Assemble

Paul woke that morning with a heave and lifted away from his pillow with urgency. That was what he felt-an urgency. This is something he had not felt in a long time. Was it never? He pushed the curtain to the side to see what was calling him. Blue. He decided to tie it up and allow the light to swallow the room. That had not happened in three months. His apartment was in the same desperate unlived- in shape. She was gone now a month or so. Mary. She took anything living with her. That was a fern and the other green leaf pot by the kitchenette window. There was an Aloe. That he knew because she broke one in half and dripped the gel on a burn of his. He remembers being turned on by it. She chose plants that improved air quality as well. She took Ariel, her cat. She was only living there a few months, if you want to call it living. He walked in and around the scattered piles of sorted through items and seemed to be categorizing. He seemed to be placing each left behind thing in its virtual proper space. He did not like the ugliness of unpurposed stacks. Things should be prepared to live out their essence, he thought that morning. Recipe books should be near the stove, ready. The novels should not be alphabetized by author and genre, but given to a friend or stranger to continue their lives. The assorted boxes held all things together as they were never intended. What does an electric shaver know of a mini food processor? What does the Birkenstock know of the deck of cards rubber banded or the electric water pic?

But Paul did not touch any of it. Especially not Reed’s box. The place looked the same from the day he moved in a year ago and is one of the reasons Mary took off. Let me organize for you, she’d say. Leave it the way it is, it looks more authentic, more genuine to the world condition, Paul would reply. Now, this morning, he walked with intent other than this. This room, he thought, will sort itself out. It knows. The urgency he felt did not come as a glistening call to action. It did not pulse with a rhythmic punch. It was not even necessarily burning. It was Paul seeing clearly. Seeing, really. Seeing and goaded toward some accountability. But what?

It was not just that- something had changed. But things are always changing, Paul thought. It was when he filled a rock glass to water the plastic plant sitting on the bookshelf that it occurred to him that he was not sure what alive meant. It was not the stolen whiskey glass in his hand taken after last call at some bar to walk home with. It was the fact that he realized that he was about to water a plastic unamenable plant that was an ironic symbol of his and Mary’s commitment to keep it real. It sat next to a mini Jack Daniels bottle filled with Reed. Aside from Reed’s ashes, Paul carried a marble notebook of his poems. He read them every night for months after Reed drown. He read them and could not imagine Reed smoking or drinking or writing or dry above water. He only saw him underwater. He saw him floating up to the family fishing out of Yonkers. He read the poems and imagined the mother pulling her children to the opposite side of the boat horrified and shielding them from Reed’s bloated and gray body. Who wouldn’t? The father used some expensive fishing tool to prod and poke and then call the harbor police or coast guard.

How sad, the mother would say.

Fucking shame, the father.

Paul read the poems feeling sad that they never read Reed’s poems or heard him sing. He was sad that they just looked at him and his tattooed arms and figured and so it goes.

Reed left a poetry reading up on 116th where he drank free wine. The poet was a former NYC cop who wrote about surviving being hit by a body that fell 70 floors from the south tower. Reed was amazed by the lucid and honest grotesque of the writing. He called the poems free verse police blotters. Someone said the cop and Reed talked for an hour alone in the corner sharing a bottle.

And then he left.

And then he did not respond to calls and texts and banging at his bedroom door. And then the family who had packed bologna and iced-teas and pinot grigio and beer, purchased bait and ice on the dock. They tipped the harbor taxi kid generously and boarded their 40 foot ship with Making Memories painted in script on the back. Someone told them the title of a ship must alliterate or they will suffer terrible sea fate. Making Memories carried the bright orange life- vested family out to sea where Reed floated alone. Making Memories.

Paul was supposed to meet Reed that night for the late show at Smoke. He drank two bourbons and waited over an hour. He left because he couldn’t take the singer trying to be Bobby Short and took the 2 to the apartment expecting to see Reed sprawled face down on his bed. Nothing. They found heroin and alcohol in his blood . They found a soaked pack of matches from Smoke. That was a year ago.

Paul still thinks about talking to that cop. What could their cloistered 45 minute conversation have been about? Metaphor? Imagery? Meter? Who decides who will share our last moments? Who will hear my last words? Who will miss our last cues and clues? Who will nod? Who will we inhale in our last breath in another’s company? Paul thought. Did the cop know Reed left him and swallowed the east river with the wine?

But here is the thing. A year before all this Reed left the city and headed east to the sea to conquer his fear of it. The sea. Not so much the water, but what was underneath, below, unseen. Unknown. When he left he told Paul that he wanted to stand at the bottom and look up. See what’s there. So he took a job in a boatyard and little by little took on the sea. Maybe that is what he did the night he died. Stood too long. Maybe he saw something down there. When he floated up the family face down, was he looking at what he feared. Ghost eyes unable to speak. Maybe he saw something that twisted his head away. Down. That family thought it was pathetic. It was. But not only. They did not know he stood under the sea. Why is it that our answers are too often trapped in muted tongues.

But this morning, Paul, standing in front of the plastic plant. The plant, Mary, they actually, purchased at a sidewalk sale to fund a local animal shelter. It was their first purchase together and she wanted it be a reminder that they would always keep it real. That was a week before she unloaded a box of her items to begin the trial shared space. She had been sharing a flat across town with some work friends. It sat there the plastic unnamable plant, those months they tried to live together next to the ashes and they never even once addressed the plant again. But that morning, with the glass full, as he poured the glass, the new light revealed a tiny elbow joint connecting the leaf to a stem. He smiled. And then he stopped watering and drank the rest. The plant had been there all of the time with Mary and now, because one little shift and a knot in the curtain and a new urge to tend to things, there it was. His smile was a cocktail of disappointment and of course. Of course, Mary would never leave something in need of his attention. Of course, he was not successful in keeping the unnamable leaves green. Of course, the only attention he paid was to something that did not need him at all. Of course. Keep it real. That’s how she phrased it and he agreed. That won’t be a problem, he thought. We will never become like those couples that artificially muddle through everything-promise me that, she said. And she said it like a vow. It startled him a bit. They were only beginning to act serious for a few days. But he repeated the words-we will never be one of those couples who artificially live their lives. She corrected him, muddle, not live. He wondered what the difference was, but repeated muddle. She smiled and then bought him a book of Cummings poems and a counter-top Einstein statue egg-timer.

Mary wanted a great deal more out of life than Paul. They both knew that. Actually, they discussed and debated the philosophical differences all of the time. In the beginning it was her romantic endeavor to guide Paul into an enlightened state. But she gave up after a while. Paul never really tried. Mary wanted promotions and gathered degrees like harvested grain garnered away for evidence. She wanted Paul to do the same. And that is why she is gone. She lived a year trying to live exactly how she wanted her, their, world to be. She gave people the best she had and demanded results and returns. She actually said that phrase in the beginning whenever Paul would challenge her on something. I expect returns from what I invest.

Paul lived inside immediate moments of satiation or agitation. One last match left to light half of a snuffed out cigarette beckoning from the clamshell ashtray is enough to consider the day a success. Not quite that all moments are miracles, but more like Paul’s life centers on him and actually ignores all things outside. Or worse, it hurts in either omission or not, like smoking. The exhaled grey pathogen ballooning that he released from the half cracked window. She would watch it exit him in a puff and then like a million gossamer threads head toward some other secondary existence. That is how she felt in the end. Maybe always. Drawn in, swallowed, exhaled to do what smoke does. And that is what she wondered while he huddled at the same narrow window off the tiny kitchenette. He did not envy Mary’s world view and at times it actually irritated him because it over complicated the way he wanted to exist. Exist. That was another vow Mary asked of them. Let us do more than merely exist. We need to be a part of the world family, she would say. We deserve more. This always made Paul smirk and that really hurt her.

And that is how they were for a time. And then she moved in. And then she left.

There were others before Mary. They all disappeared quietly and exhausted by the weight of Paul’s unwillingness to invest. It is a weightlessness really. An absence of mass that requires the lifter to occupy both spaces simultaneously. An anonymity that gives license to being uncategorized and unaccountable. Mary did leave a note. It took the entire burden of blame on herself and the way she saw the world. She knew from the beginning that would never be able to be. She said that the city was killing her. She said that when Paul gave up his high school and City Community College teaching jobs and writing poetry and took the slightly better paying job editing, she knew he had given up. That she knew that before long she would too. He tried to write a poem but never finished it.

Wherever You Go

I wanted to be at peace. I wanted silence

really. And every time I asked for it, the asking

smashed it. And then you handed me a letter

sealed in an envelope with the words-

open this is in a quiet place. So I pocketed it

and walked to the where we never kissed,

but both acknowledged the desire.

I sat and could almost see Legion out at sea

disappearing in those swine Jesus massacred

for the lunatic. Drowned demons. I opened

and unfolded with clicking shell spirals at my feet.

You wrote- You are here, like it or not.

So, a month now, with curtains tied up, not the first time-Mary often had it thus the brief time she lasted. With the room filled with light somehow with Mary gone, and the two ferns and the three shiny leaf ivies and Ariel gone, Paul now deciding a plastic emblem of failed shared vows…vows they never truly understood the same. Why? Was it the absence of life? The room truly was nothing more than a tomb holding imprisoned words in fancy coffins. Little dead house holding someone else’s ideas-read and then shelved or boxed and unthought-of. What was this place but appliances, a rug-all things we manufacture as evidence.

He lifted from the pillow that morning unlike the way smoke lifts away and up along the side of the building. What is this, now. He did not understand why he was getting dressed. Work was not for another two hours. He did not feel himself packing a small duffle gym bag that he actually did not recognize. It must have been Mary’s. It was his though. It came with membership Mary purchased for his birthday so Paul would exercise and quit smoking. He went for a week. He didn’t consider the items he placed inside. Where was he going? In the fully illuminated space, the light was a visitor nudging him out. What is this?

He did not look around the room as if to say-what will I take with me? He looked around and for the first time that morning or any morning, he was conscious of his sadness. He felt sadness for the all that he held hostage in that shack of accumulated and devoured. Some things were fortunate enough to escape-the smoke, the ferns, Ariel, Mary. Even reed’s box was condemned to this space.

He grabbed the plastic unnamable plant and surrounded it in a nest of t-shirts and socks. He did not know where he was going or whether he was going to return. He did not know where he was going as he was piloted out and into the elevator five floors down and out onto 6th avenue. He did not think of which direction to head. He just stepped forward and looked up.