakening, a routine of sorts, I suppose.
First, I would feel a repeating pulse, a cycling chucka-boom-chucka-boom rumbling up from under me. Then I would feel a hotness of metal warming quickly in the morning sun beneath my back. I'd feel the heat begin to eat through the thin cotton of my shirt. Then, finally, I would open my eyes.
I'd see clouds and sky above me and the green blur of vegetation filling my peripheral vision as the landscape rushed by. This oriented me. I knew where I was. I knew I was another night closer to where I needed to be.
But that's not how I came to consciousness today. Today I was awakened by the ache of blood rushing into my head and a tight, pinching grip around my ankles. My eyes opened not to the sky above but to earth below, to rocks and dying patches of grass and the never-ending rib cage of train tracks moving below me.
I bent my head toward my chest in an attempt to find the sky, but the blue above was blocked by the faces of two large men. One face belonged to the man holding my ankles. His biceps were mountains from the exertion of holding me off the edge of the train. His arms had been stretched and shaped from years of exercise and encounters like this one.
The other face belonged to a man who held my canteen, the metal jug Tijon had given me before I traded my bedroom for the roof of a train. The man with my water smiled at me and the dull gold in his mouth made me think of corn-on-the-cob.
He took a long drink from the canteen. The water ran down his lips and beard and then – finally, uselessly – to the ground rushing by below. I followed one drop all the way down and watched it lose itself in an ocean of dust that waited for the chance to swallow me as well.
The man put the lid on the canteen and hooked it to his belt. Then he talked to me.
"Sorry to wake you, Little One, but today is a work day for us. Thank you for the canteen, but we need something more to keep you riding up high instead of dying down low." He spit a huge chunk of phlegm into the air and all three of us watched in silence as it arced away toward the dirt.
I worked through my pockets and gave him almost all the money Tijon had given me before I left town. This was hard work to do upside down. The pressure inside my head threatened to shoot my eyes off my face like bullets out a gun barrel. I kept only the little bit of money I'd thought to tape to the flesh of my left shoulder.
I gave them enough. The silent man with the huge arms hauled me up. The other man thanked me and punched me a few times to punctuate his farewell. Then the thieves left me alone to cook my skin atop the train.
I watched the sky above and felt a sizzle below from the mix of metal and sun. It hurt. I didn't care. As I drifted away and closed my eyes, I thought, "That money came from death. Perhaps it is better to have it with me no more."
The thought had a certain dignity to it, a dignity that can sustain you, at least for a little while, so I clung to it as I fell asleep. But I missed my canteen, and the last thing I saw in my mind before the black descended was a water drop slipping passed the man's corn cob teeth, falling from his beard, and disappearing into the dirt.
The chucka-boom rolled forward, and that was all that mattered.
III
My eyes opened. I saw my face reflected on a shifting mirror of dull, brown water. I reached my right hand down until my fingers broke the water’s skin. The caramel of my arm and the tone of the water were nearly identical. Had I converted the broad, slow river to my color, had it turned me, or had we made an agreement to share the same shade?
I raised my eyes and looked across the stretch of water to its other side. What I saw, what impressed me more than anything else, were dirigibles – fat, oblong balloons floating and gloating in the sky. On each aircraft were moving pictures – silent, endlessly repeating micro-stories about finding hope and life by purchasing a certain vehicle or flavor of beer. The names of the products were written in a language different from my own.
I watched for a long time astonished that somehow they were visible here across the water during the day.
All the characters in the floating stories were beautiful. Their skin was made of clouds and their hair of flame. When they smiled, as they always did, their teeth matched not only one another, but their wondrous, bleached flesh as well.
From the sky they reached out to me, and since my right hand was still buried in the water, I began to reach to them with my left. But that made me feel stupid, so I retrieved both my hands and used them to hide my eyes.
A noise, a clearing throat, chuffed up from behind me. "Excuse me, Young Sir," said a quiet, polite voice. I spun on my rear to face the voice, kicking up a small cloud of dust as I moved.
"Excuse me, Young Sir," the man repeated. "Perhaps I can be of some service to you. You see, the last few hundred yards of this pilgrimage are always the trickiest. It takes someone who knows the way the world works here to see you through the final steps to your goal. Perhaps I can be that person for you, Young Sir." The man spoke my own words and not the strangely shaped language that shone down from the blimps. He bowed ever so slightly as he concluded his initial pitch and then circled back to begin it again, this time from a slightly different angle.
I listened to him for a few moments before I really looked at him in the face. When I did I saw that hidden under the dirt, whiskers, and an angry redness beaten out of his flesh by the sun, he was one of the floating people made of fire and cloud. There were flecks of firelight in his thick beard and in his hair.
At least, I thought I could see it in his hair. He kept his hair short and most of his head was hidden in a hat, a blue cap with orange, ornate shapes stitched onto its front, an "N" and "Y" interlaced into one. The hat looked very old.
"Let me help you, Little One," he said as he thrust a beaten picture book into my hands. I flipped through it for a moment or two as the man at last fell silent.
It was a book full of buildings.
In it I saw a picture of one building that was pale and windowless, just a bone stuck on its end in the grass. It rose up like a narrow, lonely middle finger gesturing to the sky. A skinny lake stood still before it. The water reflected the building on its surface just like the water here reflected my face. I took it as a good omen.
I saw another bleached building that seemed to be a covered patio belonging to a massive, tired, alabaster god. He sat on his throne and looked at me even as I sat on the dirt and looked at him. Perhaps he was resting after his travels like I was resting after mine.
Perhaps – although he was a god, and I was just Tijon's banished youngest brother – we were also somehow and somewhere a little bit the same. Looking at his eyes, I sensed that if the god opened his lips he would say, "Come." I took this as another good omen.
The man cleared his throat again. "Young Sir, would you like my help?"
My eyes still fixed upon the welcoming god, I nodded a “yes” not knowing if there would be a price to be paid and, if there were, what that price would be.
"Good," he said. Then he stroked my head twice. After that I heard the soft tinkle of a belt being unfastened. The price soon became clear. I closed my eyes; I floated away.
IV
My eyes open to the splatters of a cold rain wetting me. It’s pooling in the crevasses of my face like the tears of my brothers once did.
I sit on a folding chair whose unyielding metal presses against me and becomes the train's hard back meeting my own. There is a tight grip on my left forearm makes me think of the boulder-armed thief’s grip around my ankles, and the force of that memory dangles me in midair all over again.
In response to these phantom sensations, my free hand taps my hip as it searches in vain for a canteen that hasn't been there for eight decades. The move is desperate and irrational. It’s like I'm a person patting my pockets in a panic for a wallet suddenly feared lost.
I know it's stupid, even as I do it, but I often find myself dislocated in time, my memories and my present decoupled from their proper places and pureed together. This makes me do fool things like this. This makes me explode with unexpected words or actions that look hopelessly silly to the people who are standing in the real world and not inside my vagabond mind. So it goes for the old, I suppose.
This land has a famous character from a long ago novel who felt the same way I do, who moved as I do, who slid at random from one way station of time to another on greased, unreliable rails. I remember reading the story in college. By then I had learned the words of these people, but the novel meant nothing to me then. It means something to me now, but I can’t recall the character's name. It's something pregnant with symbolism and import, but I can't dig it up out of the rotting meat that is my head. (Wayfarer? No. Traveller? No. I give up.)
My eyes seek out what is holding my forearm, and before I can find it, I see my own hand lying there dead on my lap. It is blotched and wrinkled, beaten and dried up. Dark. Ancient.
My over-cooked hand and the fact that the advertisers no longer need blimps to hawk their products (they project them upon the thin air nowadays) orient me in the present moment. I am ninety-five and for some idiot reason I am sitting outdoors during a northeastern January's rain.
Then I find the source of the pinching grip. My wife is squeezing my arm. I see her hand on me, her old flesh glowing white, her arm a photographic negative of my own. My mind shoves off from the shore and goes on another voyage.
VI
I had paid my price to the man in the NY cap and was biding my time as I waited to be escorted across the brown river. It had been a week of waiting so far, and it would be another two weeks before I'd finally have a chance to see how long I could stay hidden among the people of clouds and flame.
It was night, and I was wandering the city trying to find something to eat without being eaten myself. I turned a corner to exit an alley, and I saw her. I almost ran into her. She was just a few feet away from me, and I stopped as still as death and stared at her. She was dancing in the courtyard of an open-air cafe, moving to the local music streaming through the restaurant's cheap, crackling speakers.
She bounced over to me, and I could see she was about seven years old, a few years my junior. She said nothing, but she smiled and grabbed my arms and forced me to dance with her. Under the best of circumstances dancing doesn't come easy to me, but I tried, and I did better than I expected to do.
The music finally calmed and fell silent, our bodies came to rest, and for the first time I looked at her mother and father. They sat drinking beers and watching us from a table thirty feet away.
In the cafe's lights, all three of them glowed like exposed skeletons. All three of them smiled at me and seemed unafraid of being who they were where they were. Except for the four of us, the patio was completely deserted.
The girl's father rose up out of his chair and came over to me. He squatted down a bit so he could look me in the eye. He pressed a card and some money into my hand. He told me that there was a number on the card. He told me that it was his number, and when I finally got where I was going I could call him if I wanted to. There was no pressure, he told me.
That night I taped the card and the money to my left shoulder. A month later, after I’d crossed the water to the strange land, I called him. He came from many miles away to gather me. When we arrived at his home, he gave me his basement and a bed. Not long after that, he gave me a job. Years later he gave me his daughter because she had already given herself to me. There was no price to pay other than the costs of love we pay gladly, since we are god-shaped flesh and not creatures of dead stone.
I gave this man, her father, many things. And he gave me even more. For one thing, he gave me wisdom. He told me on many occasions, including while hugging me as he died in his bed, that none of us owns a person like we possess a hammer or a dirty shirt. He said that his daughter danced over to me that first night by her own accord. He said that she danced over to me years later in the very same way.
It is his daughter, my wife, who pinches my forearm and for some reason we sit together in an honored place among a huge crowd shivering through a cold rain. A few hours ago I saw – this time in reality and not in a book – the tired, alabaster god's covered throne and the towering middle finger flipping off the sky.
Then my wife and I were brought to yet another massive, bleached building and escorted into our metal seats. From where we sit we overlook a vast, gathering crowd awaiting a grand event. My wife and I are here for this event, but I can’t recall exactly why all this has happened or how it fits together.
Then it comes back to me in a flash.
I watch my granddaughter stand up tall and serious in the middle of the throng. All at once she looks both old and young but, beyond that, she looks wise and nervous. She stands in front of another woman who wears a black, formless gown -- the garb of a judge. This judge stares at my grandchild and asks her to make various promises and repeat various sacred things about defending sacred texts.
My granddaughter, Tija is her name, stands tall in the rain and repeats the holy words, and through them she vows to protect a paper and a people, this people, the people I used to associate only with cloud and flame. She vows to protect it all, even though I know she has never held a gun or flipped a knife like her namesake Tijon did long ago.
As I recall at last why I am here, I remember that this last little detail doesn't matter. Tija will never need to wield a weapon herself. She will have many people with guns and knives at her command. I smile at this because it means that in this strange way she will be very much like Tijon, for whom command over life and death was a daily chore.
As my mind begins to float away yet again, I pray for Tijon’s soul. I pray I will soon see him when I cross another river into another strange land.
My face was wet. Suddenly. Not just my face, but my body, my bed, my everything.
Yes, I was asleep at the time, but this isn't a subtle image for dreaming of a toilet and awakening to a piss in my bed. And I’m not talking about another type of dream that involves wetness, a dream that thirteen-year-old boys like me tend to have.
I opened my eyes.
The wetness didn’t come from my mind; it came from a bucket held by my oldest brother Tijon. He'd dumped a gallon of fluid on my sleeping body. (Please let it just be water, I prayed. Please be water! Tijon has always been a practical joker with an immature sense of humor.)
Tijon was the one with the bucket, but he wasn’t the only one in my room to greet me when I opened my eyes. All my brothers were there. There are eleven of them in all. As far as I could recall, they’d never before crammed themselves into my small room all at once. Something was up.
My brothers stood arrayed around my bed, their dyed-white mohawks spiked upwards and shining brightly in the early morning sun. Seeing the presence of my many brothers packed shoulder to shoulder with their sharp, aggressive hair made me think of cactus spines. Both my brothers and their hair were designed to cause nothing but pain.
Except for Tijon, all of my brothers held guns of different makes, calibers, and descriptions. Tijon, in the hand not holding the empty bucket, held a butterfly knife which he flipped open and closed over and over again. He stood looking at me; he never looked at the knife. I was impressed Tijon could blindly flip the knife so well with so little room in which to operate, but he was always full of such small, scary surprises. And Tijon was always impressive.
Then he spoke to me. It was always Tijon who spoke for us to others. And, within our brotherhood, it was always Tijon who delivered edicts from on high. That was just the way.
He spoke to me in that oddly formal manner he used, especially when making pronouncements about the family business and about which people in our town would be allowed to live and which would – regrettably – have to die.
"Youngest Brother, our love for you is wide and deep. And, brother, you are still young, a child not yet debased, so we come to you this morning as one voice – as The White – to say that by this time tomorrow you must be gone."
"Why now?" I said.
"Because The Green is coming to our side of town Wednesday. Worry not. We are fully armed and ready. There will be blood – mostly there's, of course." Tijon gave me an exaggerated wink and tousled my hair in a way that didn’t match the severity of his speech. "Still the time for you to go is now. Momma couldn't handle it if you were lost. And so you go."
"But who has the police?" I asked.
"We own the police south of Merchant Street. The Green has them north of there. But none of this matters to you, Brother Jomen. You leave. Today."
Tijon nodded and then each of my older brothers shuffled forward one by one. When they reached me, each in turn bent over my still, prone body, and kissed me on my cheeks – right then left, one after the other, twenty-two kisses in all. Our tears mixed and puddled in the corners of my eyes.
It was Tijon who kissed me last. Then he pressed a full canteen into my hands. "Water is life, Brother Jomen. When you drink it, when you cross it into safety, water is life."
Then my eyes closed, and I faded back into sleep. It was like my brothers' kisses were chloroform and I was a butterfly to be preserved in my innocence, if not in amber.
II
Over the last stretch of days I'd become accustomed to a certain way of awakening, a routine of sorts, I suppose.
First, I would feel a repeating pulse, a cycling chucka-boom-chucka-boom rumbling up from under me. Then I would feel a hotness of metal warming quickly in the morning sun beneath my back. I'd feel the heat begin to eat through the thin cotton of my shirt. Then, finally, I would open my eyes.
I'd see clouds and sky above me and the green blur of vegetation filling my peripheral vision as the landscape rushed by. This oriented me. I knew where I was. I knew I was another night closer to where I needed to be.
But that's not how I came to consciousness today. Today I was awakened by the ache of blood rushing into my head and a tight, pinching grip around my ankles. My eyes opened not to the sky above but to earth below, to rocks and dying patches of grass and the never-ending rib cage of train tracks moving below me.
I bent my head toward my chest in an attempt to find the sky, but the blue above was blocked by the faces of two large men. One face belonged to the man holding my ankles. His biceps were mountains from the exertion of holding me off the edge of the train. His arms had been stretched and shaped from years of exercise and encounters like this one.
The other face belonged to a man who held my canteen, the metal jug Tijon had given me before I traded my bedroom for the roof of a train. The man with my water smiled at me and the dull gold in his mouth made me think of corn-on-the-cob.
He took a long drink from the canteen. The water ran down his lips and beard and then – finally, uselessly – to the ground rushing by below. I followed one drop all the way down and watched it lose itself in an ocean of dust that waited for the chance to swallow me as well.
The man put the lid on the canteen and hooked it to his belt. Then he talked to me.
"Sorry to wake you, Little One, but today is a work day for us. Thank you for the canteen, but we need something more to keep you riding up high instead of dying down low." He spit a huge chunk of phlegm into the air and all three of us watched in silence as it arced away toward the dirt.
I worked through my pockets and gave him almost all the money Tijon had given me before I left town. This was hard work to do upside down. The pressure inside my head threatened to shoot my eyes off my face like bullets out a gun barrel. I kept only the little bit of money I'd thought to tape to the flesh of my left shoulder.
I gave them enough. The silent man with the huge arms hauled me up. The other man thanked me and punched me a few times to punctuate his farewell. Then the thieves left me alone to cook my skin atop the train.
I watched the sky above and felt a sizzle below from the mix of metal and sun. It hurt. I didn't care. As I drifted away and closed my eyes, I thought, "That money came from death. Perhaps it is better to have it with me no more."
The thought had a certain dignity to it, a dignity that can sustain you, at least for a little while, so I clung to it as I fell asleep. But I missed my canteen, and the last thing I saw in my mind before the black descended was a water drop slipping passed the man's corn cob teeth, falling from his beard, and disappearing into the dirt.
The chucka-boom rolled forward, and that was all that mattered.
III
My eyes opened. I saw my face reflected on a shifting mirror of dull, brown water. I reached my right hand down until my fingers broke the water’s skin. The caramel of my arm and the tone of the water were nearly identical. Had I converted the broad, slow river to my color, had it turned me, or had we made an agreement to share the same shade?
I raised my eyes and looked across the stretch of water to its other side. What I saw, what impressed me more than anything else, were dirigibles – fat, oblong balloons floating and gloating in the sky. On each aircraft were moving pictures – silent, endlessly repeating micro-stories about finding hope and life by purchasing a certain vehicle or flavor of beer. The names of the products were written in a language different from my own.
I watched for a long time astonished that somehow they were visible here across the water during the day.
All the characters in the floating stories were beautiful. Their skin was made of clouds and their hair of flame. When they smiled, as they always did, their teeth matched not only one another, but their wondrous, bleached flesh as well.
From the sky they reached out to me, and since my right hand was still buried in the water, I began to reach to them with my left. But that made me feel stupid, so I retrieved both my hands and used them to hide my eyes.
A noise, a clearing throat, chuffed up from behind me. "Excuse me, Young Sir," said a quiet, polite voice. I spun on my rear to face the voice, kicking up a small cloud of dust as I moved.
"Excuse me, Young Sir," the man repeated. "Perhaps I can be of some service to you. You see, the last few hundred yards of this pilgrimage are always the trickiest. It takes someone who knows the way the world works here to see you through the final steps to your goal. Perhaps I can be that person for you, Young Sir." The man spoke my own words and not the strangely shaped language that shone down from the blimps. He bowed ever so slightly as he concluded his initial pitch and then circled back to begin it again, this time from a slightly different angle.
I listened to him for a few moments before I really looked at him in the face. When I did I saw that hidden under the dirt, whiskers, and an angry redness beaten out of his flesh by the sun, he was one of the floating people made of fire and cloud. There were flecks of firelight in his thick beard and in his hair.
At least, I thought I could see it in his hair. He kept his hair short and most of his head was hidden in a hat, a blue cap with orange, ornate shapes stitched onto its front, an "N" and "Y" interlaced into one. The hat looked very old.
"Let me help you, Little One," he said as he thrust a beaten picture book into my hands. I flipped through it for a moment or two as the man at last fell silent.
It was a book full of buildings.
In it I saw a picture of one building that was pale and windowless, just a bone stuck on its end in the grass. It rose up like a narrow, lonely middle finger gesturing to the sky. A skinny lake stood still before it. The water reflected the building on its surface just like the water here reflected my face. I took it as a good omen.
I saw another bleached building that seemed to be a covered patio belonging to a massive, tired, alabaster god. He sat on his throne and looked at me even as I sat on the dirt and looked at him. Perhaps he was resting after his travels like I was resting after mine.
Perhaps – although he was a god, and I was just Tijon's banished youngest brother – we were also somehow and somewhere a little bit the same. Looking at his eyes, I sensed that if the god opened his lips he would say, "Come." I took this as another good omen.
The man cleared his throat again. "Young Sir, would you like my help?"
My eyes still fixed upon the welcoming god, I nodded a “yes” not knowing if there would be a price to be paid and, if there were, what that price would be.
"Good," he said. Then he stroked my head twice. After that I heard the soft tinkle of a belt being unfastened. The price soon became clear. I closed my eyes; I floated away.
IV
My eyes open to the splatters of a cold rain wetting me. It’s pooling in the crevasses of my face like the tears of my brothers once did.
I sit on a folding chair whose unyielding metal presses against me and becomes the train's hard back meeting my own. There is a tight grip on my left forearm makes me think of the boulder-armed thief’s grip around my ankles, and the force of that memory dangles me in midair all over again.
In response to these phantom sensations, my free hand taps my hip as it searches in vain for a canteen that hasn't been there for eight decades. The move is desperate and irrational. It’s like I'm a person patting my pockets in a panic for a wallet suddenly feared lost.
I know it's stupid, even as I do it, but I often find myself dislocated in time, my memories and my present decoupled from their proper places and pureed together. This makes me do fool things like this. This makes me explode with unexpected words or actions that look hopelessly silly to the people who are standing in the real world and not inside my vagabond mind. So it goes for the old, I suppose.
This land has a famous character from a long ago novel who felt the same way I do, who moved as I do, who slid at random from one way station of time to another on greased, unreliable rails. I remember reading the story in college. By then I had learned the words of these people, but the novel meant nothing to me then. It means something to me now, but I can’t recall the character's name. It's something pregnant with symbolism and import, but I can't dig it up out of the rotting meat that is my head. (Wayfarer? No. Traveller? No. I give up.)
My eyes seek out what is holding my forearm, and before I can find it, I see my own hand lying there dead on my lap. It is blotched and wrinkled, beaten and dried up. Dark. Ancient.
My over-cooked hand and the fact that the advertisers no longer need blimps to hawk their products (they project them upon the thin air nowadays) orient me in the present moment. I am ninety-five and for some idiot reason I am sitting outdoors during a northeastern January's rain.
Then I find the source of the pinching grip. My wife is squeezing my arm. I see her hand on me, her old flesh glowing white, her arm a photographic negative of my own. My mind shoves off from the shore and goes on another voyage.
VI
I had paid my price to the man in the NY cap and was biding my time as I waited to be escorted across the brown river. It had been a week of waiting so far, and it would be another two weeks before I'd finally have a chance to see how long I could stay hidden among the people of clouds and flame.
It was night, and I was wandering the city trying to find something to eat without being eaten myself. I turned a corner to exit an alley, and I saw her. I almost ran into her. She was just a few feet away from me, and I stopped as still as death and stared at her. She was dancing in the courtyard of an open-air cafe, moving to the local music streaming through the restaurant's cheap, crackling speakers.
She bounced over to me, and I could see she was about seven years old, a few years my junior. She said nothing, but she smiled and grabbed my arms and forced me to dance with her. Under the best of circumstances dancing doesn't come easy to me, but I tried, and I did better than I expected to do.
The music finally calmed and fell silent, our bodies came to rest, and for the first time I looked at her mother and father. They sat drinking beers and watching us from a table thirty feet away.
In the cafe's lights, all three of them glowed like exposed skeletons. All three of them smiled at me and seemed unafraid of being who they were where they were. Except for the four of us, the patio was completely deserted.
The girl's father rose up out of his chair and came over to me. He squatted down a bit so he could look me in the eye. He pressed a card and some money into my hand. He told me that there was a number on the card. He told me that it was his number, and when I finally got where I was going I could call him if I wanted to. There was no pressure, he told me.
That night I taped the card and the money to my left shoulder. A month later, after I’d crossed the water to the strange land, I called him. He came from many miles away to gather me. When we arrived at his home, he gave me his basement and a bed. Not long after that, he gave me a job. Years later he gave me his daughter because she had already given herself to me. There was no price to pay other than the costs of love we pay gladly, since we are god-shaped flesh and not creatures of dead stone.
I gave this man, her father, many things. And he gave me even more. For one thing, he gave me wisdom. He told me on many occasions, including while hugging me as he died in his bed, that none of us owns a person like we possess a hammer or a dirty shirt. He said that his daughter danced over to me that first night by her own accord. He said that she danced over to me years later in the very same way.
It is his daughter, my wife, who pinches my forearm and for some reason we sit together in an honored place among a huge crowd shivering through a cold rain. A few hours ago I saw – this time in reality and not in a book – the tired, alabaster god's covered throne and the towering middle finger flipping off the sky.
Then my wife and I were brought to yet another massive, bleached building and escorted into our metal seats. From where we sit we overlook a vast, gathering crowd awaiting a grand event. My wife and I are here for this event, but I can’t recall exactly why all this has happened or how it fits together.
Then it comes back to me in a flash.
I watch my granddaughter stand up tall and serious in the middle of the throng. All at once she looks both old and young but, beyond that, she looks wise and nervous. She stands in front of another woman who wears a black, formless gown -- the garb of a judge. This judge stares at my grandchild and asks her to make various promises and repeat various sacred things about defending sacred texts.
My granddaughter, Tija is her name, stands tall in the rain and repeats the holy words, and through them she vows to protect a paper and a people, this people, the people I used to associate only with cloud and flame. She vows to protect it all, even though I know she has never held a gun or flipped a knife like her namesake Tijon did long ago.
As I recall at last why I am here, I remember that this last little detail doesn't matter. Tija will never need to wield a weapon herself. She will have many people with guns and knives at her command. I smile at this because it means that in this strange way she will be very much like Tijon, for whom command over life and death was a daily chore.
As my mind begins to float away yet again, I pray for Tijon’s soul. I pray I will soon see him when I cross another river into another strange land.