30 AD [2009]
Why you talking about old shit?
In the room that Saturday night a girl sat across from me and her smile was so long that I smiled too. I wasn't sure about the room but for the paintings and the television glow, everyone huddled around, it lit our faces and I was alone on the ottoman. When I didn't see her, I'd look to the sliding glass door and watch us and she wouldn't notice, the light backward but it all looked the same. I checked my watch again and the face almost made me cry. When I looked up from the chair there was a little girl in front of me, her black hair was there and I was lying on the gym mats and it was a Friday night, long past the party, a month I think. She looked up with her hands over her head.
“Your eyes, they're pretty.” My friend's daughter. Walking around the mats with her brother waiting for their father – my friend, to finish. Everyone was smiling too, they were working and panting and outside I could see the people walking and their breath stood in front of them through the fogged-up windows. My name's Henry.
Behind me at the party there's a Japanese man hosting, he's twenty-six next week he says and he reminds me of my friend from Mississippi; dead over a year now and his kind face, I know, must be so different with the passing of the two spinning blades under the ground. He's showing us his friend's picture, his wall decoration. A painting, it took nine years. Not the painting, but the things on it, the symbol; it wasn't very impressive but the words explaining it were. The things he wrote on the canvas, his friend's work, came from when he was a boy, spray-painting on night walks, on the walls around the city. He stopped when the cops snuck up on him one night and made him the District Attorney's assistant when he was all grown up so many years later.
There's tattoos on the arms of the Japanese man and he's showing us. There's a portrait of his parents stretching along his left bicep and they're being pulled everywhere; like they ought to be escaping his flesh like they did from the work camp so many years back. His name along his right triceps, his Dad wrote it on a piece of paper he says, not knowing it'd be stained there after the next trip to San Francisco; Love/Hate, upside-down to right-side-up - he traces it with his fingers. Tonight he tells us about the paintings again and the trip to the city.
“I want a few for my neck.” I checked my watch and to hear the gears click. It might cost him his job, “But so what,” he says.
He talks a lot tonight and she and I are smiling back and forth across the room. I see the night beyond the glow behind the sliding glass door and he reminds me about working for the state because he does too. His friend, the artist, is there as well, in that tired place and it's okay if it's only during the day, for the money. That purity and all come back for those couple of vacations and sick days, when there can really be life; hoping against the clock. Sitting at these desks, the years pass and we fade in them. “But it's okay, it's grown-up,” Mom and Dad say as I leave the house.
But that painting, the greens, they mark the house, walls so white – a rose extends off the canvas onto the wall, brushing it. Growing life from the picture. Across is another and it's all purples. A face, his face and I see gold chains too; there they go, but he's not wearing them now. He points back to his body, this time his right shoulder, the Japanese man, because he forgot to show it. It’s a boar – for 1983. He's a Scorpio as well he says and there it is, right below the boar. Took eight, no, nine years. Not the tattoo, that same green picture you’re looking at, Henry. Know what it is yet? “A caricature hiding a background hiding a life.” That’s what comes for his birthdays instead of cakes and paper hats. I wish I could see that day's party and when I look she's smiling at me again.
That big smile comes and she looks so pretty across the room and then I see that little girl in front of her and everything behind her goes away. She might as well have called me one like her, a girl, because of my eyelashes and I think of the things Father said over and over. Her brother is laughing in the corner, like him, from when I was a child. My jacket is clinging to my neck and my friend is on top of me. He's squeezing the collar and I try to move my hand, slapping against the ground until the girl disappears.
I watched a film later that night when I woke up. With every scene I checked the time to see my watch was ticking. Their mouths and sounds didn't seem to fit quite right and when I asked, my friend said, “In Italy, they broke the films with their laws.” I wanted to know if Christ was why they made the laws that broke everything. Afterward, when I slept, I saw them; the men in their robes around a table, delicate model of the world sprawled across with every detail beyond them, even down to the freckles of children they didn't know, holding their crucifixes as close as they could, breaking everything with their long canes. The city was torn to pieces because of the crosses buried in the sand that they wouldn't forget. I, myself couldn't forget the time either. Perhaps I was no better but at least, I thought, I knew it was passing.
There's a smile across the room at the party and now it's forging a picture, one for the walls. The table with the foods flooding the room in a rain. I cut a melon in the kitchen that they'd bought from the market in the city for half off; shearing the meat from the rind, still icy, I wondered about the pink chunks covering those black seeds like amniotic fluid. As I sorted them, a boy in the living room started to choke and there I am on the mat again, my friend on top of me. No, false alarm. He cried and while the others tried to console him, I rolled my eyes from the kitchen sink. When he saw he decided he'd just go to bed. He started to pass me and I watched him change through the running water and it poured outside.
The Japanese man’s friend's baby's smile covers hers for a moment, the one across the room. When he passes, he makes zooming noises so that his boy can be a super hero for just a little while and now, he's like God letting them make the miracles for The Bible. Here, just for tonight, then the dream can pass in a few years.
I made my way to the café after work with a different friend on the phone, it was Friday, not even a week after the party. He's at a club but he hates those girls yet he grinds against them every weekend. He said I should try some cologne and take them to a real bar instead of that café or just the house.
“They don't want to hear you,” he said. “Just to test you a while.” I wanted to know the time so I saw to it. “You're a funny man but you mentioned that tattoo guy from last night, right? The one so high? Think for a second Henry, how he wasn't himself. They wanted him, right?”
“I guess.”
The girls around him, the Japanese man, looking at his pictures. He sat next to one and put his hand on hers. On her head as well. She looked at him and it was love. I think she even let him hold her bottom, his hand slid across; neither one of them turned red when the others noticed.
I can't do it without a movie there. So I asked one of the girls from the café, “What have you seen this week?” She doesn't see much. Works with the Japanese man at the state though. He touched her hand once I'm sure, his tattoo prints still painted like that nine-year tag; all along her palms - she must have held onto his arm for too long, had to have gone to a film for that kind of stain, the liar.
When I came back to the café next week I sat next to another girl. Not with a smile like the one from across me that night but she looked nice enough. “My name's Henry.” I checked the two spinning blades to see if I was going too fast, my friend said I might be, I wasn't, I don't think. “Yours?”
She didn't like the book in my hand. I came back again in the week after, I left her sitting there at the table and then my friend's daughter came in with her dad. He was holding her hand before I checked my watch and then they were at the table with me but her feet didn't reach the ground. They didn't have booster seats, but that would only make things worse I figured.
“No luck?” He asked me. She said, “You have pretty eyes,” again, pointing with her index finger and I remember it being so small. That night I sat in my room with the film I bought on, the glow the only light because the doors and windows were closed and covered. I wondered about the girls and why it wasn't working like all the films. I even tried watching the ones where it hadn't been working and they went from there.
I remembered that smile. I decided to call her because we talked at the party for some time; a while actually and smiling is always good I'm told. That’s what the number was for, I think now. When we talked we were both smiling over the phone and the checking of my watch, it was okay. I thought about the crosses sticking out in the desert.
I smelled the things growing outside on my way to the café and the neighbor, mowing his lawn, waved to me. They all knew it was okay. It was the smell of the growing things, except they noticed it too. My suit still had its creases but I didn't wear a tie. The café was empty and she'd be there soon but it'd be a wait, I know. I was two hours early; I checked to make sure the clock above the register was right and I got the table good and ready.
I ordered her drink and went to the Cinnamon Shop next door to buy a book for the table. Some music for my car, the guy said, it will help seal the deal. I didn't know so I checked my watch and I bought it. I made sure I was ready. Thirty minutes till now and I wasn't too sure. I wanted to leave but I remembered my first girl and the days we had under the trees, the growing air.
The doors opened and it was then that I wanted my skin to hold ink and that it'd rub off when she held my arm to make her mine. That permanent press - they come like the finger notches on my watch, the things that make the things we have ours. I wondered why the first had gone at that moment and I waited for the smile but saw the desert when the doors opened and it wasn’t her.
My suit's crease was going away and I sat there even after the man up front went off to his break and came to sit with me. I told him the cup across from me was for her and that she must be running late. He commented that it looked real cold. The time came a few times as he talked to me and told me that I should give the cup to one of the other girls and try my luck. I told him that that makes no sense, that my friend has a method, a means; his way, now mine. That that was what I had for that; for her, for that smile - that I only wanted to see that smile today, this week and so on.
The doors opened and I checked my watch, but they were already closing. I'll call her I think, but only after I wait a few days, my friend said, otherwise I'll come on too strong. If I wait, it'll work fine and I won't have to give the cup to the blind girl and her dog again. She sat down at the same table as me once, not knowing I was there; it was many weeks ago when I was mourning. She apologized and felt my face, saying that she was certain I had pretty eyes. I didn't even know what to say. I just waited for her to know me but I left and the cups were hers.
When I came back the week after I heard her ask the man up front that I was talking to about me. He said he'd speak to me for her and he winked. That was another day that the smiles didn't come. I just sat there with the cup in my hands to remind me of warmth before I left for the gym with my bag over my shoulder. I remember her, my first one, lost in the trees with my knife in her hands up to her neck like the jacket wrapped around my own today while the little girl, replacing her, looks upon me with her brother and when the neck started to cut that's when I checked my watch; squeezed it so tight with my eyes wide-open that by the time she left my fingers painted the sides. It ticks and I go with Christ, he's etched into the face; blades taking his eyes. I want to see it each day as I do the smile, not coming. He hangs from the cross but from him there's no smile, just Anno Domini until the doors open in the café and I go back out to the desert, the party shone in my eyes and there are no shadows but for the spinning blades and crosses hanging in the sand.