“And then he was gone. I never even heard the door slam.”
It sat on the table, a round, green tangle of green twigs about the size of a strongman’s fist. It was fragrant, and I felt better just for smelling it. But this could only mean one thing.
He must be around here somewhere.
I am sitting in Allen’s old kitchen, East Village, New York City, East Twelfth Street, sorting through old cassette tapes, making notes. Reading his spidery writing on the tiny labels makes my eyes sore. It is an art I have mastered at last. Allen left behind a flotilla of material to be organized when he died in 1997, when liver cancer took him away. I started helping his staff catalog the videos and recordings of his yearly readings, back in the early 1980s, for eventual storage at Columbia. It was an annual event, like a harvest, hauling his years’ worth of wisdom to the collegiate archives. They have since moved to Stanford, who apparently had the money to purchase the hoard. In any case, the worker ants are still cataloging.
I also smell tongue from the Ukrainian deli around the corner on First Avenue, yet another sign. Rimbaud stares from the wall, that portrait of which looks like Verlaine just pissed on his shoes, which he may have.
On the other side of the doorway hangs Whitman, gazing down, as if keeping an eye on young Arthur. I look at the laundry hanging on lines outside the kitchen window. This could be a view from 1910, a Jacob Riis shot. How the other half lives.
I hear a cough, and Allen walks in, bespectacled and suspendered. Mildly potbellied and palsied-eye, short beard peppered with gray. Same as when I last saw him with his measured gait, almost as if he were walking in iambic pentameters. He could be anybody’s Jewish uncle.
“I knew you were here,” I say. “I saw your green stuff sitting here.”
Allen bows slightly, sits. “Green tea. A gift from Weiwei. Not like what you buy here. Would you like some?”
“Yes, please.” Allen’s old friend Weiwei, the revolutionary conceptual artist from China, always had the best tea.
Allen rises and places the kettle on the burner atop the old white stove. His movements are slow and deliberate. Above the stove hangs a large black-and-white cityscape by Berenice Abbott. A Mothers Against Drunk Driving sticker adorns the side of the stove. I smile whenever I see it, thinking of hectic rides Allen had with Neal and Burroughs’s wife Joan Vollmer.
I wait for the kettle to whistle. It’s strange to see him alive after all these years.
“How’ve you been?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “But what about you? Do you have TV in heaven? Do you know what’s going on? The times, they been a-changin’.”
Allen nods knowingly; he’s chewing something he removed from the fridge. “Tongue. Want some?”
“No thanks.”
It still looks like tongue. Gross.
“Not really heaven. More like a leisure spa at the end of the Bardo. I saw you here and thought I’d say hello.” The Bardo was an after-death state for Buddhists, a journey they took until they reached their final state. I never imagined a leisure spa as an option for the final result. They must have liked Allen.
“Climate change, Obama, the Twin Towers . . . life has marched on since you’ve gone. . . .”
“I know.”
I don’t know how he knows, but it’s probably one of those next-world things. I sip my tea. It’s wonderful.
“What do we do?”
“Meditate.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
Allen chews. I ask, “How do you eat that shit?” I feel freer with my opinions now that he is living in the next world.
“Acquired taste. Jewish Eastern European DNA. We eat animal parts.”
“I don’t know if even enlightenment can save us,” I offer. I don’t want to talk about tongue.
“Think back. History. We’ve suffered much worse. World wars. Police actions. A blueprint is in place.”
“Fight, resist, raise a stink?”
He nods.
“Sit on the railroad tracks?”
Again, affirmative.
“Damn. I thought you’d have an easier answer since you’ve been in the beyond. Like a magic pill or something. Or a ray gun that removes bad people from office.”
“Tried and true is still the best. Power of the printing press. Don’t forget Trotsky on St. Marks Place.”
I remember. Trotsky once had a secret printing press in the basement at 77 St. Marks Place, where Auden later lived.
“Okay,” I say, resigned.
With his permission, I scrounge in the fridge for something to eat. I pour some oil into a pan and sauté some garlic and ginger. Then I chop off the ends of some bok choy and separate the leaves. I toss them in the pan and put a lid on. It smells fantastic. We are both drinking green tea. There is one slice of cheesecake left. I’m not touching that.
I remove the lid and sprinkle some low-sodium soy sauce and sesame seeds on top. I serve us both. We eat in silence, lost in our own thoughts.
“You shall prevail,” he says with a wink. No easy chore with that palsied eye. I wonder if he knew something I didn’t, living in his bardo spa.
“Gotcha.”
He puts his dishes in the sink and straightens himself.
“Good to see you,” he says. “I must be getting back.” I don’t argue; it’s strange seeing him again. It’s sad. It’s happy. Not bittersweet but sad and happy.
He walks away, eyed by Whitman and Rimbaud. “Keep the tea,” he says. “Oh, and finish the cheesecake.” Before he vanishes, he turns and says, “Remember, the key is in the sunlight.”
I nod. Of course. How could I forget? And then he is gone. I never even hear the door slam.
David Breithaupt is a child of the cold war, born into a small, conservative town in the Midwest. His work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Rumpus, Exquisite Corpse, and the Nervous Breakdown, as well as the anthology, Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader. He has edited Hand on the Doorknob: A Charles Plymell Reader. During the 1980s, he worked as an assistant archivist for Allen Ginsberg. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he helps edit two sports magazines, one dedicated to the Cincinnati Reds and the other to OSU collegiate sports.