Cubop City Blues (2 page)

Seeing the elephants in death joined as they were in life, Skene so regretted his act that as atonement he joined the National Elephant Preservation Society. Through his activities in the society he met Miss Priscilla Winkley, board member and former president, who became his wife.

No courtship, no romance? Cornelia said, moving one of her knights and threatening my queen.

I got the queen out of harm's way and said there was, but it was irrelevant to the story. Cornelia gave me a stern look and said, How could romance be irrelevant?

On one of their trips to Africa they had a child and Skene became ill. Nevertheless, they lived happily, conjoined by his guilt and their interests, until, finally, he succumbed to his illness and died in his sleep. At the moment of his death, he dreamed he was shot by a hunter of humans while he copulated with an elephant cow who bore an uncanny resemblance to his wife.

How could a man have sex with such a large beast? Cornelia asked. Her voice had cracks in places but was wrapped in elegance. For some reason the thought occurred to me that she was a very lonely woman despite her many lovers.

It was a dream, I said. Dreams don't have logic.

Yes, they do. They may not be linear but they have logic.

A pygmy elephant, then. I was becoming annoyed by her criticisms. In truth, I had never seen a live elephant—only pictures in the encyclopedia and that stunning photograph in
Hunting in Africa
—at close range, so I had no sense of the true size of the animal. I continued. Wracked by grief, Miss Priscilla Gordon, née Winkley, moved to Calcutta and became a Hindu mystic and devotee of Ganesh.

Cornelia pursued my queen. She was relentless.

Is that your story? she asked.

Yes, I said, leaning over the board to see what she'd done.

There is no climax, no great revelation. A story is like love. It rises to a peak of intensity, then comes back down to a state of rest. You must give me more.

I had no idea what Cornelia meant, but in time I learned she was right. Once upon a time you didn't exist.

Mate in three moves.

Once upon a time someone tried to kill you.

A KNIFE ENTERING
THE BELLY

H
e hasn't known anything like it. There is, first of all, the quick movement of the arm toward his midsection and the flash of metal that protrudes from the balled-up fist. It is the knife blade, of course, and almost simultaneously he knows he is powerless to stop it. He hears an almost inaudible tear as the blade rips through the cotton shirt he's wearing, and then he feels it slice up into the belly through the three layers of skin and into the thoracic cavity. His instinctive reaction is to bend forward and stand on the tip of his toes to keep the blade from going farther. But it is too late for the maneuver. The knife is all the way to the handle, where it stays a moment, then withdraws through the peritoneum, the subcutaneous fat, the dermis, and the epidermis, leaving behind a space that is quickly filled with a burning sensation, like a hot fluid, like blood. There is no pain yet, just a sense of being violated and his head bursting with anger and in his mouth the salt of indignation. He raises his eyes to look at the man's face, but he has already turned away and is fleeing down the street. What? he thinks. What?

He starts walking in the direction of home, and after a few steps his legs grow heavy and unbalanced, his breathing short and insufficient. He doesn't fall so much as float himself down to the sidewalk and sits leaning against a newspaper box. There is a fire in his belly and every breath he takes feeds the flames. He unbuttons his shirt, which is damp and heavy with blood. Each button is an ordeal; each movement of his fingers as they push the buttons through the holes contains all of the pain he has felt in his life to that moment. The wound's small size surprises him, and even in the semidarkness of the city street he can see the blood puddling around the edges and a loop of blue intestine that is protruding through the opening. A wave of embarrassment comes over him and he pushes the intestine back into the stomach. It is not punctured and he is grateful for that. At the same time he thinks that if someone doesn't help him soon he will die, here on the dirty street, the only illumination the copper light at the corner, the only solace the fact that he is dying in the city he loves.

A figure walks by taking fast, loose steps. He mumbles something in the direction of the figure, but there is no response. After some time a couple stops and they bend over him. He can barely raise his eyelids over the balls of his eyes, and his lips and tongue are stuck together with a gummy substance that fills his mouth. The man looks into his face, which must be as pale as the moon right now, and says to the woman, Guy's on some heavy-duty shit. He takes her by the arm and they move quickly away.

He prepares himself to die by looking at the darkened liquor-store window in front of which he has fallen. In one corner of the display is a magnum bottle of
Veuve Clicquot, the champagne he once poured over Amanda while she lay in the bathtub. Amanda, the rat, whom he loved beyond expectation, who left him for a young thin boy with sad eyes and unwashed hair, whose absence surrounded him with the scent of solitude. What he wouldn't give to drink that champagne, to have that woman pink and naked before him!

CITY SONG

A
city is like a novel. It spreads outward from a starting point, which is where you happen to find yourself when the lights go on: a street late at night, a coffee shop where the night owls are fueling their insomnia, a park where you talk to a mockingbird and the mockingbird talks back, a bar where a man gets shot. Then the city, your city, moves in the direction that is most accessible, away from one moment to the next.

A valleyed city will spread through the valley floor until it runs out of room. It will creep up the hillsides, along natural or artificial terraces, creating tree-lined enclaves for the rich or favelas for the poor. A riparian city will grow along one bank of the river or away from it, depending on the lay. Occasionally it will jump across the water to the other shore, but only if there's a settlement already there and at least one bridge between them that allows for easy travel back and forth. If there is no bridge, one will eventually be built. Ferry travel is slow and boats are subject to the whims of water.

A port city will hug the port, then naturally flow away from it, either along the water's edge or in layers toward the interior, where the food-growing regions lie. In one city the center has moved as the city has grown, leaving behind a series of depressed neighborhoods that once were thriving, barren buildings, meager services, people chewing cud waiting for the machine to start again, and all but empty streets like a backwater. In another city the center stays put. A place like that is fickle and it is only a matter of time before decadence consumes it and all growth stops. That's when the populace begin to move away, in small groups, over time, either to another city where commerce still holds and money still flows, or into the country where they'll be able to relearn the techniques for planting that their families abandoned generations ago, grow their food, and avoid the defeat of a place that crumbles around them even as they try to keep it together, fixing this, patching that, shoring up a balcony, unclogging a sewer pipe.

Some cities live and some cities die; some grow over the ruins of themselves, bearing no relationship to the original other than a dim historical connection and a convenient geographical locus. Ancient and modern Athens. Ancient and modern Rome. Tenochtitlán and Mexico City. Constantinople and Istanbul. Some will disappear altogether, destroyed by war—Troy, Carthage—or by nature—Chichén Itzá, Palenque. All, however, are driven inexorably by chaos toward decay. On this decay and through it, people live and thrive and die.

Cubop City is all of the above. It is the Dutch and their goats, the English and their teas, Spaniards with their rotten stews, Jews and their lox, Russians and their vodka, Blacks and their kingdom in disguise, poets and plumbers living together, dancers and dentists, actors and accountants and acupuncturists. It is an island between two rivers, a garland around a bay, a glop of concrete on the sand. Cubop City is walking words and static silence and drums and saints and demons with penises like flaming hoses stalking the pretty girls by the school door. It is some skinny lady doing drugs in a bathroom downtown. It is the long nose of the marketplace and the short nose of the church. Cubop City rises out of the stone, rises out of the sea. It grows underground upside down and shoots a million needles into the rapturous sky. Cubop City is that sassy girl slithering onto you like a snake, the man who holds the devil in his hand. Watch his victim dropping to the ground. Watch the pool of blood. Cubop City is blood, a man in a blue bathrobe, a woman who talks to the dead, she knows too much, she loves too much, she dallies through trains and buses and garbage trucks. The killer killed, the wife be done, a man adrift in the sea, a man adrift in himself. The horn plays through the day, the drums at night. The island sinks into memory, memory into sand. Money like water, money like lead, wandering shadows, wandering blind. When baseballs fly out of the sky, when you find your mother crying, your mother gone, a field where your lover turns away, a building on fire, crumbling to dust. A palace of crystal, a Sepharad for the dead, a street that leads to a street that ends in the palace of lye. You go blind. Sun and moon. Mama, Mama. Cubop City. You go blind. Into the underworld, out of the light.

STORYTELLER

T
he years passed as imperceptibly as dream water. Cornelia stopped coming to the house. It was Mama's doing. She could have her affair with the perfume magnate but she wasn't about to let Papa have his, not in her house. Some things are not to be desecrated as crassly as that. There was no confrontation. One day Cornelia was there; one day she was not. Gone were the chess games. Gone were the quiet moments when we sat across from each other reading silently, gone her passion, barely contained within the trappings of her servitude. She was not beautiful, though I could easily imagine her slim and graceful when young. She was with us seven years. When my manhood began to blossom, currents of desire shot through my body and I fantasized about making love to Cornelia in a room overlooking one of the great European capitals where she'd lived.

She was the loneliest person I have ever known. If you were older, she said to me once, I would fall in love with you. I was shocked. Destitution drove her to passion. That's the way of Europeans. Nevertheless, I was entering the outer boroughs of adulthood and liked hearing that from Cornelia.

I wanted to respond that I didn't need to be older. I let my hand slip over the knuckles and tendons of her hand and let it rest there, until she pulled away and went off to do whatever chore needed doing. She stopped coming to the house soon after and was replaced by a nondescript woman who did her work with a minimum of efficiency and had no poetry to recite, no history to relate. I tried telling her my stories but she grew fidgety and anxious, wanting to get back to her work before the Mr. and Mrs. got home. I told the stories to myself hoping someday I would find someone like Cornelia. Sometimes I made believe I was a nobody living in the greatest city in the world; sometimes I made believe I was an aging professor alone in the city, a boy whose father played baseball with him, a lover of feet, a middle-aged man in love with a twenty-year-old woman, a trumpet player, a struggling writer; mostly I made believe I was myself. The world was made of stories.

Eventually my mother discovered that the new housekeeper had been stealing from us and let her go. They decided a man in his twenties can care for himself, even if he can't see beyond his nose, and they were right. I knew every inch of our apartment. Cornelia had taught me to cook and I was quite at home in the kitchen, able to prepare anything from a chocolate soufflé to a simple omelet, as long as I had the ingredients at hand. If a blind man can play the piano, he can be a good cook. Papa again called me a genius, a culinary phenomenon. He was easy with his words. Mama kept her comments in check, though I heard her once moan with pleasure when she tried my
risotto alla piemontese
.

Life went on in its quiet way, Papa with his students, Mama with her perfume magnate. They didn't entertain much, but when Papa's colleagues from school or Mama's coworkers came for dinner, I cooked
paprikás,
goulash, Dobos cakes, and other dishes Cornelia taught me. The guests marveled that I knew Hungarian cuisine, and I told them I had learned the recipes from an old Hungarian witch. It pleased my mother enormously to hear that. My father clenched his jaw. After my parents got sick, the visits stopped altogether and their friends sent flowers instead. The perfume magnate sent cologne, and the representative of the teacher's union sent a fruitcake on Christmas. Then the cakes stopped coming and all we received were Christmas cards, fewer and fewer every year as we failed to reciprocate and people crossed us off their lists. Eventually, it was just the three of us, marooned in the city of exile.

We lived in an old neighborhood in a prewar building where pieces of plaster fell off the apartment walls, exposing the lath and horsehair filler. Papa was forever calling the superintendent, who ignored the requests to fix the walls as a matter of course, though he once suggested we cover the holes with plastic sheeting, a suggestion Papa tried to implement, nailing the plastic onto the wall and causing more of the plaster to come off. When Mama came home, redolent of perfume and love, she became irate and went downstairs herself and confronted the super, who was, by that point in the day, as high on drugs and alcohol as a functional human being can get. The man went from mumbling incoherencies to complete sobriety after Mama was done with him. He came upstairs with a bucket of plaster and some chicken wire and fixed the holes but not before warning us that the whole building was crumbling.

Building's full of holes, he said. Housing department talking about condemning the property. I fix one hole today and tomorrow another one appears in the hallway. Like cancer.

It was a presage, but like all presages, it didn't feel like one. Just an offhand comment from a crazy, broken-down druggie. As the holes were fixed in the master bedroom, the hallway, and behind the settee in the dining room, the plaster crumbled in other parts of the house—the bathroom, the foyer, the inside of the closet. The superintendent took more drugs when he saw the futility of his work and began to hide from my parents, not answering his door for days at a time. The walls fell away. At dinner we discussed the possibility of moving, but Mama was a headstrong woman who held on to money as if it were a lifeline. In her mind it was the landlord's responsibility to fix the plaster somehow, get another super if need be. She'd start a petition among residents. She'd write a letter to the housing authority. She'd threaten to sue the management company. We were staying put no matter what. Papa got up from the table saying he did not feel well and went to bed.

That was the beginning. Every night after dinner he felt ill and retired early. Every morning he moaned and farted in the bathroom. This went on for two weeks until we found him retching and rolling on the bathroom floor and my mother told him he better get himself to the doctor. He said he couldn't do it by himself; he was in too much pain. So we went together to the emergency room where they gave him morphine and settled him down and did all the tests they had to do. The results came back positive for stomach cancer, incurable since it had metastasized to his intestines. Little to be done but cut away, stuff him full of chemo, and extend his life beyond the six months the oncologist predicted.

Al carajo, Papa said, and after sending the doctors to the deepest pit of hell, he took to bed to wait for his spirit to leave him. Mama, who had been the picture of health in the family to this point, robust in the morning, resplendent in the evening after her sessions with the magnate, took ill, too. It started with a small persistent cough that grew in intensity and kept us awake through the night. The blood came eventually, first in sputa, then in long slivers mixed with her saliva. Back to the doctors again, different ones this time, who pointed to X-rays of her lungs riddled with small white spots—too many tumors to cut out. Mama's verdict was three months. As soon as she heard, she quit her job and went to bed next to Papa, and they both waited for death.

Things happen in threes, people say. We lived in the same space, ate the same food, drank the same water, breathed the same air. I began to feel pain in odd parts of my body. One day it would be the arch of my foot, the next my left arm or my back or deep inside my brain. The pains subsided in a few days and I was left wondering when my time would come, tomorrow, next month, twenty years? It was not something I could tolerate for very long—sitting around waiting, feeding the two death birds, washing and tending to them. The apartment kept falling down around us. Every day there was another hole in the wall, more dust, more plaster on the floor. Once, as I felt my way down the hall toward my parents' bedroom, I touched one of the holes. The different textures brought me to such feelings that I shook uncontrollably and had to use all of my willpower to keep from collapsing. When I recovered I realized I'd come in my pants, without even touching myself, the way I often did while sleeping. I heard my parents calling, but I turned into the bathroom instead, where I washed myself, splashed water on my face, and waited until I could breathe normally again. Then I went into the room and told them the knifing story. I didn't know what else to do.

When I was finished, I noticed Mama's breathing was calmer and Papa's gases had subsided. They asked me what the story meant and I told them I didn't know. It's just a story, I said. Just a story? Papa said. I didn't know how to respond. He embarrassed me. I hadn't yet learned to keep the lion of criticism at bay.

Yes, a little moment, I said.

Not so little, Mama said faintly in a voice that was soft, just this side of tender, not at all like her voice when she came home from the perfume magnate. The man is dying, like we are, except he's on the street.

I think he'll survive, I said.

As if you had any say in the matter, Papa said.

I believe I do. I put him there on that stretch of sidewalk, just as that criminal was walking by intent on doing meanness.

Who was that criminal?

I have no idea. Came out of nowhere.

It was true. I had made up the man and the situation as I sat before my parents in a narrative trance, making believe I was telling Cornelia the story while I waited for her to move a chess piece.

Well, I need to know who he was, Mama piped in. I could hear tiny wheezes punctuating her words.

Give me some time. I'll tell you another story tomorrow.

Then they both grew quiet. Mama turned to look out the window at the mottled sky. Papa lay with his eyes closed, snoozing. And then I understood what would happen if I told them a story, or part of a story, every day. It wasn't a cure for their maladies but a way of existing, going from story to story as Cornelia went from city to city as her condition dictated and her needs allowed. In Paris she was a femme fatale. In Havana she was an exotic European. In Cubop City she was a servant, a lover of husbands and poetry. One more day taken from death was one more day of memory, of staying alive.

I made believe I could see, I made believe I was a character in the stories. I made believe I had a life inside the fiction, that I could love and be afraid and tell stories and be wounded and married and divorced and live alongside the characters I created. And that it was all true.