Gibraltar - NYC entry

Like most identical twins, my brother and I were indistinguishable from one another to most people. We weren’t the kinds of twins who harbored any unique moles or tics or cowlicks that would, to the discerning eye, separate us one from the other. On every square inch of our bodies, we were exactly alike, two people walking the earth who seemed in every hop, slurp, action or speech, to be the same. Even when we got into trouble, the trouble was times two and the punishments were meted out in equal harsh chunks. Our Bar mitzvahs were even held in unison, our passage from boys to men held side-by-side and firmly cementing in our minds that we were going to travel our lives closer to one another than most people could imagine or desire.

The only thing different about us was the titanium rod inserted into Oscar’s ankle when we were twelve. He sustained a nearly identical injury to me during a particularly vicious skiing accident, an impromptu downhill race we engaged in during a ski trip in Zermatt.

Even the scar left visible on his ankle we shared, but when the doctors went into my ankle they determined I didn’t need the permanent assistance of a metal rod to help strengthen my joint. The scar on the insides of our left ankles was shaped like a fingernail moon. Try as we might, we couldn’t ditch our identicalness.

That is, until we were eighteen and Oscar met Luisa.

We’d been apprenticing on a research vessel, the Fathom, to learn the trade of what most people call treasure hunting but was known in the trade as deep sea salvage. My father knew the captain, John Angeletti, and convinced him to take Oscar and me along with him one summer. The captain’s daughter, Luisa, had practically grown up on the ship and become a beautiful diversion for us that summer.

It took Luisa five or six weeks for her to be able to even tell which one of us had snuck into her cabin and crawled under her sheets. When she was finally able to distinguish Oscar and me from each other, she sat us both down and told us it was Oscar she wanted.

We were both smitten as lovesick children but for the first time in our lives, Oscar and I had one thing different about us. Over the next five years, Oscar and I worked on the vessel, but Oscar was made the heir apparent to its ownership.

Luisa and Oscar were married at sea on our fifth summer on the boat and I became a valued, if not heired, member of the crew.

Captain Angelotti treated us both with equal respect and responsibility – after all, even our boat skills were perfectly comparable – but Luisa’s choice of Oscar as her lover and companion was enough to give him just a tad more security.

Before launching for our sixth summer, a year after Oscar and Luisa were married, Captain Angelotti brought the whole crew together for our standard pre-salvage conference and pep talk. More than once, our salvage operations were conducted in tricky weather and conditions that only people addicted to uncovering history would bother with. Captain Angelotti’s boundless energy and enthusiasm was enough to palliate any amount of trepidation we had.

He gave us the usual spiel he did before each voyage because there was always at least one person on the crew who was new and hadn’t heard the Captain discuss the vastness of treasures in the waters of the world. According to the UN, there are more than 3 million shipwrecks on the ocean floors of the world. Whenever the Captain repeated this number, it amazed even the most jaded of his crew. At least we knew we’d never be out of work and could always dream we’d find something magical.

“This year,” he said, “is going to be a special year. I was privy to information about what could be the most valuable shipwreck the world has ever had and one which has remained secret.”

He’d told a version of this story each summer, speaking in terms that would make the most experienced of salvagers salivate. I nudged Luisa who was sitting next to me and asked her if she knew what he was talking about.

“He’s kept it secret even from me,” she said.

“Last year,” the Captain continued, “some historians discovered papers that have brought to light a very interesting twist in the sinking of the HMS Sussex.”

The Sussex was a known shipwreck, but no more interesting for salvagers than any other of the hundreds which we’d studied. It was simply a Royal Navy ship that had sunk in along the Spanish coast on its way to the Mediterranean in 1694 and one which interested historians more than it did salvagers. The captain’s body washed up clad only in a nightshirt on the shores of Gibraltar.

“Apparently,” he said, “the Sussex was on a secret mission. Captain Wheeler was carrying 1 million pounds sterling to deliver to the Duke of Savoy, to keep him from falling to French bribes. Today, that booty, all those silver and gold coins are worth more than a billion dollars.”

We could hear the collective gasp in the room and then childlike tittering among the crew.

Most of the rest of his speech was lost on us as we talked amongst ourselves. He adjourned the meeting and told us all we’d sail in two days.

Oscar, Luisa and I went to the local pub at the marina where we were docked and spent the night reveling in the possibilities of our next adventure.

“You and Luisa are going to be rich beyond your dreams. Beyond mine. Beyond anyone’s,” I said.

Oscar said, “Brother, whatever’s mine is yours. You know that.”

Luisa, as she usually did, bristled when I brought up the fact that her choice of Oscar had inexorably changed the course of my life. After all, because they were married, Luisa and Oscar became the beneficiaries of anything that Captain Angelotti and the Fathom found at sea.

Oscar squeezed my shoulder, knowing full well how our lives had taken different roads. But I believed in his reassuring manner and put it to rest for that night.

We drank enough that night to carry us into a reverie about our impending trip that we’d never had before. The three of us stumbled back to the ship and passed out in our cabins, dreaming of the Sussex’s treasure off the Spanish coast.

The next day, last minute preparations were made with more vigor and energy than I could recall, smiles on everyone’s faces. Captain Angelotti even treated the entire crew to a gluttonous dinner where pats on the back and hugs were in full sight. We all could taste the possibilities though we knew full well how difficult this salvage would be.

The sail across the Atlantic was calm, uneventful, and filled with energy. For three weeks, we studied maps of the wreck, made specific plans for the salvage and read about the history of the Sussex. Captain Angelotti had created in every one of the crew a previously unknown interest in the history of shipwrecks of that region and time and our dinner conversations veered more frequently to Admiral Wheeler and his unfortunate voyage three hundred years before.

On the 22nd day after we left the eastern coast of the United States, we anchored above what was the site of the HMS Essex. Captain Angelotti gave us his final pre-scavenge pep talk.

“I know this may be the most exciting excavation of your lives. It certainly is mine. But remember, we’re going to be out here for the better part of six months working, so whenever anyone needs to take a break and visit Gibraltar via the transit vessel, just let me know. Or my first mate, here, Don.” The Captain put his arm around Don and said, “To a successful rebirth of the HMS Essex.”

After the anchoring and initial lowering of our navigation sub, the electronic eyes for the crew, a few of us gathered around the video feed to await the first images of the Essex. Through the murky water, we spied the ship that had lain on under a thousand meters of water for four centuries. We all applauded and then set in to guide the sub around the wreck to see how we’d begin the excavation.

That first day was a day of meticulous planning on how we’d raise the ship, piece by piece, to the surface and into the air for transfer to our warehouse on land to go through the wreck’s treasures. At the end of the day it felt like we’d already been there working for months because of what we knew lay ahead of us, the sweat and hard work we’d endure. We ended the day on the deck, Oscar, Luisa, Captain Angelotti and I sharing two bottles of Spanish wine.

When we were nearly finished with the second bottle, we noticed the weather was becoming worse, a storm coming upon us. Mostly clear weather had been on the horizon so the quick turn to drizzle surprised us all.

Don came up from below deck and consulted with Captain Angelotti. After Don returned below deck, the Captain told us we’d be in for a surprise levante, the strong easterly wind that in this part of the world could appear in an instant and cause havoc to even the most sturdy of ships. It was a levante, in fact, that had originally downed the Essex long ago.

Within perhaps ten minutes the Fathom was in the middle of a severe levanter and rainstorm that turned what was a beautiful day into a frightening night. As the four of us were making our way gingerly along the rails to find our way below deck, the Fathom lurched heavily and I slid headfirst across the slick deck.

I awoke in my cabin, my vision blurred and my head a knot of pain. Two people were at my bedside and in a few minutes I could tell it was Don and the ship’s medic.

“You’re awake, son,” Don said.

I struggled for words.

“The storm. What happened?” I asked.

The medic had his hand around my wrist to check my pulse. “You were knocked unconscious. You’ve been out for five days.”

“My brother, Luisa, the Captain,” I said.

Don waved the medic away and he left my cabin.

“Oscar, this is difficult, but you’ve got to know,” Don said. “The three of them were washed overboard that night. It took us two days to find their bodies.”

My memory was absent. The last thing I recalled was sliding uncontrollably across the wet deck. And why was Don calling me Oscar. In my haze I began to be unsure of my own identity.

Don continued, “The Fathom was severely damaged. The storm got so bad they couldn’t even send and boats to assist us.”

“Where is my brother?” I asked.

“Oscar, we lost all power to the refrigeration systems. There was nothing else we could but cremate them and give them a proper burial at sea.”

I remembered Captain Angelotti once telling us that in the absolute worst case and in order to spare the rest of the crew the possibility of disease, a person who died at sea might have to be put into the ‘crematorium’ built into the Fathom. Though referred to as the crematorium, it was actually a large oven used to help bake off debris from wrecks we pulled up. The morbid truth was that it was big enough for a body.

I began to weep thinking I’d lost the person with whom I’d entered life with. The confusion was overwhelming. And then I thought what would happen to the Fathom.

Don said, “The captain and Luisa we buried at sea. Their ashes are where they would want them to be. Back to the ocean. Your brother’s ashes are in a makeshift urn, secured on the main deck.”

I lifted myself up so I was sitting on the bed.

“Will you please bring the urn to me, Don?”

He left me alone there, the loneliest I’ve ever felt since the day Oscar and I were separated for a mere three hours when we were five years old. I had no idea how life would even be possible without him, without the possibility of working with him and Luisa on the Fathom once the Captain retired and passed it onto them. I had no claim to it all.

As I was weeping into my hands, Don brought the urn in. My parents would never understand the cremation. Our faith forbade it, but what to do.

“We saved the titanium pin. We had no idea your brother had one, but the melting point of titanium is about 1500 degrees higher than what we must use to dispose of a body in a crematorium. I thought it might be too morbid, but I assumed you’d want to keep it with his ashes. When we finally are able to dock in Gibraltar, your parents will be there. They’ve been notified of the tragedy and are going to pick up you and his ashes. I’ll leave you alone now. I’m so terribly sorry, Oscar.”

As Don left, maybe because of my muddled thoughts, maybe because I missed Oscar so much, I made the decision I had to and the one which I’ve never regretted. It had to be done to save the Fathom. It had to be done to honor Oscar, Luisa and the Captain. It had to be done to preserve the ongoing work that the Fathom and her crew had to do.

I took the urn under my arm and made my way to the deck. The day was so still the water looked like a sheet of blue glass. I said a prayer for the three of them and unscrewed the lid to the urn. I poured my brother’s ashes over the side of the boat and watched, as if in slow motion, the titanium rod implanted in his ankle when we were twelve, the only difference between us that metal hunk, plummeted into the ocean with a visible but inaudible splash and sank, I hoped, to the very bottom of the ocean near the Essex. I wished as hard as I’ve ever wished for anything in my life that by taking my brother’s place in this life, I was doing the honorable thing.

I buried both of us that day and often think of Oscar’s ashes in the ocean and me, Oliver, lost to my parents that day too, thought they’d never be fully aware of what had really happened. The lie was written in water that day and somewhere in the limbo of two lives taken much too early, I wonder some days who I really am.

Old Scars

When I wake up from a regular night’s sleep, my body shows proof of the injuries I suffer in my dreams. Usually I ease back into this world with only a mild puncture, an odd scratch on my belly, a black eye from a bully’s punch. But tonight I’d woken up to my wife, Mary, trying her best to stop my flailing. Apparently, I’d been yelling, ‘No more buttons, no more buttons.’ In the scuffle, I walloped Mary square in the jaw. When she knew my dream was over, she said, “Okay, lights on. Let’s see what mess you’ve gotten yourself into tonight.” The tail end of the dream still in my mind’s eye, I said, “My wrists.” In the nightmare, I was a sideshow attraction at a weird circus, hands bound behind me, being force-fed the contents of an ancient sewing box, overflowing with so many buttons it looked like the trunk of a shipwreck on the ocean floor. She flipped the light on, I held up my hands and we gazed at the rope burns – crimson evidence of my peculiar problem. She massaged her chin. "I'm getting ice," she said. "Care to join me?"

We'd gotten married on the fly in Santa Fe ten years before. I was at a sleep clinic in New Mexico in a desperate last attempt to find a cure for my dream oddity. Mary was teaching yoga as part of their holistic healing program. When I saw her Audrey Hepburn body bend into a tight little comma, I was in love. It took me an entire week to tell her why I was there, about the abnormality I'd been keeping mostly to myself my whole life. I asked her on a date the day I left clinic. After a puzzling look I was sure would be yet another woman’s brush-off, then a hesitant kiss she offered me, we spent a week losing ourselves in the New Mexican desert in the Jeep I’d outfitted with camping supplies. We got hitched at a chapel outside Santa Fe on our way back into town and Mary dropped off her notice at the sleep clinic. She moved back to Flagstaff with me and my dreams thinned out to maybe one a month. More importantly, the serious injuries fizzled into sore toes, hangnails, fat lips. Nothing else had worked for long – not pills, psychotherapy, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, not even, once, the parlor trick planting of a post-hypnotic suggestion. Eventually, my dreams would return and with them, the scars that peppered my body. But Mary’s presence in my life had worked like a magic elixir, until just recently.

For the past year of our marriage, the dreams crept back into my head, into our lives, with a fury. The only time Mary slept in the same bed as me anymore was when we’d made love and afterward held one another tightly, a quiet wish for the injuries to stop tying knots in whatever last thready bond remained between us.

In the kitchen, I rinsed my wrists off under some warm water until only faint pink bracelets remained. I pulled some ice out of the freezer, put it in the center of a dish towel and drew the four corners together. The knot on Mary's chin had grown in just a few minutes to the size of a walnut. I pressed the towel to her chin and pulled her to me, the ice between her face and my chest. I told myself the drips of water I felt on my toes was only the ice melting.

The Answer to Every Question

At fifteen: extraordinarily gifted computer programmer. Twenty: principal owner of wildly over-inflated tech start-up. Twenty-five: last remaining passenger on said start-up, now sunken ship. Twenty-six: greenhorn window washer with a few long months of experience. Twenty-seventh birthday in only one day - what was the next rung down on this crazy ladder?

This was the monologue running through Henry's head as he cleaned the café window. He looked at himself in the clear glass, wondered how long it would be before the face staring back would even fake a smile.

Beyond his reflection, in the otherwise empty café, a woman in a blue hat and long yellow coat read the Sunday Trib. She didn’t skip around, like Henry did, but started at page one, flipped them methodically, didn’t linger. The way her finger crisscrossed the columns made it seem like the news held the answer to every question in the city that afternoon. When she got almost all the way through, she pulled a pen from her purse and marked the bottom of a page. She recapped the pen and finished her coffee. She pulled a tiny book from her purse, opened it, crinkled her nose, gathered her things, then left the café, her newspaper still on the table.

Henry set his squeegee against the window, walked in and sat at the woman's table. He opened the paper and looked for the page she'd marked. She had circled a sentence in an obituary: “Benjamin Swenk was, until his passing Thursday, an avid ebberman who enjoyed his hobby under approximately two-thousand bridges in his 79 years." Henry walked to the counter and told the mustachioed man he'd be back in a minute to fetch his supplies out front. "Don't let anybody at them," he said, over his shoulder. "They're the tools of my magical trade," he said and laughed.

When Henry stepped onto the street, he looked left, then right, and at the end of the block saw a yellow blur round the corner. He ran to the corner, looked down the street and saw the woman at the top of the steps entering the neighborhood library. He followed her in, hiding himself unconvincingly behind columns and shelves. She stood in front of a cinder-block thick dictionary on a lazy susan, spun it in her direction and found what she was looking for in the first three inches. She jotted something down in a little notebook she pulled from her coat pocket and turned to leave.

Henry walked up to her and said, "You'll have to excuse me. I just saw you in the cafe. I'm not crazy. I'm just irresistibly curious why you circled that sentence."

She looked at him for enough awkward moments that Henry felt the hot instasweat of a full head blush, and said, "Words."

"Words?" he asked.

"I look for a word I’ve never heard of in the paper every day, then take a walk through the city to the retirement home my mother is in. Ebberman wasn't in my little dictionary. During the walk I make up a story using that word, at least part of a story. My life isn't interesting enough to talk about, and mother always hopes her daughter is doing something interesting. Today I'll tell her I've just started dating an ebberman, a man who fishes under bridges named Benjamin Swenk."

The woman in the yellow coat and blue hat left the library and Henry returned to the cafe. He looked at himself in the clear window, smiled and said Happy Birthday, Henry.

a new word

sourhours (pl n) (slang for PATRIOT Act addendum FUNTIME provision - Freedom Unapologetically Needs To Impose Maximum Exasperation)

The time before a flight departure that US authorities now require passengers to be at an airport in order to allow enough time for mandatory curbside, ticket-counter, food court, security gate and preboard full body scans and/or strip searches; domestic - 3 hours, international - 6 hours. (This service is assessed a ‘TSA convenience fee’ of twenty-five percent of ticket price.)

Harry’s average workweek as a hotel industry consultant has gone from 50 hours to almost 90 since they introduced sourhours.

The Nurse

The nurse left work at five o'clock in the morning.

At 4:55 he'd removed from his locker the photo, some extra scrubs, his razor, a tattered swatch of blue towel, the unread sports pages from yesterday’s Tribune, put everything in his backpack, and left the combination lock unlatched on the shelf inside.

Five minutes before, he'd been standing in front of the open locker for so long his feet had fallen asleep, standing there looking at the photo taped inside the door: a small boy on his father's shoulders in front of Wrigley Field, long before the rooftop seats appeared outside the stadium.

An hour before opening the locker, the nurse smoked a bummed cigarette—his first in ten years—on the roof of the hospital, smoked it hard, down to the filter and flicked it away, watching the cherry drop four, five, six floors, mingling with the falling snowflakes and then sputtering out on a patch of yet unmuddied snow on the sidewalk.

The four hours before that smoke break delivered more wretched injuries than the nurse had seen in years. Bones crushed so completely their flaky pieces could have been emptied into a spice jar. Wounds deep enough to hide three baseballs in. Eyes in jars, in jars for god's sake, eyes that had only a day before witnessed weddings or homemade pies or a daughter's first snowman, carrot nose askew.

Sixteen hours before five A.M., when he started his shift at the hospital that day, the nurse stood at the bedside of an unconscious woman admitted moments before. For the only time in all his years at county, he felt bile back up in his throat after he lifted her dressing and, where her hand once was, a festering stump wiggled and stank.

Twenty-two hours before five in the morning, when he went home to sleep for a few hours before the third double of the week, the nurse listened to the message on his answering machine for the thirtieth or fiftieth or hundredth time. He'd disconnected the machine from the phone months before, after the funerals, so there was no chance it would be recorded over. Dad, we're going to state. State! We’ll be home soon.

Twenty years before he left work at five A.M., he went home with a woman – soon she’d be his wife – both drunk, yet unnamed to each other. The nurse made love to her, then took a shower and used her frilly blue towel, the one she’d never forget to pack no matter how many moves they made. When he lifted it to his nose, he was delivered instantly to the laundromat where his father would show him how to do laundry for free, slipping a quarter with a drilled hole and floss attached into the slot and yanking it out just before the machine forever kept it. We win again, son. We win again. This game, better than any arcade or fair had ever offered, is what the nurse remembered as he stood in the tub, pressing the towel into his face.

Thirty years before he left work at five o'clock in the morning for the last time, thirty years before he wrapped a scarf around his face against the wind, thirty years before he walked home again, thirty years before all this the nurse didn't cry when he threw a handful of dirt into the cold hole where his daddy lay, but he could, both then and now, hear each snowflake break apart as it hit the ground.

Departures

The Wave, 1898

Roderick O'Conor

News of the successful voyage reached us three months after their landing. Sofia scribbled the letter in her little hand, at the ‘lovely, welcoming, odiferous harbor of New York, America,’ on the first day of the new year. The ink on the letter was as dark as the March waves. I walked to the edge of the cliff and stared over the rolling water in her general direction. O’er the caps of the waves I saw the shadow of her lips.

I prayed a short one for a safe journey, the only prayer I’d uttered since Sofia and her sister left to settle us in with her distant aunt. How would those Americans take to having me show up with a faded picture of their village relative, a girl from the side of the family only God believed was worth redeeming. So we decided two warm women’s faces would be more convincing then the hardened hands of a man they didn’t know. ‘They’ll take us in, Moishe—how could they turn blood away,’ Sofia whispered in my ear on the dock when she departed.

The boys came running over the field so fast they could have jumped off the cliff and landed right in their mother’s arms. ‘Daddy, it’s time to go.’ I held them each up to the far horizon and they waved feverishly at the fading but not forgotten image of their mother.

South of Jupiter

‘I brought you a cake. Lemon-apple.’

‘Now how would you know I liked lemon-apple, Colette.’

‘Once, I think it was a Friday route, you yelled it out the door just before it shut.’

‘I remember that. I was flirting with a woman who’d just gotten a job in Cakery Bakery. She never rode my bus again. Maybe this dirty old man scared her away.’

‘Robert, you couldn’t scare away the most timid child. Cakery shut down recently. I think your object of flirtation just moved on. Do you want me to cut you a little piece?’

‘It’ll be hard to eat while I’m driving but I can’t resist. Give me a one-bit sliver.’

‘The last time I baked a cake was with my mom and my little sister. Two or three years ago when I went home on a summer break. Here you go.’

‘Tart. Tart is perfect. Estelle never made them tart enough. Rest her soul. I suppose because when she did, no one else wanted any and I’d eat the whole thing on the first nite, sneaking out of the bedroom while she was sleeping. But why today?’

‘I’m moving away and I think I’ve seen you more often than I see my friends or family. Five days a week for almost four years. Nearly a thousand times you’ve graciously chauffeured me on your lovely city bus.’

‘Tired of the Phoenix heat? Or perhaps it’s a boy somewhere far away.’

‘I love the heat. Especially when I get in here in the afternoon. It feels good the a/c after throwing pots all day in that overheated building. I love the heat when I get a break from it.’

‘Next stop, 48th St. The bell’s not working today so we’re doing this old-fashioned.’

‘My god, this cake is tart. My face feels like it’s getting sucked from the inside.’

‘How I’ll miss you, Colette. It’s not much of a life but a few regular faces make the days go by quicker. Cut me another slice, honey.’

‘Have you ever taken a day off, Robert? I mean other than Christmas or Thanksgiving?’

‘Not since Estelle passed. I never found a reason to go anywhere without her. She’s the one who’d lay out the plans for a perfect trip. I don’t know what museums to see or the best lake to camp near. I always let her do those things. It was enough for me just to be by her side.’

‘Here’s another slice.’

‘If you’re not careful, we’re going to polish off the whole thing before I let you off at your stop.’

‘She’s a potter, too.’

‘Sorry?’

‘We met at a local arts fair. She makes the most exquisite pieces.’

‘Aha.’

‘Santa Fe.’

‘Well that’s not so far away.’

‘It might as well be Jupiter.’

‘My parents would kill me. I never said a word. Jesus, I’m supposed to bear a dozen children with a responsible man and give them little ones to buy shit for. Dad’s a Catholic and Mom’s a Mormon—lapsed, but still. She expects me to shoot them out like I’m a carnival show.’

‘You couldn’t tell them?’

‘Well, I could say the words. Behind someone who will protect me from their barrage of accusations and incriminations. I mean, my mother and father never even held hands in public.’

‘I don’t trust people who don’t hold hands.’

‘I mean, they’re not nasty people. But this. No.’

‘If they love you, they’ll deal with it, honey.’

‘I’ll tell my sister first, bounce it off her. Her back is tattooed. With a tribal design. She refuses all beach trips with my parents.’

‘Sisters have a way of sharing information with their parents better when they’re in the room together, some kind of team. Strength.’

‘I should go home first. I haven’t seen my little sis since that summer. Just got too busy. My stop’s coming up. Here’s the rest of the cake.’

‘I see the door open but you’re not moving, Colette. How about you take another loop with me. Keep this cake on your lap. We’ll finish it together.’

‘Maybe I’ll just stay in Phoenix forever and you could drive me around and we’ll eat cake all day, every day, for the next million years.’

‘I’ll get fat, you’ll get diabetes and eventually we’ll run out of gas.’

A Homecoming

The Volunteers, 1860

Frederick Daniel Hardy

The fear of impropriety precluded me from stealing Walter away to myself that afternoon. He’d been in Crimea for nearly a year and the children pined for Daddy to show them again his expertise in knocking down all the skittles with a single toss of the cheese. I simply wanted to look into his eyes and see if the war remained.

The last of the money I’d saved in the tin went to the drum, which all six used with varying degrees of proficiency.

Jane seemed to be the natural player and led her eldest brother in a miniature march which made us all proud of Walter’s service to the crown.

The children, so admiring of Walter’s devotion to the Guards, took it upon themselves to assemble as an orchestra and dancers of a welcoming home committee.

Our youngest, Johnny, tugged at his buttons as if he knew this was the first, maybe last, time he’d see his father. The boy came into the world with his father abroad.

Walter returned to Crimea and suffered the greatest indignity of all for a soldier, dying not on the battlefield but en route under the weight of a horse gone lame.

His last night bed whispers echo in my ear like shattered wind.

News of his death didn’t reach us for three weeks. The drum goes unplayed now.

I Name Everything Mary

The old metal bowl I’d make spinach salad in and put between us on the floor, a fork, Mary too, for you and a fork for me.

The panties I stole from you when you said, when I knew but wouldn’t admit, that we were through – I didn’t intend to steal them but after picking the dirty, sex-smelling cotton underpants off the floor and wiping my tears in them, on your bed all morning til my eyes were empty, I knew they’d be the easiest thing for me to stuff in my pocket and carry with me forever. I have.

The key to my apartment, the key you said would prove I trusted you, the key I handed to you hesitantly, the first key to anything I shared with anyone, the key you used to ditch your office hours and come take a nap while I was at work, the key you sent back to me, without a note. I named it Mary, too.

I named and name everything Mary. Mary was my mournful mantra in those years after you left. They considered me crazy, but no. I named everything Mary just to have the right to let your name blow across my lips to prove I was still alive.

I named the train in Vienna Westbanhof Mary. The conductor quickly tired of my moaning and shook his head.

Do you remember the way you looked when you were on the platform, after sealing me in the train, a fresh camera in your hand, snapping away like you were a child, telling me it would all be okay, smiling that wet, delicious smile I wanted to kiss one last time. Of course you don’t? But I remember the way I looked. I saw myself in the dusty window. I looked through the reflection to you with the grief of the condemned, I heaved my breath in and out, no longer something out of my control and how I wanted to stop breathing.

But instead, I named everything Mary. Cats, trees, glasses of tea, houses, mountains, corns on my aching feet, puddles of mud after a storm and even the pen I’m writing this with.

I name everything Mary and nothing, Mary, nothing speaks back to me.

Hangman

I’d avoided needles since I was six. The doctor jabbed one in my ass and I cried. The last tears I shed.

The woman behind the counter looked up from behind her veil of tattoos. She might have had a beautiful face. I couldn't help but stare at the third eye inked perfectly between where her eyebrows once grew.

“Are you eighteen?” she asked.

“Double that,” I said, smiled.

“Fill this out,” she said, slid me a form, then resumed slipping a tongue stud between her lips from corner to corner of her mouth, a metronome to calm my heart.

“You’ve never been inked,” she asked, stated.

“No,” I said.

“The owner just got born again. He doesn’t do vulgar or tits anymore.”

“That’s okay,” I said and filled out the short form. “My mother raised a good boy. Or so she thought.”

The girl looked at the form.

“Okay, Warren,” she said, snapped her gum. “You go in there,” pointed with her nose to the back room, “and wait for Henry. He’ll ask you what you want, draw it out on you, then go to town.” She smiled wide when she said those last three words.

Henry came in ten minutes later.

“Simple or complicated?” he asked. A crucifix the size of sink plumbing dangled around his neck.

“Simple. You know the hangman game?” I asked

He looked at me, puzzled. “Like the game you play to guess words, hang the man when you don’t get it?”

“That’s what I want, right here on my forearm.”

“What about the spaces for all the letters,” he said. “I mean, how do you know what the length of the words is gonna be?”

“I don’t,” I said. “I’ll draw those on every day. I just have a lot of time to play where I’m going.”

“How long?”

Dondurma

I cut the dondurma into little cubes with one of my father’s hundred or thousand folding knives he’d collected his whole life and placed into a gargantuan toolbox labeled, in perfectly aligned spike tape, FERHAT’S KNIFE COLLECTION.

This was the only thing I wanted, this filled toolbox, not his threadbare old Turkish clothes, not his diary, filled page-edge to page-edge from the very top to the very bottom, with his imperfectly phrased English musings on American non-culture.

Popping a hunk of the dondurma into my mouth, letting the orchid flavor roll around and melt a little, I wondered if people in Ankara would think it was weird that we ate our iced cream with a spoon, sometimes even with a little flimsy wooden stick, sometimes even from a truck with bells.

Once he said, ‘If these, ahem, actors, could have witnessed the spectacles my cousins and I made in the village, they would jump off the stage right now and beg Ferhat to teach them how a story is properly conducted, movingly portrayed.’ This was off-off-off Broadway, one summer night, during a particularly ill-attended opening night of, well, what, I can’t remember. That day, he’d been patching holes in the theater curtains, spiking tape down for set placement according to the director’s notes, oiling the hinges of the stage trap door, sweeping meticulously every inch of the auditorium, even sewing, for the leading lady, a hole burned in her costume with a cigarette cherry just before showtime. I’d been lurking in the corners, watching my father talk to her. It was the only time I ever saw my father smoke, when she pulled the cigarette from her crimson mouth, placed it between his lips. His face reflecting in the makeup mirror, the twenty lights bordering it, he looked like a star. He dragged deeply, confidently, blew a stream directly above her head. As he took the cigarette out of his mouth and stubbed it out in the ashtray, the cherry leapt on to her lap. Hastily, he put it out with a slap or three of his hands. Embarrassed, he pulled out the pocket knife he’d randomly, eyes closed, picked from the toolbox that morning and sharpened at the breakfast table and, like most mornings, when my mother was too tired to be up that early, before dawn, pulled from the freezer the dondurma, the only thing he knew how to make, cut up three bites a piece for each of us and said ‘Start the day with some sweets, son, and the world is not so bitter as it is.’

He cut a perfect square around the burn, folded the cloth over, sewed it perfectly and sent the actress on her way.

published at press 1 september 2007

Panties

The thing I missed most about you wasn't the way you left me in the morning every day - though the woman I am going to marry now, in two weeks, would never dream of waking me up with her mouth as anything but a microphone to make sure I locked the door when I leave for work, later than her, thankfully, so I can have some time alone. I knew you were going to leave me the next morning. Your sister told me the night before, came over and told me, and swore me to secrecy. She said I deserved to not be abandoned with no explanation. I knew I would miss your panties, those yellow cotton ones, the ones that smelled of you in the hamper longer than any of those frilly things you said you bought for me but seemed to wear only on nights you went out dancing with your girlfriends, and the way they peeled off of your ass with a sound, a sound for christ's sake. That's why I kept them, sealed them away in a sandwich baggie and told myself I would never look for that bag and open it and see if I could still smell you until the day I'd get married to someone else, a day when I must have reached a point of getting over you because I'd have said forever, again, to someone else.

published at sixsentences.blogspot.com 05.20.07

Soup

My skin began peeling off, inexplicably, one summer night. Once, a piece fell into the soup, carrot, I’d been stirring for an hour while the others worked on salads and entrees. My dinner guests said I’d finally hit the mark, cooked a soup worthy of awards.

*

I was prescribed a cream that worked instantly. My skin unwhitened and began to pink up. My friends said I looked better than a newborn. My wife rubbed my back gently until we both fell asleep, easily.

*

My skin became flush with the color of a man thirty years my junior. My children applauded my new found health. Strangers smiled at me and sad people shared their stories.

*

I visited an ethnic spice shop, bought some cardamom, basil, a rare white pepper and other spices I’d never used before. Like a chemist, I mixed them in my soup pots, but no one had brought a bowl to their lips and drained it in months.

*

I tossed the cream into the garbage before I left for the restaurant one afternoon. My wife found it and called me. “Why?,” she asked.

*

Months later, alone, in the restaurant early, I peeled a small beginning of skin and floated it into the pot of mulligatawny. I stirred it for hours, beads of sweat gathering on my forehead. Not a bowl came back with a hint of soup that night.

published at 971menu.com june 2007