Friday, September 9, 2011

Times Infinity

I could probably write a whole novel about the, what? Five? Six? Maybe 9? minutes I spent outside sitting on my porch just now smoking a cigarette. I can’t sleep. I’m sitting on my bed now, eating a granola bar. I was thinking. I was sitting on my porch, smoking a cigarette, listening to the frogs. They’re so damn loud right now, millions of them it sounds like. You’d think we were way out, deep in the country and not snuggled into the crook of interstate ten, just where it bends between City Park Ave/Old Metairie Road and Carrollton Ave.  A forgotten neighborhood. A dip in the bowl of this city, still scarred by the events that happened in 2005. And maybe 1967. Even 1811? 1708? Numbers.  Questions.   Each scar could be one line, a wire. There are so many goddamned wires outside this house. I was looking at them, sitting on the porch. Looking at the lines that they cut across the sky…  across the beautiful, deep picture that is in front of my house. Just houses, cars, poles, trees. But pretty somehow. Talking to me. Telling me things as my eyes slowly drink them in. The smoke curls around me. On this one porch across the way, someone draped something, I don’t know, a jacket maybe over the iron rail of the porch. It looks like a person, huddling against something. Not cold, it isn’t cold outside. It’s July. But not hot either. Not even warm really. It’s been cool this July, compared to what we usually get, though you couldn’t tell from all the bugs. I come home every night and there is at least one roach to try to kill. Good nights I find just the body, upside down on its back, almost crunchy with death.

I hate smoking. It is a filthy habit. I wondered tonight, as I smelled the dank smoke on the still air, if it is the most reprehensible thing I do. That would be good. I don’t want to do anything worse than that. It makes me kind of high still, because I don’t do it often. Since I was fifteen. I go every once in a while and smoke. Just one cigarette can give me that dizzy, floaty feeling like time is slowing down, like the universe around me is pacing itself with the smoke I am lingering in my mouth and slowly pushing forth with my smoke-filled breath.  Looking at wires. Trying to count them. Wondering if the wires are as countless as my thoughts. I am thinking about Rey. Will he smell the smoke on me when he climbs into my bed in the morning, his growing ten year old body no longer small enough to fold into the c shape I curve on the bed with my torso? It used to fit. He was so small. A little bigger than a hearty loaf of bread. I think about my brain. His brain growing inside his body when it was in my body. Between the two of us, how many infinities of thoughts? He spiraled out of me so long ago and keeps growing growing growing. Thinking so many thoughts. And my thoughts don’t stop.

It’s kind of beautiful really. As I try to count the crisscrossed wires that feed up to the light pole in front of my half of this double shotgun house, I think about HOW MUCH I think. How can my brain be so busy.  Just see what I am looking at. Wires leading every which way from this pole, from house to house to house, tethered and coursing with invisible electricity. Stupid televisions are fed, humming refrigerators, lights, that trailer that the guy three doors down still has in front of his own tiny little house, the one that is pushed further back from the street so I can’t see it from where I am sitting. About a month ago I saw him kind of taking a shower out on the sidewalk. He had a towel around his waist. A garden hose was in his hand and the water streaming down, almost as invisible as that electricity in the wires. Water trailed down from the hose he raised over his head, onto his white-grey, kinda longish hair, his naked torso flabby and gleaming wet. He lives next to the guy with AK47s tattooed on his cheeks, the guy who has two kids, little boys both still in diapers. They hardly look like they’re more than a year apart in age. They hang out on the porch sometimes.  I don’t hardly ever see the mom.

Across the street is Judy and Charles’ house, I see the truck but not the minivan that is always parked in front. As my eyes search, I see what could be the van in the yard, behind the fence that is always locked. I don’t ever see it open. They have a nice house. I remember years ago, maybe I was still pregnant, going for my walks in the neighborhood. I still lived in the house that we bought together, we’d just moved in there.  John and I would see that big old raised basement cottage, kind like ours but bigger. Nice big porch, huge huge yard. The house was kinda peach colored then, shabby looking, the paint was peeling. The house and yard were pretty bare. I guess Judy and Charles, whom I’ve only recently met, they fixed it up.  It’s really pretty now. Light pinky purple colored paint, they fixed it up nice, there are two big crepe myrtle trees and they’re really in full bloom. I’ve thought six million thoughts just running my eyes over their house these past few minutes. About the frogs, about rey, about my neighbors, about electricity, insomnia, nicotine, drugs, how people make money to survive in my neighborhood, the rain, math, a road trip, seeing Curtis Muhammed today, bottom up organizing, my dreams,  the slow leak in my back passenger’s side tire on my truck, the human brain, dorie, how dorie loves the brain, neurons, tattoos, the infinite number of leaves on the trees in front of me, the mushrooms in the tiny patch of grass near my feet, #grasshopper, fucking, shaving, the way they say at Mishfest that smoking closes your heart chakra, running out of medicine, cancer, getting pregnant, Molly’s baby, how Flick keeps emailing, now texting, she’s in Connecticut, my interrupted call with Lisa tonight, the grant report due Wednesday, Sue Bong Chae, my math professor in college who died,  science, if my brain could choose a different path, learn physics, the long ass drive to Miami I am about to take in two weeks or so, my mom, my conversation with her earlier tonight, how she talked about my youngest niece, hatefulness in her voice when I told her, she’s just a little girl, ma… she’s 11. “She’s got the mind of a grown woman,” she spits back at me, her voice raising, and edged with exhaustion. “She drives me. I yelled and yelled for her. I couldn’t find her. I was so upset. She says she was out in the yard… thinking. What does that child need to think like that for.  She says she didn’t hear me calling her name. I couldn’t find her.” I think to myself, “ I wonder if she was thinking of running away.” That’s what I was thinking when I was 11. Well. When I wasn’t thinking of worse. The adults in my family know how to make a young body with an old mind feel unwanted. I talked to her, I think my mom wanted me to fuss at her. I asked her about her summer. She wants to go home. She’s bored. “What do you do all day?” I ask her. “I watch tv then granma makes me take a bath.” My mom gets back on the phone. “You’re a grown woman, mom,” I hiss before she can say anything. “You have to control yourself. She’s a little girl.” I can’t think about what my mom must have said when she found her. That woman can cut you up with words.

I bought these cigarettes on Jhilya’s birthday, at that absurd but rustic and oh so pretty wine bar near the Naval station. Nat Shermans. Fancy. I am pretty sure they forgot to charge me for them. The world’s finest cigarette, for free.  A boon? I don’t know. At one point Hopey tells Maggie, “If you were on fire, you’d buy yourself a gallon of kerosene.” I can’t remember when though. I’ve lost myself in the pages of that book so many times, looking for that quote.

I’m tired now. I put the cherry out on the cigarette butt just before I get to the little brown crest they print at the edge of the filter. Throw it over the porch rail. Get up, go inside. I remind myself to tighten the screws on the doorknob. They’ve been loose since the week after I moved in.

The frogs are croaking away, so damn loud, it is really surprising, when I close the door to that sound, that it stays back there. I can’t hear it. That must be how we don’t go crazy. Seems like we’d go crazy from how loud it is.  Like a slow dragging rattle across a rusty fence, but denser, deeper.  Infinite.

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