09.14.04

Here's a little something that's the result of an exercise. You take ten nouns out of a box, and weave them into a piece. Here's what happened:

Simon stared at the record at the bottom of the torn cardboard box.

A dark blue, round, paper label with oxidized gold ink peeled from the center of the heavy celluloid disk. Tilting the album against the dim light in the attic, he made out the words: Enrico Caruso. Pagliacci. RCA Victor. He wondered what it sounded like. The old Victrola was long gone. The morning glory horn had been tossed in the junk heap years ago.

When Simon was a boy, the Victrola sat in Poppi and Nana�s parlor in Glens Falls, New York. On family visits, he woke to the ratcheting of Poppi winding the machine. For a few seconds the scrape of the needle against the record, the ghost of music to come, filled the air. Then the tinny sound of classical music played by long-dead musicians crawled from the plastic and fell from the morning glory horn .

When Nana died, she died in the garden. She fell into the lavender that she and Poppi planted the day they married. By the time Simon got there, a few hours after Poppi called, all the plants were ripped out of the earth.

When they went to the funeral home, Poppi clutched a Koran in his hands.

The funeral director met them in a darkened office. Yellowed shades hid the summer sun. Simon shivered. The air in the office was cold.

Poppi seemed shrunken in the darkness of the funeral director�s office. His skin hung from birdish bones. The dark green leather wing chair swallowed him. Poppi held the Koran as if he didn�t know he carried it.

After they shook the director�s too-dry hand, they walked into the heat. Simon wiped the sincerity from his and his grandfather�s palms with a linen handkerchief.

Simon moved in with Poppi three years after Nana�s funeral.

Those three years hadn�t been kind to Simon. He�d ruined a good thing with a woman by being too grasping and needy. His job shriveled up and blew away. Before he moved back in with Poppi, he sold his last, most valuable, possession; a Japanese tokonoma scroll from the Meiji period. He lived in his battered, hand-me-down, beige 1972 Datsun 510 sedan.

One night, when the car still ran and Simon was still running, he stopped on the bridge from Arkansas to Memphis, Tennessee. To his right, the dark earth of Arkansas. To his left, the pink/brown glow of Memphis. In front of him the oil-black water of the Mississippi flowed to New Orleans and the Gulf.

Simon stared into the water for a long time. In between states, he felt jumbled. Child, adult. Arkansas, Tennessee. Hope, despair. Home or another grey man wandering the edge of life.

He didn�t want to jump.

But if he did, he thought he might swoop low over the water. He�d skim the wet tips of lazy ripples, then he�d go south, far from his decayed life. He�d fly past levees and breaks, past N�awlins, to the Gulf, and out to open waters.

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