"I live with passion, hot squirting fire-blood through fuel
channels dumping into the afterburners of a Ganges or a Nile,"
Faith declared seriously, and I nearly slipped a cog figuring
how she got that hyphen into her voice. Each phrase she had neatly
measured out and tied in a bag, and each was an overdose. "Live
for the moment's roses, or life will pass you by."
"I'm an equal-opportunity author," she continued. "Seventeen
percent of my characters are Hispanic, 23 percent black, most
white, and seven percent are of interesting and different origins.
You know, Polynesian, Vietnamese, et cetera."
"Parallelism," chided the electronic judge, and Faith
smiled. "Silly machine. It's unnecessary in spoken language.
You gotta speak the language of the land. When in Rome, you know."
I nodded hesitantly. "Wanna hear my latest?" she asked
breathlessly, then forged on. "Good, calm down, you might
want a seat." She wilted into her swan pose.
I backed away and found one of the griffin-shaped beanbags that
dotted her room. It leered over my shoulder and its glass eye
winked in the sunlight knowingly as if to say, Another one of
her recitals.
Connoisseur of experiences,
Slave to his senses,
the tailor patches together
his memories -
here/what an odd expression;
there, FACIAL OR VERBAL
everywhere (the masses living in quiet
desperation1)
She owes her life, her environment, her education,
Debtor to Tocqueville (and ee cummings)
Dropper of names OR
counter-revolutionary for the populist experience,
anti-capitals, anti-elite, anti-snob
I like Ike / Stick With Dick / Jackson, the People's Man
Literature for the masses.
What a curious patchwork mirror
Steaming under the Alaskan sun
Idioms gallop through the silver
Ignoring the "whoah" of a frightened Phaeton.
"Well?" she paused, shaking out of her trance.
I laughed. "Very nice. But I think I'd like a copy. It's
hard to catch the 'imagery galloping out of control' on the fly."
"Well, I know, silly, but that's why I read it so
slowly," she crooned. "No mind, never matter. It rocks
my lobstrosities and turns my toenails blue, and that's all there
is to it." Snort. "What fun!"
We'd lost each other over the years. Faith knew it would
happen. Before I left that night, she'd compared friendship to
"spinning, paisley galaxies," sometimes warming up,
sometimes cooling down, momentarily in contact with another before
revolving away to a new rendezvous.
"Faith - you're a poet!" I'd gasped lightheartedly.
"Naw," she'd brushed it away forgivingly. "Don't
drift away, though," she'd called out into the slow dusk.
It had died on the warm currents of jasmine that had smothered
her neighborhood. I could barely make out the quirky grin of the
griffin in her living-room window; its hard eye glinted in the
dying sun.
I looked her up one morning in Billings. It was easy; she
was the only Montgomery in the phone book who'd dare live at "13
Dark Hollow Lane." I was sure it was the same person.
I thought I'd surprise her, and as I pulled up in my rent-a-car,
I half expected her to peek through the blinds and open the door.
Nothing stirred around the house, a trim white stucco vision from
Monterrey. I knocked, it opened, and for a second she didn't recognize
me. Then the brown haze cleared from her eyes and she invited
me in, calling me by my first name.
I sat down at the dining table. The place was cheery enough, but
distressingly normal; she'd ditched the griffin. We chatted, filling
each other in on the missing eighteen years. She'd become a
technical writer, hired for her English skill. She told me how the
engineers wrote awkward, boring manuals for her to revise, and
I sympathized. I told her of my son, victim of a drunken driver,
and she consoled. The pauses became more frequent,
the silence less easy.
She excused herself quietly to get ready for work. She said she'd
be off at five, but I had an earlier flight. I ached inside, but
my memory would mercifully fade. It had killed her, this loss
of passion. She'd stepped off her motorcycle, into these invisible
fetters of practicality: endless chapters of mind-numbing grind,
an unfulfilled introduction withered.
And a paisley galaxy spun away.
Manish Vij