September 1, 1987: Claire’s latest letter, postmarked Jerusalem, begins: “We’ve learned a new trick, a process known as oral rehydration. Last night Azziz and I, with the help of some UNICEF folks, administered salt-and-sugar packets to several pairs of parents, for their kids. My pet projects – birth control, literacy – have sprouted wings. Still, the Mighty Penis rules our group and I’ve said so. A few of the men, including Azziz, are beginning to listen. In the meantime I’m amazed at the resiliency and resolve of the women over here. They have a real country-toughness, though windstorms and war have forced most of the rural communities to fold up their tents.
“So now we depend on city-dwellers for support. They clothe us, offer us food and shelter. Of course we’re in constant need of cash. A steady supply comes from sympathizers in the States, but the mails are slow. We’re on the move a lot.
“You know what I miss? Woody Allen movies. Has he stopped being funny? Do you get into Houston or Galveston much, or are you too busy wishing on stars? Silly William. Have you found a job?
“You wouldn’t know me. I’m whippet-thin, strong (though I’m smoking again). The old devils have started to stir – a couple of girls in our outfit have traded ‘meaningful’ looks with me, but so far I’ve kept my hands to myself You’re the last one to’ve pushed my button.
“Be careful, Will. You may be asked about me.”
______
My clearest memories are of intimate moments, such as seeing Claire naked for the very first time: the delight that she was so feminine (I’d had no doubts, yet the sight of her unwrapped brought relief as well as happiness: A woman’s body, I said to myself, something with which I’m familiar, and even to some degree practiced). The susceptibility of her skin; the offer; the vulnerability; the variations (breast size, wrist size) from the standard American beauty; the discovery, by watching her gestures and learning their urgency, of what she most (inexhaustibly!) welcomed –
Crazy, recalling all this now – she won’t be back. Remember, instead, that blue double star in Lyra earlier tonight: an elongated object to the unaided eye, but when magnified, the pair – both blue – stood at least twelve degrees apart. The loveliest things I’ve seen since Claire, and of sufficient visual interest to record in my log.
______
11/23/87. I try to concentrate on the sky but I’m still thinking of C. For five months now, ever since she left, I’ve collected her letters here in this binder, next to my sketches of Jupiter’s gray and yellow bands, Saturn’s rings.
Her remarks of October 2 share a page with the Martian polar caps as they appeared in my ‘scope last night. What is she becoming? By her third strident paragraph I no longer recognize the person I knew:
“… more and more women are cutting loose, placing themselves in adversarial roles to their own societies. In the States, it was all I could do not to be enraged every day. The stares of young boys. The sexual compromises. I resent the fact that I was made to feel I had a crisis on my hands if I lost an earring or discovered a run in my hose ….”
In this same notebook I scribble replies, only some of which I mail. I’m surprised at my own anger. Often I find myself writing about her as though she had died. Sometimes I forget that she’s not here.
______
She’d lost patience with forecasts, proofs and signs. Tossed my atlas aside. “I’m thirty-eight years old, William. Thirty-eight years old,” she said.
I continued reading as I’d always done (philosophy, gardening, the lore of star names), hoping to impress on her a sense of continuity, but nothing mattered to Claire after she’d lost the baby.
“There is a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there also is the truth,” says Kierkegaard. “There is another view which conceives that wherever there is a voting, noisy, audible crowd, untruth would at once be in evidence.” I followed the latter principle, gathered my instruments and built my base out of town.
______
Watermelons, beets, basil and chives, squash, cauliflower, radishes. A deep, sweet water well (the water is heavily fluoridated, comes out of the ground that way, good for the teeth though it stains). I’m self-contained out here, northwest of the city, but discouraging activity surrounds me on all sides. Last month a mobile home park opened up down the road, with huge mercury vapor lights diminishing visibility in the southeastern sky. Crowds in the evenings, curious about my buildings. A mile to the west, bulldozers clearing six acres for a car dealership.
The owners of the mobile home park want more space. They’ve offered to buy the surrounding lots, but so far the local landowners – including my father, who maintains the three or four acres I occupy – refuse to sell. Meanwhile, migrant families from the east, from the industrial midwest, keep arriving, jobless and violent. Tread worn thin beneath their trailers, cotton towels waving off sun and dust in the windows of their trucks …
Like Claire before she left, they’re not sure what to think of my place. Of necessity (I didn’t, and don’t, have much money) the design suggests frustration, dead ends, lack of fulfillment. Made with materials found at various county dumps – bed frames, soup cans, rusted pipes, drilling bits, aluminum foil, TV antennae, tractor tires, a ship’s compass, engine blocks, fans, filters from washers and dryers, busted chunks of billboard – the buildings are both functional and full of surprise. The telescope sits in a cinder-block room, round, two-and-a-half meters high. Stones with filed edges. On top, a white pyramid (easier to construct, using loblolly pine, than the more traditional dome).
The optic tube is irrigation pipe taken from a fallow field. Scraped clean. Mounted on a tripod. Carefully, I’ve calibrated the distance between primary and reflecting mirrors, ground glass like cornmeal on a stone, and balanced the whole assembly with milk cartons full of cement.
A base, in these fractious days, from which to view the world.
Sometimes now on hot afternoons a group of five or six young men, angry at not finding work, sit in front of their house trailers, drinking beer. At a certain point in their shared misery they break out automatic pistols (easy to purchase in Texas) and use my pyramid for target practice. I’ve been patient, hunkering down inside, protecting the telescope. It maddens them that I won’t show myself. They know I’m here. “Come out, you son of a bitch!” they shout.
Bullets rip through the pyramid’s peak.
Lately I’ve been fighting back, disconnecting their car batteries while the men are asleep, short-circuiting the wires so the mobile home park goes dark. Moonlight on the Airstreams, no wind, whole families bereft of air conditioning trundle out onto the ground – undershirts, nighties, coolers of beer. They take up awkward positions in rickety lawn chairs and try to sleep. I’m sympathetic; they were misinformed. “Lucrative Sun Belt, shit,” they say. But they’ll have to leave my pyramid alone.
______
Total lunar eclipse. Temperature in the forties. Slowly, a red shadow moves across the craters, spreading like a cherry stain.
In the fields, grass stirs. Animals nuzzle each other for warmth.
When the shadow recedes, and the moon resumes its stare, cows, milk-thick, greet the day royally before learning it is false.
______
What’s your view like, C? Here, at this time of year, the sky is most receptive when you wake to it in the middle of the night. It’s as if a fog has cleared. The constellations have abandoned the positions they held when you first went to bed, the night is chillier, quieter. Giddy now with a plucky, pleasant wind.
Oh, the deep satisfactions of the amateur astronomer: groggy as you pull on your socks, then two or three shirts (for it is cold, very cold, and that’s just the way you want it). Wrapping a wool blanket around your shoulders, fixing instant coffee, consulting the atlas. The book smells of last night’s dust. It lies heavily in your lap, weighted with mystery: the grainy, cobbled path of the Milky Way, the amoeba-shaped Magellanic Clouds, the star-names in swirling script.
Then you push open the pyramid doors.
A puff of wind. Skin tightens. Genitals recede into the corduroy folds of your pants, coffee turns flat and cold all at once.
But the sky is swimmingly active; it draws you out as powerfully as a sea’s undertow.
With shivering hands you open the atlas on the floor, hold its pages with the thermos, and flick on the flashlight. M 20, the Trifid Nebula, is the object of your search tonight. Once you’ve located it in the book, you must turn off the light and wait for your vision to adjust to the dark. The freezing touch of the telescope’s eyepiece startles you. Jittery stars, settling down now …
Nothing.
The pages of the atlas are white, the sky is black. The contrast confuses your ability to calculate angles of position. After several more attempts with the ‘scope, you find and center the prize: a blue, crablike cusp of cloud with a pink tinge at the top. Stars golden all around it. By now, the seams of your pants have frozen. They catch the hairs on your thighs. Goosebumps cover your skin. You have good character. You understand discipline. You are mathematically precise and full of bad coffee.
Dedicated.
An amateur.
______
Last night I reread your letters: “No more selfish pursuits.” “The individual doesn’t matter.” “The group is all that counts.”
Claire, consider: Do my buildings make sense by themselves? Can the atlas put its own information to use? No. Without me – my poor, individuated consciousness – there is no correlation between one thing and another. No rain leaking through the roof. No spider in the corner. No one to lift the flashlight.
______
“I’ve discovered that, for most men, politics is a matter of ideology,” Claire writes. “For women it’s the body. We’re trained since we’re young to use our physical selves. Naturally it’s our asses (and not just our thoughts) we lay on the line.”
______
12/8/87. Good news, Claire, I have found a job. Four nights a week now, for five dollars and twenty cents an hour, I change the light bulbs at the Chemtex Refinery in Baytown. Six thousand, four-hundred ninety-nine light bulbs on fourteen smokestacks, twelve storage tanks, two distillation towers, two cokers, one hydrocracker, eight security gates. At ten o’clock, carrying boxes of fresh supplies, I pace the parking lots searching for burnt-out bulbs. Flames curl from metal kilns; puddles of gasoline and rust reflect the fire and bright filaments. Sulfur, steam, hydrocarbons, nickel, and vanadium mix with gas, skunks, dill-weed, sunflowers, and rubber to produce an odor at once sour and sweet. Tonight, climbing the steel hull of the cat cracker, I can see the refinery flames, blue then white then gold, mirrored in the bay waters lapping in from the Gulf. Leaning forward on the ladder, I unscrew a bulb and replace it with another. Flat, metallic air burns the back of my mouth. Hundreds of petrochemical plants surround the bay, their flares like signal fires from distant camps. Rusted ships, broken barges, abandoned loading cranes stand in the shallow water.
From here my pyramid is indistinct, a white smudge lightly shaded by tangles of mesquite. To the south, and to the west, Houston, Galveston, and their suburbs.
______
Christmas eve, light snow: Clinging to the cat cracker, balancing my box of bulbs, I reread with amazement Claire’s latest letter: “Our group is changing its tactics, becoming more aggressive – which matches my personal growth,” she writes. “Today I learned about persuasion. Azziz showed me what to do. First, you pack about a kilo of Cosmopolitan B explosive into a round metal container and build a wooden box around it. Leave a square hole at the top so you can insert the detonator and the fuse. If you want to make it waterproof, you can wrap it in a couple of plastic garbage bags. Secure it with chicken wire – an irregular shape, like it’s an old rock lying in the road. Spread some wet cement on it, sprinkle a few pebbles here and there, a little grass and dirt. And that’s it. You can rig it to a regular twelve-volt car battery. We’ll use it in a march we’ve planned for next week. Set it off in the street, to disrupt traffic.”
The bulb by which I’m reading goes out with a pop. I replace it with a sixty-watt. Headlights snake around the rim of the Gulf, then bunch together at sharp bends and bridges.
Exxon, Arco, Mobil, Shell, Phillips – each plant is a city, self-contained: pulsing, blinking, shimmering in the black bay, lighting the smooth steel bellies of the 747s overhead.
Claire continues, “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about my new buddies, Will. They’re not much different from the folks I met in the Peace Corps – dedicated to genuine social change. I’ve learned, though, that in this part of the world, violence is often the only way to get ‘official’ attention. So we’ve radicalized our methods. For all its good will, the Peace Corps will never make a dent in oppression. Nothing short of cataclysm is ever going to help the poor over here. I see that now.
“My colleagues have known these things all along. They aren’t crazies, as most Americans think. They’re intellectuals of the highest order, very serious and honest, well-read.
“At thirty-eight, I’m the oldest member of the group. Sometimes the women are as bad as the men – they pamper me, as though I’m arthritic or senile or something. They’re all in their twenties. A few teenagers – some with kids. I ask them, ‘Where are the old ones?’ ‘Ours is no occupation for drooling old fools who’re settled in their ways,’ they say. I argue but they don’t listen. I understand that my value to them is largely symbolic: a citizen of the world’s most privileged nation who’s ‘seen the light’ and thrown her lot in with the poor. They don’t expect me to be useful in any practical way. But I intend to be. I can use my symbolic nature to trigger change. All I need is a plan, an explosive public event. Last night I figured one out …”
______
C? Are you kidding me?
My hand trembles. Her letter rattles. I read the line again.
Martyr.
The word, like the thought it embodies, intimidates, is somehow unmodern. She writes, “I want to draw the world’s attention – I mean the damned television audience – to the needs of displaced women and children. If I have to die to do that, well okay.”
A couple of cans of kerosene, she says. Matches or a lighter, she says, “on a day when there’s no other story to distract the three major networks.”
C. C. C.
A complete lack of irony, if not guile. No regard for personal limitations, or the vast indifference of nations. Masochistic. Why am I attracted (have always been attracted) to this side of you? In anyone else it would seem dogmatic, belligerant, foolish.
In myths – remember the stories I read you? – heroes and martyrs walk among the stars. The night sky is filled with those who’ve triumphed or failed, spectacularly: men, women, and animals who used the planet before us – who bequeathed to us the misery of making choices.
______
The first time we made love, Claire asked me to hold her hands above her head, as if they were bound, in bed. Afterwards she was angry at me for complying. I was only trying to please you, I said. Tell me what you want.
______
Sometimes I invite Dalene out to the observatory – she’s the Chemtex secretary I mentioned in my last letter. Early twenties, very cute, blond hair hiding her face.
I show her Mars and the moon. When we make love, her expressions of pleasure are loud and prolonged.
I’ve told her all about you. “If you don’t mind me saying so, this Claire lady sounds like a loon,” she says. She takes my hand. “Stick with me, William. You’re much better off.”
Of course she can’t figure me out the way you always did. “You don’t ever go into town?” she asks.
“Just to the post office and the bank.”
“Too dangerous? Too big?”
“I had to look away.”
I open the pyramid doors: Houston, twenty-six miles to the south. Streets circling one another, no tangents. It looks like the failure of knowledge.
______
Gunshots. A wildcatter (I surmise this from his gleaming steel hard hat), drunk and unemployed, sits in a lawn chair in front of his mobile home, a1mmg a pistol at my pyramid. Wood-chips fly all around me. I crouch behind the ‘scope.
______
1/8/88. Claire: yesterday, a man named Macon and a man named Leeds asked me about you. I thought you should know. Twice a month I catch a ride into Houston with one of the Chemtex drivers, to deposit my paycheck at Texas Commerce Bank downtown. Macon and Leeds – local FBI – met me in the lobby. I agreed to talk to them when my business was done.
I’d expected them. I knew they’d been reading our letters.
They drove me in a black car to a nearby Ramada Inn. A room on the second floor. From the window I could see a piano propped on a yellow pole in front of a music store.
Bears and Vikings on TV. Macon handed me a beer. “Do you know Ms. Dillon’s whereabouts?” he began.
“No.” I sat on the bed.
“You’ve written to her.”
“I write back using her postmark, but by then she’s usually moved on,” I said. “I have no idea whether she gets my notes.”
“She left the Peace Corps?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know when, exactly?”
“No.”
He glanced at a bio sheet on me. “Unemployed for eight months … now you work at Chemtex for what … five bucks an hour?”
“Five-twenty. I’ve offered her a small amount for travel expenses, if that’s –”
Macon waved his hand. “You’re not under investigation here, Mr. Keller. We just want to keep track of her. She wrote you first last July, care of your parents. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And your parents forwarded the letter out to your …”
“It’s an observatory,” I said.
“You live there now?”
“Right.”
Leeds poured himself a Heineken. He and Macon, stocky men, both wore dark brown suits, thick, though the weather was warm.
“How would you characterize your relationship with Ms. Dillon?” Leeds asked me.
“Friends. We’re friends.”
“Are you in love with her? Forgive me for being so personal …”
“I was.”
“Is she in love with you?”
“I don’t think so. Not anymore.”
Macon walked to the window and watched the freeway traffic. “It’s indiscreet of her to write you. Why would she write you?”
“We spent a lot of time together.”
“Was she content-I mean, generally?”
“She chain-smoked – kind of nervous,” I said.
“Employed?”
“Cashiering, mostly. At bookstores, restaurants.”
“Any violent tendencies that you were aware of at the time?”
“No.”
“What did she say about her plans when she left?” Leeds asked.
“She didn’t have any.”
He checked a page in a folder. “It says here that your father – a realtor in town? – owns the land you live on, is that correct, Mr. Keller?”
“It’s been in my family for years,” I said.
“What do you do out there, with the telescope and all?”
“I look.”
“At what?”
“Things that move. Things that don’t.”
“William – may I call you William?” Macon said.
“Go ahead.”
“William, of course you realize what this is all about.”
“Yes.”
“But I’m wondering if you know that eight different law enforcement agencies worldwide, including the FBI, suspect Ms. Dillon’s foreign comrades of first-degree murder, in connection with an October ninth bombing in Tunis?”
Murder? I shivered. C. C. C.
“Do you think Ms. Dillon could ever be involved in –”
“I don’t know,” I said. Claire?
“All right, William,” Macon said. He buttoned his coat. “That’s all. We’ll be in touch.”
They’ll be watching me, C. Reading my letters to you – do you receive my letters? Five so far – six, including this one. Before I close, let me add, at the risk of attracting prying eyes, that as of eight o’clock this evening, a six-hundred-foot ground cable extends from my fuse box to the edge of the Big Thicket. The limbs of the pines have been wired in honor of your recent resolve. The moment you strike the match (wherever you are – Greece, Turkey, the Middle East – whatever you may have done) I’ll throw a switch and a burst of red light will bounce off the water in the bay. In its brilliance the display will eclipse the mercury vapor lights of Houston (one hundred and sixty-five thousand in the downtown area alone), Galveston, Baytown – as far away as Huntsville. The famous prison rodeo held there each year will be suspended until the furious Brahma bulls regain their sight. Planes will be dazzled in the sky.
Admittedly, the meaning of my gesture (love, grief) will be missed. Despite its public nature, mine is a private act.
So, in a way, is yours.
______
What are the thoughts of a person about to be set on fire?
When people still believed in Hell, the sight of flames must have startled them even more than it frightens us now.
Do people still believe in Hell? Do you?
Where will the event take place? At what time of day? Will you light your own match or will Azziz do it for you?
Broad outpourings of sympathy the hoped-for result, once the horror has passed.
______
One night I woke to find Claire weeping into her pillow. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
She said she’d felt impure since her pregnancy. “I want to be loved.”
I combed her hair with my hands. “You are, you are,” I said.
She sat up and wiped her face. “Did you know that in certain parts of the world, parents believe that babies who don’t survive their infancy automatically become angels?” she asked me. A waitress named Linda, an active Pentecostal who worked with C at the restaurant, had been lending us spiritual guidebooks ever since the miscarriage. “Angel Princes of the Altitudes, Angels of the Hours of Days and Nights. They’re universally worshipped.”
“Let it go, Claire. Please, sweetie, we’ve been through this. It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “Maybe it’s all for the best. I know it’s hard to see that now, but money’s tight-”
She rose and tore a sheet of paper out of my notebook. On it she scribbled angel-names. Michael, Gabriel, Raphael.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Love spell. It’s in one of Linda’s books.” She laughed – “it’s just a game” – then taped the page to the cinder-block wall above my pillow. The paper clung loosely to the stone, threatening to fall. “You won’t be able to sleep now without thinking of me.”
“I’m thinking of you, honey. You’re in my bed.”
“But I don’t know where your mind is.”
“I love you, C.”
“I know. Hold my wrists.”
______
“Yesterday a Palestinian woman approached me in a square,” Claire writes. Lebanese postmark. The letter has taken a month to reach me. “Azziz had attached a pipe-bomb to the French ambassador’s limo (a warning only – not much punch) because the night before, in an address to Israel’s Knesset, he said Europe’s children would sleep better at night if our group stopped impeding the humanitarian efforts of Western governments. I led the woman out of the square, to a safe spot several blocks away. She asked me who I was, what I was doing in the Middle East. When I told her I’d come to save her children, she laughed. ‘Here, the women have no wombs,’ she said. What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Babies die as babies, or as young soldiers … our poor withered cunts are open graves,’ she said, and spat a wrinkled prune seed onto the street.”
Mobile home kids have trampled my squash. The car lot is encroaching. Claire continues: “As for you, silly Will, I’m worried – out there all by yourself. I agree, American cities are hideous, but isolation isn’t the answer. You could choose exile, as I’ve done.
“The mind does funny things when it’s left alone to feed on itself. Get into town. Ask your girlfriend – Dalene? – to take you to the movies. God, what I’d give for a movie …
“Or go roller-skating. Play softball. You’ll dwindle away to nothing if all you do is watch.”
______
The pain of steady seeing.
If, as Sartre says, consciousness is an insatiable hunger, then those who wake at night and turn their eyes toward the hard-to-find are starving.
Insomnia, sensibility (that is, uneasiness at finding oneself in the world) struggling for clarity of expression.
Wretched instant coffee.
Stars as round as cups and saucers.
Tonight my mirrors glisten in the light of the quarter moon. Nebulae, as delicate as a young girl’s aureoles, grace my lens. Slight kiss of a crisp wind. A candle burns on a table next to the ‘scope. Taped to the pyramid’s warm inner wall, a slip of paper – Lévi-Strauss: “What I see is an affliction to me, what I cannot see a reproach.”
______
On my fourth cup of coffee tonight (my thirtieth birthday, alone), I decide to sculpt the lights in the trees, the ones I’ve arranged to flash on in tribute to – in sorrow over – your self-immolation.
Setting down my thermos, I scale a thin pine and rehang the Christmas bulbs I placed here last week. No pattern in mind, but Form, limited only by the number of lights and the shape of the woods, will sooner or later suggest itself. Nothing as obvious as an insignia, stripes, Star of David, stylized fork-and-spoon which your commando friends have adopted as their symbol. (“We drop them – little paper cutouts – in the name of the world’s hungry children, wherever we go,” Claire writes.)
Variations on a structural theme, balance, off-centering: a few of the ways to proceed. But my favorite (employed in putting together the observatory), because most challenging, is to eliminate, as I go, individual parts of the construction.
______
3/15/88. “The postmark’s misleading. We’ve tightened our communications network, so we’ll be even harder to trace.
“I’m here in ——— to join the crews of cargo flights chartered by the International Committee of the Red Cross. They don’t know I belong to an alternative political organization. They think I’m still with the Peace Corps.
“Anyway, I’m studying the ICRC’s methods so we can become more effective; unfortunately, they’ve got troubles of their own. The C-147s they’ve chartered belong to the Nigerian government which, until recently, has loaned the planes free of charge as long as they were used for relief efforts. Now the Nigerians have decided they want five thousand dollars per run, a minumum of eight runs a day. The ICRC can’t afford it. In addition, some of their food has been sabotaged by armies eager to counteract any Western influence. Our group opposes the economic motives of capitalistic governments but approves of government agencies designed to aid children. It’s a contradiction but we live with it.
“I’ve been in Christian cities, Muslim cities, Buddhist cities. Cities strafed by gunfire. It’s exciting, Will. I’ve sunbathed topless in Tunis, on the roof of a building two blocks from Arafat’s stronghold.
“I miss Dr Pepper and (never thought I’d say it) People magazine. I haven’t fallen in love.”
______
Poverty and oppression naturally feed rebellion. All right. But it’s not at all clear to me, Claire, why terrorist acts erupt in one area and not in another, or why a middle-class American woman wants to involve herself in the violence.
Because you had a miscarriage? You fell out of love with me?
(She met some people at the “Soup Bowl,” where she worked. Old Peace Corps volunteers. On their advice she made a plane reservation. This much I know.)
“The movements of small particles in politics as in physics often deny any explanation” (Walter Laqueur).
Physicists now admit that the smallest particles in the universe are even smaller than they thought.
______
6/5/88. “I’m feeling sad these days. Melancholy. My time’s so short. I told Azziz about my decision. He thinks I’m brave. He’ll be my ‘stage manager,’ in charge of the kerosene and the matches. We figure Thanksgiving is the prime time to do it, when the emphasis in America is on eating. I have five months.
“I kissed one of the girls – one of the teens in our group. It’s been a long time. That summer, after I met you, when I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit myself to a man … since then, I haven’t touched any women. Until now. I liked it, Will. I’d forgotten how much it excites me. I was going to practice celibacy over here, hone my mental strength, but … it’s so gentle with women. No thrusting or pounding or feeling held down. The male body is such a forward-moving … well, no wonder so many men equate sex with force.
“I like your twinkling trees. It’s sweet of you, Will, to commemorate my sacrifice. I miss you. I miss your gaze.”
______
Rewiring the lights: though bulbs like these are usually reserved for Christmas, the holiday effect is strictly to be avoided here. I have no hope of making a statement with a simple string of lights – I’m merely attempting to show solidarity with you.
You’ll go up in flames.
I’ll light the leaves of the trees.
Do you remember how dense the swamps are, C? In the heart of the woods, surrounded by barbed-wire fences, steaming ponds thicken with chemical paste. PROPERTY OF U.S. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, signs say. KEEP OUT. Once a place for backseat lovers in beat-up Chevies and Fords, the Thicket’s swamp areas are now a breeding ground for crocodiles and birds who’ve fed on toxic waste since birth, and are immune to it. Yellow swamps, red swamps, black swamps. The heat and light of the nearby refineries bore through the woods. Mist swirls in front of my flashlight whenever I come out here at night to wire the trees. The ground sucks at my shoes, bulbs clink in the bag on my back.
Last night I heard a rustling in the high grass next to the tree I was climbing. The pasty swamps curdled and popped, the sky burned orange with refinery smoke and fire. Macon’s men? I know they’re watching me. I slid down the tree, clutched my string of lights and walked slowly through the Thicket. I tried to keep calm, to think of pleasant things. I remembered seeing once a television commercial for a local utility company. A bowl of light bulbs arranged like pieces of fruit. Pineapple shoots made out of green neon tubes.
A twig snapped behind me. Something like a whisper. I ran through the dark.
______
6/15/88. Claire, here’s my blind belief: you’ll soon join the heroes and martyrs in the stars. The search for you will become the sole purpose of my observations. Any fuzzy object in the sky, any strange new phenomenon, I’ll know what it is. Just remember: my southeastern aspect is blocked by lights from the mobile home park.
Tonight, Coma Berenices (according to myth, the hair of an ancient queen) blazes vigorously in my ‘scope. The American astronomer Garrett Serviss, describing the constellation in one of his books, says it has a
curious twinkling, as if gossamers spangled with dewdrops were entangled there. One might think the old woman of the nursery rhyme who went to sweep the cobwebs out of the sky had skipped this corner, or else that its delicate beauty had preserved it even from her housewifely instinct.
Well. Talk of domesticity makes you nervous, C, I know. But I remember your scattered hair, how you cut it the day you left to impress on me the seriousness and severity of your new life. How you left me to sweep it up. Now I wish I’d saved it, some little piece of you to touch.
______
6/29/88. I met a woman who looked like you. Last week Dalene took me to a party (my first trip into the city with her; we kept to the shadows so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed all at once by the wild profusion of lights) and this woman, a foreign exchange student at Rice University, dancing with her husband, astonished me. I couldn’t eat or drink. I sat in a chair overcome with desire, and watched her eyes, her lips, her hands. Later that night, making love with Dalene, I saw this woman’s face, which was of course your face, in my mind … and pushed deeper and deeper toward you as far as I could go.
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I carry an image of you in my head. I say I “see” you in my dreams. But creating and gazing at images is not the same thing as seeing. Image merely records/replaces what is absent.
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7/20/88. “We were almost caught today. Azziz and I had stopped in a little town for tea. The hills all around us were being shelled – moderates versus extremists, though who can tell them apart? – but the city seemed safe. We sat in an outdoor café. I was reading the menu when someone shouted and pointed in our direction. A man in a market across the road. He’d recognized our faces – we hadn’t realized that the local authorities had printed up posters. We ducked through the restaurant and escaped out the back. I was terrified.
“So I went ahead and bought the kerosene, Will. I’m going to perform my act sooner than I’d planned, while I still have the chance.
“Do you really not know why I’m doing it? Or are you trying to force me to face it? I can hear you now: ‘Tell me, Claire … tell me what you want.’
“All right. I’ll try. Yesterday in camp I was washing clothes with Selena, a beautiful sixteen-year-old who joined our outfit in Turkey. She has trouble pronouncing my name; I helped her practice. When she finally got it right, the word sounded urgent on her lips. Claire. I took her hand and put it on my breast. She squeezed me. I thought I’d faint. My knees shook, Will, no kidding.
“Me, the old woman of the group, utterly helpless in the hands of this child.
“She knew it, too, and whispered in English, ‘You’re mine now, Claire.’ She grasped me hard by the arm and pulled me into her tent. Led me like a slave. And I loved every minute of it.
“It’s not just with men, Will. That’s what I’m trying to say – what you want me to say. With men I had an excuse – I was taught to bow to them. By my father, my crack-boned culture – encouraged to court their violence. But now I’m sure it’s deeper, something in me – a desire to be erased. I’ve always felt it. You know I have. It frightens me. It gives me a thrill.”
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Skywatch, with the radio on. Coffee worse than usual.
Antares, the brightest star in Scorpio. A binary. Hard-to-find partner.
Heat waves rise off the ground, distorting what I see – soil and rocks, still warm from the sun, won’t cool until ten. Lignite and natural gas swarm deep into the Thicket. The oil refinery’s all the violence I want.
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8/1/88. “This will be my last letter to you, Will. My task has been enormously complicated. For the past several weeks Azziz has been sulking because I’ve paid more attention to the women than to him. Then this morning I discovered I was pregnant. I’ve been queasy at dawn, feeling weak. This local doctor told me … never mind. The point is, Azziz – the only possible father – is ecstatic. He’s asked me to forget my plan and to marry him.”
(Our child, C, the little angel – last night I thought I saw him near the twin stars, Castor and Pollux. A faint object, I couldn’t be sure … he dimmed, then disappeared …)
“I’ve decided to stick with my convictions.”
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I try to imagine what you’ll look like – to extrapolate what I can’t yet grasp from things I have experienced. Flames. Your body.
A mathematical model of fire. It must take into account the following variables:
1) The heat combustion of the volatiles.
2) The thermal conductivity of the char as a function of its mass retention fraction and temperature.
3) The specific heat of the char.
Where do you fit in this equation?
All that remains of the human body after cremation, I’ve read, is the canine maxilla, fragments of the parietals, occipitals, facial and palatal bones, ribs, vertebral drums and spine, the calceneum, the talus, and perhaps the tibial and humeral shafts.
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To see a faint object, look away. It’s there in the corner of your eye.
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9/3/88. You feel dead to me, Claire. Are you dead? Solid in memory, no longer fluid as you were when your letters still came. The certainty of your presence, even at a distance from me, meant that the circumstances of our being together – past as well as future – could be changed, just as you could alter your appearance or opinions any time you liked.
Your death, on the other hand, illuminates – no, contextualizes – the past. Wrongly, perhaps. The cold, opposing currents that ran in you always can now be seen as a kind of order. A conflux of passions impelling you to sacrifice yourself as you did.
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You stand in the middle of a square. Noisy brown children, chickens, dogs. One or two American cars. Slowly, you remove your dress, pulling it up over your head, revealing first your knees then your belly and breasts. You shake your short black hair. White skin, lightly tanned in the sun. Azziz hands you the kerosene. Lifting the can, you douse your face and shoulders. Rivulets run down your back, pool at your toes. Sad smile. Look of resolve. Then you open the matchbook, tear out a stick.
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Two A.M., pyramid dark, I throw the switch. For a moment nothing happens – I fear a short in the circuit-then red lights, blurry in the mist, ignite the leaves of the trees. The woods sizzle, then flash. Houston dims, the chemical swamps simmer and boil. Barbed-wire melts, smoke begins to billow from the trailer home park. Families pour out, sweating. Macon’s men run, steaming, from the bushes where they’ve hidden. The car lot bubbles and pops. Rust softens and flakes from tankers anchored in the shallows, mosquitoes spark into flame in midair. I’m peeling off my shirt. The bay’s drying up. Come back to me, Claire, come back, my garden is charred, the beets have withered, the potatoes have burst. I close my eyes, my eyes, C, my goddamn open eyes –
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The stars won’t settle down until ten tonight. It takes that long for the ground to cool. Patience, more patience is what I’ve learned.