We’re not such active participants, you and I. Although we do go to the gatherings. The rooms – for we gather in different halls, different places, we are always moving – the rooms are always set up like it is an AA meeting; maybe that is what we want them to think. It isn’t an AA meeting. There’s Kool-Aid in a jug, or a vase (depending on what room we’re in. Each room seems to be equipped with a different kind of pitcher), and bland store-bought cookies, which are usually vanilla-flavored. We sit down somewhere, choosing random chairs, sometimes together we sit, and sometimes apart. The chairs are always plastic, no matter what room we are in. Their colors differ; white and green and blue are the prominent ones, though of course, there are others. We usually get there first, because I am punctual, and because you like to look at “the lay of the place”. I understand that to mean that you like looking at the uncovered legs of the women who file in, sometimes alone, sometimes together, sometimes with men. You like to look at the back of their legs, how their skirts slowly rise up as they reach for a plastic cup for the Kool-Aid, because the table is wide, backed up against the white stark wall, and the white plastic cups are hard to reach. I look to see if the men’s legs are as promiscuous, following your example; but no. There is only a rustling of the creases of the pants, the different kinds of fabrics playing with the glaring fluorescent lights.
So, we have gathered. This is no AA, there are no confessions, only accusations. You listen to the words that are said, I listen to the tone, the inflections. I watch the spittle rise out of the speakers’ mouths, and descend quickly in an arch-shaped movement to the ground, or maybe onto one of the listeners (if they are listening. Maybe they are just sitting). When we get home we will exchange information, though it will not be a fair exchange. You will fill me in on what I have missed; you will know that I haven’t been listening. I listen to you, because I cannot only follow the musicality of your voice, its deceptive softness, because you will leave me, because I will be lost. So I listen. The words you use are grand, big, bold. I see, as I listen to you, the speaker, dressed in a general’s outfit, with eyes of red. The spittle is now draining from his lips, downwards, and he is speaking, in your voice, of what is right, and what is wrong. When you are done, a silence settles down between us, and we wait for it to pass. I turn on the heater, warming my hands in the glow of the red metallic coils. You want something of me; oh, the march; no, I will not go.
You will go (suddenly you are an active participant) and you will be comforted by the masses, the noise, the smells. Someone told me, once, that the hot-dog stands stay open as usual, even though you are marching through the streets, even though so many others have taken cover. And that every so often a marcher will suddenly stop chanting, and reach for his wallet, and pull out a dollar, and buy a hot-dog. Not you, though. You are still at the gathering, when you march. Not on the street, not in you, as your body screams slogans and your mouth chants words.

When you come home the house will be spotless. And when you start to cry, I’ll pour you a shot of whisky, and then put you to bed, and hold you until you sleep.

She is speaking on the telephone. Her voice, the man on the other end of the line thinks, is like granite: hard, toneless, expressionless. The man on the other end of the line is a policeman. He sits behind a tall desk, and he likes how people approaching the desk need to look up at him, as if he is a judge, or a king. He never gets too full of himself though. What with his wife constantly bitching at him from whatever room she’s in, in the house. The room the she is in when she is speaking at him effects the content of her words, though not their nasal whine which speeds up and down like a police siren. “The damn light’s dripping”, she’ll yell at him through the telephone. One of these days, he’ll open up an encyclopedia and find out how a telephone works, how his wife’s enraged voice, travels through the telephone lines. How is it, he wonders idly, doodling on a pad of police paper as she loudly makes up a something wrong in the living room, dining room, kitchen, garage even, how is it that only her voice can be ferried across on the telephone, and not her cigarette smoke, and not her own very self. “Jesus,” the thought of her materializing here, in his place of work, amongst the rapists and thieves and people whose dogs have gone missing, fills him with a very bizarre feeling. He feels that she should be here, packed behind bars with other women who yell at their husbands. He would go and watch her, in her cell, and she would yell at him, and his face would remain neutral, he would be ever so calm. It wouldn’t be hate or gloating staring out of his face at hers; it would be justice.

The woman on the other end of the line waits patiently; she cannot know that the seargent on the other end of the line is daydreaming, his ears blissfully listening to the monotone voice that had been her. She is not ruffled by this, she merely waits, calmly. Her mind has been vacant for so many years, although occasionally her sense of humor will have dry remarks: this space for rent, it giggles to her. It seems to her, as her friends used to tell her, when she used to have friends, that something should be missing from her life. And then later, when her friends had despaired of her, of her silence and lips pressed firmly together and the spark that didn’t appear in her eyes, her brother had said: doesn’t it matter to you, that you exist? “Not really”, she hadn’t really looked at him when she’d answered, she’d looked out the window, to where a winter’s pale blue sky was waning, to where little white clouds frisked in and out of the window frame. Since then she hadn’t had a brother, except on holiday, bursting through her mailbox in the form of colorful greeting cards on recycled papers. Right now she is waiting for a police sergeant to get back to her, so she can tell him that someone is dangling a potato on string in front of her window, it must be someone from the roof. Her apartment is on the top floor, she will tell him, when he gets back from getting a coffee or wrestling a killer to the ground or whatever it is he is doing, and it wouldn’t bother her so much except for that someone had carved a face, a sad face, into the potato, and stuck a knife in one of the eyes. She will tell him, and she will mean it, that she isn’t scared; it’s just that the murdered potato is blocking her view of the sky; it’s just that she can’t go up on the roof, on her own.



He looks up at her, smiles, looks away. He can tell that she isn’t paying attention, his mother. She’s smoking her cigarette, watching the smoke patter out sporadically before her, as it disperses into the cool blue air. He wonders where the smoke goes; it’s whiteish gray, and the sky is blue. He looks up at the sky, his mother catches in the corner of his eye as he looks up. Briefly, there are faded white sneakers, with pink stripes and a shape which looks like two lines from far away getting closer and closer until they meet. Then legs with purplely lines running down them, then a skirt with more lines, red and blue and green, cutting across each other on a black background. He wants to ask his mother if she likes lines, if the straightness is calming or scary, but he goes past her white blouse and her white vacant face and her thinnish brownish hair to the sky. The sky is blue, so blue, bluer than the lines on his sneakers, or on his glasses, or the letters on his hospital bracelet, which are so faded by now that he can hardly see them. The letters are still there though, if he looks for them, hard enough. He can’t read yet, but he knows that his name is written there: Ernie Jones. Sometimes, suddenly, the fear grips him that when the letters on his white bracelet disappear he will disappear as well; but he doesn’t share this with his mother; and maybe, he thinks happily, when these scary thoughts of him and his letters going away suddenly materialize, maybe he will get to be the orange Ernie from the television. Ernie from television has a big smile, and is very silly, and most importantly he has stripes on his shirt.

But the sky. Ernie Jones, having looked past his mother to the blue dome overhead, looks for the lines in the sky, and cannot find them. This is slightly discomforting to him. Maybe the lines are so thick underneath the blue, so tightly packed, that he cannot see them? While Ernie thinks on the sky his feet play with the purple and brown and red leaves on the ground, his hands clench and unclench and squiggle – as he likes to call it – in his pockets. Although he is deeply puzzled by the linelessness of the sky, he also aware of his nose, which must be red in the crisp Autumn air, and his cold ears and the high whistling sound that erupts there, ever so suddenly, every so often; is the whistling coming from inside, or out? The pain that is beginning to trickle into his neck is present, he can see it almost as well as he sees the blueness of a sky; it is a dull red pain, it is that kind of pain. He knows that if he holds his head in the same position, the red will become a darkling blue, and then a grayish black, and then he won’t be able to see anything at all. His mother knows this too. She throws away her cigarette, and the movement is arrested by Ernie’s eye; he snaps his neck down, and understands that playtime is over. He looks, with longing, at the yellow slide and the red swings that are moving back and forth, playing with the wind. His mother has already starting walking, though, towards the big white building, with her head down; maybe she is looking at the pretty crunchy leaves? Ernie starts walking behind her – not too fast, he knows he can’t walk fast, he musn’t – and even as he tries only to walk on the cracks in the pavement, he looks up to see his mother’s cigarette smoke trailing lazily behind a small aero plane, sailing in the blue blue sky.

In his dream, she’s a blonde violinist.

She smiles at him, and it lights him up. She mouths “good luck”, and gives him an airy kiss. It floats between their lips for an instant that will stay with him. In his old age he will remember this instant, he will remind her and she will smile that smile again, and he will be lit.

Then he goes on stage, and plays. The keys kneeing at his fingertips, he glides over the keyboard. The grand piano making grand music in the grand hall before the grand audience. They sit, hushed, watching, listening to him. There are many of them, hundreds if not thousands. He plays for one though, and she stands in the wings, violin in hand, her hands fingering the strings, silently accompanying him.

Then she comes on stage, and together they make music. Sweet, beautiful music. In unison, completing each other. He lowers his scale, she jumps an octave, together. They don’t watch each other while playing, each is sucked deep into their instrument. But they hear, he hears her and she hears him. The strings and keys join together, and the music flows forth and fills the hall. Seeping into each member of the audience, filling them. And they know. They all know the music is true music. It is distilled and honest and genuine. They will never hear such music again.

But the two of them will. Every day they hear the music, they see it, they smell it, feel it. One doesn’t feel in dreams, but he feels this. He knows this isn’t real. But it will be. He will meet her one day, and they will make the music together. He doesn’t even play.

But in his dreams, she’s a blonde violinist.

When she was down (and she was often down), she would put on a pair of purple-tinted sunglasses and go for a stroll (“A stroll.” She would chuckle, running her hands, slowly, theatrically, through the thick short tangle of brown curls that covered her head. “My, aren’t we grand.”). The sunglasses would come on with the mood. She would be sitting in her room, stretched out on her bed, her stomach pressing into the flowered sheets. Her legs would be running through the air, back and forth, and she would vaguely wonder what that would feel like, to run on air, and to go somewhere, to be somewhere, airily. There was a book in front of her, or a magazine; if it was a magazine, she would be gazing, spellbound, at the perfection of the models’ thighs, and if it were a book she would be saying to herself, “you will never be this smart, you will never write anything of worth”; and then the sadness would set in. “It’s time for the glasses,” she would try to make light of it, try to laugh it off as a meaningless idiosyncrasy of hers, as she walked to the bed-stand, opened the drawer, and with a whisper lifted the iron-rimmed glasses from their green-felt cradle.

Staring at the mirror, seeing herself in a glinting purple haze, she felt protected, she felt omnipotent, and she would often lean far, far out of her bedroom window, and look at the trickle of people passing, pressing on the cement side-walk beneath her. “I must look like a bug to them,” she would smile, imagining herself looking up and seeing herself; then she would recoil. “No, I must look like an idiot to them.” Slowly, painfully (for it was painful, to tear herself away from these people who might adore her, if  only she’d let them), her neck would be craned in, her familiar room, surrounding her, bathed in a purple hue, and she would remonstrate herself: You are sad. You are nothing, nothing but a purple projector. Then she would sit on her bed, and the purple walls, with their empty picture frames and her winter coats on their pegs and the imposing wardrobe sidling ever closer (so it seemed to her) to the door, would begin to heave and swim, in conjunction with her shoulders and her lungs and her eyes and her soul.

Suddenly, at a pub. She would never frequent the same bar twice (which didn’t present a problem, in her city. There were so many dark holes to choose from, so many people who had capatilized on others’ misery and high-strung emotions), for fear that they (the bartenders, the usuals, the first-timers) would realize, that the glasses (her eyes), were an affectation, were a life-preserver thrown out to a world too colorful, for her. “I am sensitive to light”, she would reply, shortly, simply, to any curious bartender (although lately, recently, no one had asked. There were sunglasses of all the colors of the rainbow; there were curly-haired brunettes on every corner), as she sat at the bar and gazed at the mahogany of the tables, the different sorts of purples in the world as reflected in the twinkling bottles in front of her, around her, and the soft lights (purple), descending down to her, from the ceiling, like a first snow, like an exploded pillow.

“I’ll have a Shirley Temple”, she says, wearily, and as the purple beverage appears before her (brought, served almost angrily, she feels, by a purple, Adolf-mustache), her gaze lights upon a pinstripe shirt next to her, crumpled around the form of a woman. The glasses are raised form a moment, then quickly lowered again (her movement is barely perceptible; she just wanted to check if the stripes were actually purple; they were). She thinks, as she puts the glasses away, and then checks that she did, and checks again, and stares at the indent left on the bridge of her nose (it is much later, as the clock ticks away her life, as her fingers stray, innocently, towards the page that she left herself on, in the book, or the magazine), that she never takes the glasses off, she only thinks that she does.