"The Mathematician's Pen"

He had a favorite pen. Black ink. Smooth wooden barrel. Brass clip decorated with tiny birds. He liked to believe they were cardinals, but the engraving was not very precise. One of the birds appeared to have three wings and the other only one. Both of them had bodies that weren’t completely birdlike, as though the person responsible for the engraving had only possessed a passing knowledge of avian physiology. In spite of that the mathematician loved the pen, how it felt in his hand, how the wood caught light and bent it into pleasing amplitudes. With undeniable pleasure he recalled the buying of the pen. It was a perfect summer day. You couldn’t ask for better weather. Hot, but not too hot. A steady breeze from the west that bore the faint tang of sea salt. The mathematician ate a light breakfast of eggs and toast and spiced tea with milk and sugar. He indulged in a long and leisurely walk through the woods behind his house, not going anywhere in particular, just winding around trees and gazing up at the endless blue sky. The leaves of the trees spoke in a June rustle. The wind whispered its own secrets. The mathematician left the woods and walked into the village and had lunch at a small restaurant by the library. Salad. More tea, iced. He spent an hour in the library, reading magazines and newspapers and then checking out a book on ancient Greek myth. He went to the grocery store down the street from the library. He bought canned soup, a bar of bath soap, a loaf of bread, a small box of chocolate cookies. The pen he found hanging on a cardboard display next to the rack of candy bars and gum. There were about twenty others similar to the pen, but none had wood the color of fine chocolate. The young woman at the register said the pens were on sale, today only. Her eyes were green and went well with the wooden barrel of the pen. Her nails were painted and bitten at the tips. The mathematician wondered what caused such an attractive girl to eat not only her nails but unpleasantly flavored polish and would have asked but the young woman’s smile, perfect as this perfect day, stopped him in his tracks.

Hillbilly Tangent

So it was that Young Lover lived with a gent she called Bear, real name George or Henry or some such, Young Lover didn’t concern herself with such trivia. When they kissed he wasn’t anyone but Bear. It was a name and a description. Bear was huge wine cask of a man. He was a great mass of unruly hair and beard flowing like runaway smoke. His trmendous hands wrapped around Young Thing and with anyone else she might have been afraid, but with Bear she felt nothing but security, plain and simple.

The winter of ‘83 Young Lover and Bear shacked up in a trailer by Lake Onawanda, they screwed by day and drank rotgut scotch by night. They lived like life was about to be outlawed. Plenty of booze, plenty of dope, plenty of soul. Young Lover couldn’t help thinking Not bad for a girl just turned eighteen. This is a decent way to spend her precious time.

The night Bear died Young Lover was sipping malt liquor and watching a rerun of the Beverly Hillbillies on television. Bear had half a thousand hits of grade-A acid in his shirt pocket and one still stuck to the underside of his tongue. He was dream-driving, floating through a hallucinogen haze. There was the purple glowing moon and the stars that spelled arcane messages across orange heavens. He cranked the steering wheel for a better view. The truck fishtailed and flew, with splendid grace, through a guardrail.

Bear entered the waiting arms of a gully three hundred feet deep.

Young Lover collapsed on the couch and laughed.

I just love that Jethro she said and glanced around instinctively for Bear to either agree or disagree.

Belief System

A religious zealot, hand-lettered sign on a stick. Make ye your soul be cleansed. Filthy robe. Ragged sandals. The zealot gesticulates awkwardly and chants in a secret language. Man or woman, impossible to determine. What brought the zealot here today. What inner voice provided direction. Where will the voice tell the zealot to go next. Will the voice provide instructions for a new sign to match the new destination. Will the words be as stilted and archaic.

The zealot waves at the bright morning sky and smiles inexplicably. Who did this person used to be before going mad. Where was this person’s family. Isn’t there someone out there to keep a leash on him. If it is a him. If it makes any difference once you lose your mind.

Coffee Can

In the evening her man friend goes off to do something with someone. Do what. With whom. Is it another lover. Is it an illegal activity. She doesn’t know, the man friend has his own agenda, he doesn’t bother keeping her in the loop. She has the apartment to herself, she sits on the bathroom floor and pries up a certain plank in the corner. The plank is slippery and mildewed. From the space underneath she removes a rusty coffee can. Tonight another handful of coins is added to the contents of the can. Tonight a few metallic clinks, last night a few, tomorrow night a few. Few and few and few and eventually the can filled to the brim and magnificently heavy in her hand. These are bits of copper and silver scoured from street gutters or taken from pockets of drunks in the bar where she works. The man friend has no idea about the plank or the can, otherwise the coins would go away and the saving would start again. The man friend is more or less without scruples. He tends to his needs first and hers a distant second. It is what it is. The can is the can. The money inside is the money. When she has enough it will be possible to buy a bus ticket to somewhere other than this city where there is no man friend and no one like him. The ticket will be printed on paper. The paper is the paper. Slowly she adds today’s coins. Today is twelve clinks, which isn’t thirteen or twenty or fifty, but also isn’t six or three or zero.

A pretty good night after all.

Seagulls

Outside the city are the fields. At the far edge of the fields there stretches a desert. The desert is bordered by mountains, and beyond them lies the gray and restless sea. The sea reaches for another shore. Who lives here in this unfamiliar land. The enemy. Not like us, not good like us. Not decent or fearful of the holy powers. These are terrible creatures undeserving of breath and blood. If the sea were to boil forth and drown the enemy once and for all. If justice should be served. But the sea does not care. Good versus evil. To salt water the concepts are interchangeable.

Ashen gulls hang by invisible strings on the acrid breeze. They scream and fling themselves down in search of fish. They know little about the shore behind or the one ahead. Gulls are not truly alive, they are illusions of the ocean sun. Spun like dirty silk from the haze and set to motion by deep hidden forces older then the earth itself. Who can honestly claim to have touched a gull and felt its down, its beak, its claw. Anyone says he has, that person is a liar.

Searcher

I remember seeing this dead woman once, I was dropping a letter into the corner post box and the dead woman came out of an alley pushing a rusted shopping cart with crooked wheels. The cart pulled her to the right and the left. The dead woman fought to control the cart. A better way to say is that she struggled with the cart. The best way is to say she warred with the cart.

Suddenly the dead woman stopped and looked all around.

Where is it she said.

Where is what I asked.

I’ve misplaced the damned thing.

Something fell from the cart?

I had it. I had it and now it is gone.

When did you lose it?

The dead woman made a strange sound.

I didn’t know what the dead woman lost, she never explained, she appeared to think I already knew every detail of her misfortune. She swung her head awkwardly, scanning. She began to weep and I almost offered to help look for whatever had gone missing. But it was getting late and I had things to do and the moment to offer aid passed. The dead woman began to speak quietly to herself in a language I didn’t recognize. She got down on her knees and crawled into gutter. She picked up loose change and discarded cigarettes and soiled bits of paper and held each item and sighed.

Another moment came and went. I couldn’t say what kind.

The dead woman crawled along the gutter. The dead woman crawled to the corner. The dead woman turned left and crawled out of my sight and that was all the time the dead woman and I would ever share.

Still. Some nights I dream of her. There she is, wandering though the vapors. I have questions for the dead woman. Did she ever locate her missing treasure? Was she still out there crawling in the darkness of the soulless city? Had she worn out the flesh of her knees? Was she scuffing along on bare bone?

I have questions for myself. If the woman was dead, then how could it be possible for her to return to life? And if she lived anew should I really consider her as having been dead in the first place?

“----------“

She opened a dusty box on a shelf at the back of her thoughts, she revealed to the love of her life a closely guarded secret, one locked deep inside for many years, I am ---------- she said, and ---------- was a word she feared to speak, and ---------- had long caused great shame, never in decades had she been free of being ----------, ---------- was how she identified herself, ---------- was a small agony firmly anchored to her soul, the only thing conceivably worse than being ---------- was to be *******, which is what the love of her life chose to reveal about himself.
In fact, I’m proud of it he said, and she knew not how to respond.