The week of the August wildfires. The matte ash sky smothers speech, a shipwreck nobody else can see appears on main street. We have not talked in several days. Grief has the rhythm of corrective self-reproach. I cope by sitting in my car often. I become evening traffic in the morning, coasting pale and burnt out, stained and sticky, teetering on the next big one. I make long lists of shoulds, shouldn'ts, can'ts and won'ts, you get your hair cropped.
Now, we are restless, electric, you legitimize the experience of flight by fixing the crinkled edges of our connecting tickets, you fix Edmonton to Chicago, the long crease in Chicago to Amsterdam, and press it finally between the pages of your carry on book, asking paper to ally in self-preservation. The half-moon smile you offer is familiar, it says onto itself a phrase such as “good stuff in the long grass,” evoking ideas about places we haven't been in a while. Still, we pull up the arm rest, and you nest with me, deliberately cat-like, under the complementary blanket. The pitch black outside the window washes over, slows down time.
The taxi drives up Osdorperweg, turns, drives down, turns again, drives up -- eyes on house, heaping, over-wooden, folding under the weight of our inquiry -- drives down once more, as if rising number on fare meter indicates coefficient of accuracy; 'I am 45, no, 46 euros sure this is the place,' the cabbie thinks in perfect English, turns over a couple of words out loud in not-Dutch. A banknote comes out of my wallet, from under the paperweight of my empty stomach, all before 9:42 A.M. central European time. Two sunken luggage bodies stand in a plume of dust as the taxi peels out. Transit tiredness, faces turn into Monday mornings.
The doorbell is rung. Twice. Three times. Exasperated forth, and resigned fifth. The property is looked twice over, the numbers check out. I look at you, your tears accrue secretly, lip issues quivering warning, I bite my own back, my windpipe caught between bricks. A decaying rabbit carcass on the side of the road knocks once, twice against the consciousness, against the dull hot sky. Dip finger past the broken skin and into where the organs buckled under the weight of death; yup, sure enough -- This boy went Rotten 'bout an hour ago. Baby's first time in the big boy world.
On Saaftingestraat, for need and love of bystanders, we stumble into a continuing care home. An old but indispensable lady offers four slices of ham, cheese, and use of a telephone; how at peace, how honest, how automatic. I leave messages with our host. A pair of crusty overalls shows up in a small, work-horse economy car with ladder strapped to roof; driver-side door splits, six to twelve screwdrivers roll out onto the pavement, a class-specific stench exits the vehicle and slams the door behind itself. Overalls grin, hold the door open for us, bestow the house key, tell a bad joke, eat a lit cigarette.
The first night. Just the two of us. The house is simple with spiders who shelter behind paintings affixed to the ceiling. I try to charge our phones but my power adapter trips the breakers. Can't find the breakers. No power. We don't unpack our suitcases. Memory of toilet paper dwells on mind, thoughts of home are identified as sadness. The resulting collapse is made in bed where love-pull causes mutual urge to physically occupy the same space; we hold on tightly.
Half-awake, night divides darknesses (into marionette shadows), weightless boulders hover in not my bedroom (dementions of space or time), bodies taint by between hanging blinds, a thin pane of glass separates me from uncertainty, demands my eye-half-open attention. The rain falls, one hundred thousand metronomes, noise the antithesis of meaning, life is but a dream, and you, beside me. The rabbit's decaying gaze pulls the blinds apart. I heard it said that if darkness is stepped into at the right location and angle, any doubts present on the mind at that time will sunder, spasm, and coil onto themselves until dry. It is cautioned, however, that they are known to regrow gradually by means of sideway speech and inconsistencies in internal dialogue, one of the heart's chiefest oversights.
On little remaining battery, I study the online transit charts meticulously for recurring dream of missed connections. We take tramlijn 17 to Centraal Station. Slowly, the hard, functional angles of the Osdorp projects give way to a strange geometry of pavement markings, stratiform boulevards glisten for morning, the city drizzles thick and continuous on the window of the tram, streets begin to narrow, motion sharpens, population density rises; smaller cars behave like bicycles, people behave in raincoats, Amstel is sold for scraps, the canals open up, city banners rap in the wind, tram nags you to check out, the buildings tilt to get a better look at you, bicycles are locked to every railing, to every tree, you black out and wake up floating in a gracht with six bicycles locked to your extremities, palpable charge in the air induces smile on your face, Centraal is a cold explosion; make friends with pigeons, hold my hand, don't get lost.
We pick up a power adapter and some groceries, charge our phones in a sandwich place, steal Wi-Fi, contact our families. I pick up some Duvel to share with you. It feels like the rest of our selves have finally landed in Amsterdam; you begin to colour in your words, I no longer strain to hear you past my hunger.
Waiting on a tram just off of Dam square, an ugly old man stands in front of me smelling of not beating his kids, for which I promptly put points down in my book. A woman across the street yells 'maybe if I shaved my pussy you'd love me,' as a Canta LX docks the curb and spits ten donair-eyed eastern european boys into a backalley bistro winning the adoration of international clown car enthusiasts peeping this from the fifth floor of the Royal Palace of Amsterdam. In some versions of Amsterdam, two tables are pushed together at die Port van Cleve to fulfil a reservation made by the Van Gogh Impersonator's Society who upon sitting down immediately avoid eye-contact, spending the next five minutes angling their gaze to settle into a final, stable, mathematically sound equilibrium of eye aversion. The first Vincent in violation is ostracized. He exits the building, walking past twelve persons lined up by height, waiting for the #17 Centraal, looking wistfully down the road, where milk carton trams round the corner from Raadhuisstraat onto Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. There, an Albert Heijn is both overflowing with produce and cracked shopping baskets and also wholly deserted, canvassed with construction tarp, exposing only girders on which both birds and words perch. On the crossing between Magna Plaza and Dam, a long concrete island floats like a longboat atop ceaseless horizontal locomotion, the patterned pavements intersect at angles of destructive interference causing the extremities of perfectly good Amsterdamers to blur and disappear, though that may be a fault in the panoramic stitching of the mapping software I am using to help me write this.
At the house, we discover the breakers in a room hidden behind a bookshelf. We turn the lights on, stock the fridge. I open a Duvel. In between hiccups, I notice you holding your book upside down. You go to bed before me.
For a moment, I sit to myself. Duvel. You clattered in my tourist bag through the rain in Dam, like the pinging of a twenty-two inch byzance ride with rivets. On tramlijn 1 to Osdorp de Aker, when it came time for us to disembark, we did not forget to check out. You taste deep; fretless, you slide between meanings. Tom tom escapes my mouth, ghost snare hits like kisses, kisses like ghosts, the cymbal laughs smoky when sizzling, the piano accompaniment a twinkling of potentials, the overall effect dark, you equally dark, equally tempered, proven to wash as easily, frothing on my tongue; a pregnant high tide, a hidden overtone, a deceptive cadence, an ignored thought, bitter'd. With Brian Blade's blessing, together, we listen to the jazz, to the rain, to the snoring coming from the bedroom. We pull thoughts out from places my arms can reach only on certain kinds of days. We trade fours with Lucifer. We contemplate tectonic shift.
A week later, at Lelylaan station, you are two steps ahead of me and do not look back when identified by name. You study the departure board, I look down at my shoes. Words clamber out of my mouth by way of apology and shatter on the platform like dinner plates. You say “OK,” and board the correct train.
In Utrecht, the sharpened Dom tower holds the rainclouds captive at knife-point, a shipwreck nobody else can see appears on main street. Our hue cause fire-truck-rainbow to intensify in pitch far beyond what is known.
Getting back to Osdorp, I have the overwhelming urge to follow the fresh sun out of the city. The clouds are saline over Markermeer, heated by reed organ and cymbal blasts, the chord progression falls, I sink, hopelandic snares my tongue and hurls out vowels; I am no more than fifteen kilometers outside of Osdorp, dissipating. I'm always out there, dissipating. It's been ten months, but a version of me is still standing out there dissipating, believe it or not. Hearing the same music, I can take the song, hold it by its ends and tear it open, gaze through that dimension for a while, and sure enough, there I am, leaning against my bike in the nuclear sun.
Quitting the rolling blond fields, I pull my bike around the corner, droplets corner my mouth, Osdorperweg narrow, humbled by hooligans on stolen bicycles and sober Rembrandts driving lemons over limits. I coast behind the street kids as they veer, darting sidelong between imagined obstacles and knocking loudly, once, twice, against the bedroom window of our bed and breakfast, startling your body from between blankets into upright home-sickness. At the door, I lean the bike against the trash and damp wood. I attempt to take the key out of the tire lock but it has rusted shut in oxidized rot. All things are under the weight of some other thing. Even under the weight of a thousand carnivorous atmospheres, a rabbit carcass can wear that bedroom smile, given days.
Here's what I'm thinking as I unlock the door with our only key: pollen, golden hour, a softly strummed major seventh chord visits through the sliding door which has so far been only baptized in saline rains, (here's what's on my mind), past the TV reruns fast turning extradiegetic, past the damp flour smell of the standing water in the ill-designed bathroom, past the idea of stranded, my stomach bothers me to imagine a refrigerator stocked with Canadian foods, tupperware of salads-you-made, tupperware of leftovers-I-saved, ours, our space, our rent, taping magazine cut-outs to the wall that we find funny, our detritus, our bed for two, not this four-walled lover's hangover where polystyrene boards mask secret doors. I round the corner and see you in the bedroom still upright. I contract your homesickness. Is this the house where home happens? Of all places... Sit down beside you under the starchy clothes hanging from the ceiling, my head halfway up a pantleg, you smile from a distance of one thousand leagues, my heart is an isosceles triangle too sharp for my ribcage, it falls to the ground (again), politely bouncing once.
I just wanna feed you frites and mayo, y'know? Come get your frites and mayo before this all falls apart. Before we're two cramped seats into our fourteen hour calculated flight through nothing. Having solved nothing. Before we're back to not knowing where next to.
That's it. My roof. My rules. We're eating silt for dinner.
In ushering your literary counterpart from the word-organ (aware of having outstayed her welcome there, waiting for me, perplexed and in a state of some confusion being in danger of death by clockspin), I noted that she sprang to life fully-grown and mimicking, roughly, the extradiegetic past. She entered into this world on that first night by crying through the pillow to the other side, our side, over the causeway, past the band of bricklayers laying brick by moon and lamplight (though it is not required by law, it is considered good etiquette to wave while passing to receive the Causeway Nod), past the mechanisms of memory, arriving finally at the appropriate terminal. I noticed immediately no electricity; it was her half-ness, such which cannot last long outside of tasture or text. I got to work, bitter'd little with to keep you. Establishing electricity by the frication and fracturing of words starting with 'f' and 'sh' I was finally able to sustain her long enough to ask her questions. I came up against the obstacle of retrospection. I take the same words, mix and remix them, finding memories I never made. That is easy enough to explain. Time passes, memory mishandles itself, rewritten by iterative re-remembering, rendered more and more part of my own particular weather. She gave me summary answers, the circularity of which I anticipated fully, fast assuming my best “oh well” attitude. I withdrew to share the incandescent low-light with spiders. Ｙｏｕ ｆｕｃｋｅｄ ｕｐ， ｌｉｔｔｌｅ ｍａｎ， the rabbit said to me, my return ticket in hand, sheepish but severe, kicking me straight in the uncanny valley. Ｓｏｍｅ ｇｏｄｄａｍｎ ｓｈｉｄｉｏｔ．
faults and sins are pinned against the sky (vivisection)
hearing the song “Coming On The Hudson,” you decide it is the sound of a “familiar kiss becoming new again,” you bless Thelonious Monk
the unwanting (thiscomes in waves)
the abstraction of shivering
in the end, the girl is just a post script in the coroner's investigation
Even with both windows down, the heat in the car is unbearable. I park, notify you I'm here, get your stuff out of the back seat. You peek out from behind the screen door with a heap of my books and sweaters. Classic. I walk up to the third step, you look down at me. We are both wearing the white flag grin. Small talk. Familiar jokes. We both still laugh.
“The whole thing I said about not wanting to talk to you ever... I was being a little too harsh. It's not really what I mean. I just... I don't know. Had a bad day.”
“Yeah, we don't have to cut each other out completely, right? I'm sorry if what I said about growing apart sounded harsh.” I used to want to burn down that house on Osdorperweg for what it's done.
“No, it was fair and true.” Your hair is so long now.
“I just want to stay friends. You're good people.”
Once upon a time, I perceived the edge of sleep (I figured it out for all of us), there you were, your thigh over mine, the moon on your jawline, droop glisten lip shirt hiked up to nipples, I remember wanting nothing, pulling your shirt past your collarbone I'd have torn you to shreds, I'd have cut you to pieces, and laying my head on your breasts breathing words (that hallmark of given-ness), I would have woken you up, I would have
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