It was Jasper he saw with his eyes closed. It was Bridey he saw everywhere else.
Walking through the East Village in the morning, early fall and the leaves turning gold, cutting through Tompkins Square and passing the queer cast-off kids sleeping out on the center lawn atop cardboard pallets beneath the trees, wearing everything they owned; or sitting groggy and pissed outside Ray’s Candy Store with last night’s bottle and a small hot coffee steaming into the cool air between their faces. It was impossible for Milo not to think of her.
When Jasper’d dragged her back from Larissis, she’d no money and looked rougher than they did: black hair, the kind of tan that comes from sleeping out. A feral thing with ice-blue eyes like an Eskimo dog’s. She moved lightly, weighed nothing, had a delicate Celtic face, wide mouth, and pointed, slightly crooked eyeteeth. He’d many occasions to look at her.
Dressed always in Levi’s and combat boots, her body was like a boy’s: small breasts, might well have been pectoral muscles, her shoulders well-defined, veins visible in her strong arms. Bridey was an American survivor, the kind that made you think of the Donner Party. She had a rangy quick stride even when she was drunk; carried lighter fluid and matches and electrical tape in her bag. She smiled when she thought no one was looking and beneath her clothes the skin was soft and pale.
It had been twenty-five years since their last word, but when Milo moved to the United States he believed he would find her again. Stranger things had happened in the time they had known each other. Coincidences disguised as fate. She could be out on the street right now, could be sitting beneath the elms in Tompkins Square. The appointment at the New School had seemed like a sign. Another unlikely place she might know where to find him.
The job he’d had before this one was on a loading dock in Salford, not far from his mother’s flat. Now he worked in a pretty building with wide corridors and tall windows. The hallway leading to his office was a gauntlet of closed wooden doors self-consciously decorated with worn, grubby New Yorker cartoons. He was obligated to be on campus every day to talk to students, to write his third collection, and to teach one class. The apartment he lived in was paid for by the school. It was, without doubt, the most luxurious situation he could tolerate.
Each day when Milo got to his office he made tea with an electric kettle, opened his laptop, and put on Joy Division or the Smiths. Read and deleted sentences he’d written the day before. Opened the window and let in the sounds of the street.
His students wore pajamas to class, emailed things he pretended not to receive. They were groomed and articulate and used to hearing themselves speak. All but four of them were white.
The shocking tranquillity of his life often left him dumb. And though it had yet to produce any results, he spent a good part of each day at his desk looking up Bridey’s name and various guesses; sifting through the digital detritus, trying to piece together what had happened between then and now.
Bridey Sullivan
Bridey Sullivan fire
Bridey Sullivan hospital records, birth records, warrants
When he exhausted his search for her, he would occasionally look for himself, fascinated and disturbed by the violation of his private life and that, by virtue of writing and speaking and taking jobs, he’d lost the ability to be lost. The fact that his personal information was updated regularly enough to account for a position he’d accepted little more than a month ago shocked him. But the entries were not malign; instead, his life had been sanitized entirely, distilled into a product description. Wikipedia was the worst:
Milo Rollock (b. 1972) is an English writer and the author of two collections of poetry. He is currently Poet in Residence at the New School for Social Research in New York City.[1][3][6]
LIFE
Early years
Rollock grew up in Salford near the Irish Sea, the only child of Colleen Rollock, a garment worker.[3] His first collection, In the Shadow of Machines, is dedicated to his mother and contains several poems about working-class life. He has attributed his literary success to having “no television, no father, no money, nothing to do but read and fight.”[1]
Education
Rollock dropped out of school at fourteen, began his training as a boxer at Longsight and Urmston and had a lackluster string of matches in Manchester and London in the mid-80s. Won 12 (KO 5) + lost 18 (KO 0) + draw 0 = 127 rounds boxed KO% 1.5.[5] In 1990, he received a full scholarship to University of Manchester on a special dispensation, where he studied metaphysical poetry, with a concentration in John Donne.
Career
In the Shadow of Machines won a Witter Bynner Poetry Prize in 1992 while Rollock was a sophomore in college.[12] The London Review of Books called it “transcendent” and “lucidly brutal.” The collection deals with themes of institutional violence, class, race, and gender. Despite these topics, it is apolitical in presentation.
The American publisher City Lights released his second volume, Running, the year of his graduation. It was translated into Portuguese, French, Turkish, and Greek.[7] After university, Rollock moved back to his hometown, worked in a shipyard, and returned to boxing, winning six matches over the course of a year. During this time he published only three poems, which ran in the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books, respectively. Critics of Rollock’s work have called him a token,[12,16] claiming his successes, particularly the Witter Bynner, were politically motivated and due to race.[11,12,16,43]
Running
Critically polarizing and more raw in form than In the Shadow of Machines, the long poem Running appears to be an account of Rollock’s life on the street before he attended university. Told through the eyes of a teenage girl, clearly a stand-in for Rollock, the piece has been described as an ode and an indictment of the heroic tradition.[7]
Personal life
Rollock was the longtime partner of American painter Marc Lepson[23] and the subject of Lepson’s well-known portrait series Flight.
If Milo was to believe the things he read, he’d had a full life. He’d written books and was once someone’s “longtime partner.” Was currently employed. The reality of his existence was footnoted, proven by articles in French and English and in newspapers of record. What he was afraid of, what compelled him to type his own name into the search engine, was finding details of the years between his lackluster career as teenage punching bag and the gracious dispensation that afforded him an education. The simple word Milo was afraid of reading was Athens.