Living on Air

- Living On Air -

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LIVING ON AIR A NOVEL

BY NINA ZIVANCEVIC “He is in the air, stranger to his century, without a country, “maudit” - a writer.”

J.P.Sartre

© Nina Zivancevic

BARNCOTT PRESS LONDON - AMSTERDAM - PARIS - NEW YORK - KATHMANDU - CAPETOWN

CONTENTS Living On Air ! ! ! ! !

The Rodents ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Hello, my name is...!! ! ! ! !

Vienna Circle! ! ! ! ! ! !

It happened on MacDougal Street.!! !

The Bay Area! ! ! ! ! ! !

The City of Doom! ! ! ! ! !

Nightclubbing! ! ! ! ! !

Lao Tzu's Ruling My Country Again! !

Doctor Rieux! ! ! ! ! ! !

Recollections of a Friendship! ! ! !

Grave Responsibility! ! ! ! !

Guilietta’s Story! ! ! ! ! !

Chicago Chicago! ! ! ! ! !

Back to Los Angeles! ! ! ! !

The Black Queen! ! ! ! ! !

The Purple Queen! ! ! ! ! !

The Red Queen! ! ! ! ! !

The Return of Mice!! ! ! ! !

About The Author! ! ! ! ! !

! 1 10 19 29 51 66 74 79 82 92 102 113 123 129 134 141 148 153 162 171

Living On Air

I woke up early one still morning to a tableaux vivant from ancient times - humidity hung in the air. It was a wretched weather day in New York City. I visited an aged Viennese doctor, who removed his monocle and looked at me in despair. “Your complexion is pale and spotted, Fraulein. You seem quite unhappy to me.

What is the problem?� He asked if I had a history of cancer in my family. The antiquated creature kept me in his office for two hours, but he made no diagnosis, offered no prognosis. Still, my agony was only about to begin. He caused a great delay in my daily business, and prevented me from returning to my editorial 1

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duties, which, incidentally, I abhorred. I was simply depressed. Then, when I got back to the office, my boss announced that I was fired. I became even paler.

But I felt happy. I was about to become the first alien in the United States to receive unemployment benefits from the government.

The timing was perfect, since I was anxious to leave my job and start work on this novel, this unpredictable beast which varies ceaselessly from one mood to another, from one moment to the next, always threatening to eat itself alive.

As soon as I learned I'd receive government benefits in my grave (I thought I must have died and gone to heaven), I rushed home to call the recipient of these pages, and then to start this novel, whose progress is truly indeterminate. An extraneous phone call greeted me at home: my lover announced that he got back with his old, tangerine-colored sweetheart. Mind you, I was turning increasingly pale, almost transparent by this time. I pictured myself lying in my Byzantine grave, flowers above me, with Joe, Bill, Emma, Sarah, Jackson and Tom standing over the mound, mouthing desperate prayers: “I hope your soul sinks straight to Hell, bitch, where it belongs!� I decided, yes, it's my time to die. Only one thing prevented me from the decisive act - a vague feeling I should get on with this novel, which should have been written a long time ago.

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My lover called to tell me he was no longer sure of his loving intentions. I was delighted, swamped with emotions. If I stopped seeing Beau, or, to put it more accurately, if I was no longer obligated to see Beau, I would have more time alone, to think and to write, and to compose this letter to K., whose eyes have stayed with me far longer than the clever remarks and sticky fingers of other people. It had been a very long summer. I made me nauseous to think of it. New York summers have the quality of sticky fingers gummed up with glue, blood and dog shit - fearsome to imagine. I considered concealing my heroic death from my friends and reckless acquaintances. When Beau called, that was my first thought. Not that Beau bothered much about my health. But he was a public personality, and as such felt he could not afford to let information about my health slink past him. So I found myself evading his stubborn questions about how I was feeling and my trip to the doctor. He didn't really care, anyway.

He just barreled onward. “Actually, I have something important to say. I got back with M. She's so sweet and wild, and her pussy tells me ancient fairy tales that you would never dream of.�

I knew Beau would miss our long hours of love making. He'd call in three days, moaning how much he misses me. But by then, I'd already be dead. No longer there to hold his hand. I couldn't help him pick the gladioli for my funeral. Of course he would ask 3

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me, “Z., what flowers do you want for your funeral?”

But no, I wouldn't answer. I'd be gone.

He was better off with M. Unlike me, she's a kind and docile creature, eager for wild adventure. And she was absorbed by a need to demonstrate he emotional pull over Beau. Fine. This allowed me to die. By which I mean, allowed me to breathe again, resurrected.

After finishing it with Beau, I began a round of calls to my friends to report on my health's decay. I found that this information made them all quite cheerful.

I should tell you something about my friends, so you'll understand that the characters in this book which follows are not unworthy of your attention.

I have two kinds of friends. There are those I would die for, but whom I rarely, if ever, see. Some in this category shook off the chains of material existence when I was still young. The rest are scattered across the globe, leading their own quite lunatic lives. The precious few times we do see each other we argue to excess, I drink myself to death, we whine over our mutual imperfections, or I shake them awake in the middle of the night with a phone call to read them new poems — a practice they tolerate, but confess to find annoying.

The second category consists of those whom I see often, very often. We exchange rapturous insights about the minute details of our daily routines. Then they vanish. Poof. Many of my enemies, who have recently shown their true colors, belong to this second 4

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camp. When we speak, they're terribly polite. They would never pass judgment over how I abuse my poetic license. These people mouth their superficial concern for my person with such insistence that I simply can't take them seriously. And why should I? Of course, they are far more involved with their own daily rituals than with anything that relates to me, a fact that I can respect on the left side of my brain.

K. belongs to both camps. This is what caused a decisive fissure in our communication, a breach that will be mended through this letter that I write, this novel that will bring us together once again. I refer to my time with K. as my post-gladioli days, my period of rebirth, when K. and I leapt madly and romantically on the trampolines of our nervous systems - causing both camps of my friends to sigh in disbelief, and, perhaps, despair. Now my friends come to visit me.

They try to tempt me with movie tickets. They read to me from their latest books. They do all they can to distract me from my happiness, since I don't have to report to a day job at an office, and since one day I have to die. And so I am happy. Still, at the same time, hunger gnaws at me. My cash has all gone to pay medical bills: $200 for a barium test, $350 towards various doctors, $180 for blood tests. After that, $168 went to the phone company; then came the rent that I split with my roommate, Randy. Randy, of course, is broke, waiting for his unemployment check to arrive, just as I am waiting for mine. Under the auspices of 5

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my shifting identity, I struggle while contemplating this letter (as it turns into a novel), and the nature of art.

Beau knocks at my door. No longer my lover, he wants to make love. I, however, am too sick. That is, the situation has made me nauseous. So he offers me a job, instead. I accept. It's a small job, selling ads for his downtown paper, a neighborhood tabloid in which Mae West sleeps peacefully in the arms of Gary Cooper on Forminter Island, perfectly forgetful of Hollywood money and everything having to do with the entertainment industry. I visit the most ancient sectors of the crumbling city, continuing with my dreams of K.'s fingers, trying to sell ads, working hard to forget how drained and ill I am, exhausted by the demands of existence. It's as if I'm the protagonist in a strange porno video, a movie where I'm also a spectator. I watch an ongoing sequence of bitter and lustful encounters happening to a woman quite like me, who looks like me, talks like me, makes love like me, but who, at the same time, is blissfully forgetful in her ignorance. Such forgetfulness, unfortunately, is a gift I have not received.

Oh, how I miss the stage! I mean the real stage, the theater, where I once performed. The grinding spectacle of my daily life has become little more than a mad vaudeville show.

I go from door to door through the deepest crevasses of the city, offering newspaper ads to bull dyke 6

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restaurant managers and to half-wasted immigrant owners of stridently trendy boutiques - it's their way, I suppose, to conceal the exhaustion that comes from a migrant's misery. I speak to them in one of several available languages. I try to believe my words as I pronounce them. I labor hard to earn money from commissions. I am on stage again, giving a performance - a stage where others stroll leisurely to and fro, smiling, worrying little about their daily routines, their flittering existences.

They think I'm mad. Beau takes me to dinner. Now that we've broken up, he's trying to convince me that his personality has some redeeming qualities. He likes to show me off to his friends: not only am I a worthwhile piece of meat, but I might have the added value of selling ads for his paper. And I'm glad to be there. I love dinners with a small circle of friends, and I especially love having to cheer people up -they are down because they think this is our last meal together, our last supper. I look around the table and consider: every person makes a different Judas.

Recently my friend Jesus died of an overdose. They placed Him on a crucifix and stuffed him like a waxed bird, rouged his cheeks and painted his lips, then shot photos of his corpse to print in Beau's downtown newspaper. Poor Jesus. Here I offer you, dear reader, a short prayer for Him. Certainly, Jesus would have done the same for me, though he would've been conspicuously absent from my funeral. Jesus was such 7

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a self-contained, fragile thing. A father, a Madonna, a child—all in one. His own particular trinity. He was fond of the child in Himself, especially.

When I last saw Jesus, He was in drag again. His wig was haughty and His inner child was dominant. He meowed at me in a mellow tone, “Keep your chin up, and don't let that terrible diet ruin your figure.” Like most of my friends, He was a believer in vitamins but an atheist when it came to clean living. His problem with clean living was that it had to be purchased, and Jesus refused to pay for anything. Not even His own image. And so He had to die. I honestly believe that Jesus became entirely bored with life, and felt condemned to entertain Himself in a world of fading glory. His fame was waning. His stage was shrinking.

He realized His opportunity for a last spectacular act was drawing to a close. Since He was unable to profit from His own death, He chose instead to offer His life as a gift to His friends - perhaps they would be able to collect on His death, and earn their own fame and fortune.

He died, yet His friends remained, their cheeks tear stained, pain choking their sobs, “Have you heard of J.C.? Did you know who He was?” Well, He left behind no children....

They fastened Him to a cross and carried Him to a subterranean parlor, a nightclub named Golgotha.

There they indulged in sacrificial bread and drank 8

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blood instead of wine. I got sick. No, I decided - such holiness wasn't for me.

After my dinner with Beau I returned to my apartment and found a love poem left on my answering machine: Your eyes are like cherry blossoms, Your lips are like green leaves, Your heart is in my pocket, My money is under your table.

I turned to look and it was exactly 10 p.m. Under my walnut desk I saw a mouse crawl behind a yellowed newspaper, but no trace of cash. A small disappointment. I saw trouble on the rise. ***

* The complete version of Living on Air is now available as an ebook. A print edition will be published in September (2013).

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The Rodents

By the 16th century, many physicians in Europe suspected that the plague was contagious. It wasn't until the late 19th century, however, that the plague was identified as a virus carried by fleas from rodents to human beings.

Or I might start a novel without revealing in the least how I feel. One might say that I'm not sick at all simply linguini-thin, gaunt and haute. One could note the tired circles beneath my eyes, but they are not a sign of illness; rather, they are scars of love. I walk down the street, looking for a job. People pass. It's downtown New York. A man who goes by has Marcel 10

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Duchamp's face, but in reality he is an aging Jewish office clerk, a Bartelby who sags from years of placing manila folders just perfectly in order in gray metal drawers. I need money. Therefore: I want to be like him - but I don't.

I spend the rest of the day in a street level apartment in a Puerto Rican building on the lowest side of New York, where my desk has a mouse beneath it, and I am never left alone. Black kids play with cats by a fire hydrant just outside my window. If I wasn't so weak, I would be on my feet dancing to the salsa that booms all day and all night from the radios of the locals who deal dope and trade streetwise tips on the sidewalk outside my barred windows. But, like William Burroughs, I choose instead to rest: I must ration my energy by the spoonful. I lay calmly among pillows on my floor.

Beau stops by to visit now and again. He brings me news from his editorial offices. He tries to make love to me, then retreats, He is followed by Mark and John and Charlie and Pete. They call at midnight. They leave messages on my answering machine, which I listen to on occasion, when I'm in a good mood - like now. As I am always in a good mood when I have the freedom to lose myself in this novel-in-progress, alone, without distractions. Pete is the caller most prone to leaving messages about his poetic endeavors, as well as insipid heartfelt comments that analyze the state of my mind, the essence of my being, and other stabs at 11

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universal truths. At the first hint of his voice, I hit the fast forward button. In our era, universal truths should not be reduced to language.

What I want most is to do is see K. We would snuggle and spoon, or perhaps read a book aloud, or talk politics, or discuss my state of mind, or the essence of my being, or hint at the truly inexpressible, but he never comes over. That is, other than last night, when he showed up to say good-bye. He was leaving for the land where I was happiest for one single day in my life - a blue jewel on the California coast.

When K. came, I was discussing problems about the newspaper with Randy, and Beau was reading a political biography. K. said he brought me vitamin C for my blood. For my coronary problem he brought me his eyes. We talked politics through the night, for five hours straight, until Beau grew tired and decided not to leave - which made me miserable. But I was wearing a red Afghani dress, and so felt happy. I had to walk K. home to get us time alone, then exchanged good-bye with him in such a flat, chilly way that it made me sick for days after.

When I returned home to Beau, awkwardness prevented us from making love. I couldn't fall asleep for hours. Later I had a dream about snakes. In the morning I consulted my imaginary analyst, but the dear doctor just pulled on his beard and sucked on his pipe and said nothing.

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Snakes present us with an irreducible challenge. We encounter them endlessly, on the street, at work, at home, they slither beneath our stools at the bar when we get drunk, they insert themselves into the most innocuous considerations in our subconscious; we adore them yet we hate them; snakes are truly penises.

Truman Capote admired snakes so much he hung a stuffed rattlesnake over his bed. Less sophisticated varieties, such as eels and vipers, were once worshipped as deities by Sumerians, Egyptians and Indians. Etruscan cults relied on snakes for making oblique, personal references.

I've never understood why, in my mother tongue, the word “snake” is feminine, while it is masculine in the Anglophone regions. The same is true with the word “death.” Snakes can have the countenance of angels, though they are less dangerous and encountered infrequently. The Mexican god Quetzalcoatl was a snake with fiery wings who taught us to approach death without fear.

The other day I went to the Museum of Modern Art with Jay, a friend visiting from Toronto. Rousseau, we noted, was fond of snakes. He painted many of them, in a wide range of colors. It was his way to explore the phenomenon of war - as Thomas Hobbes had done before him, defining the range of all possible misunderstandings between human beings. This is what I wrote: 13

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Rousseau's microcosm is not so naive!

What made him see this world as a jungle?

Why is the sun a bloody red in his paintings?

Why are his women unconscious and unprotected? Why are the pink flamingoes so delicate and pink, in juxtaposition to dark warriors of the forest?

Why are the citizens of his jungle mainly lazy monkeys and parrots and snake-charmers?

Why are the threatened always less innocent than the aggressors? Why is that red sun so soothing?

Why do the people look so much more dangerous than the wild animals?

Why are the sunsets and plants the backdrops for growling tigers?

Are his tigers burning bright? His eves and monkeys seethe with contempt.

This painting is of a sad child with a doll and a flower; all three radiate more violence than any animal I've ever seen.

War-child on a black horse, a tiger-like bride attending her wedding. It looks like a funeral.

Wild plants and pensive beasts; equal parts of the Rousseau jungle universe.

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Jay's visit left me inspired. He's a radical ecoorganizer, a committed combatant, constantly on the move: from country to country, river to river, one city to the next. Wherever he travels, he spreads his snakelike angelic grace. Jay is an ancient child who asks for no more than a snatch of civilized conversation, and has no hard feelings if you cannot keep pace when he raises questions about morality-mind you, he was a student of Northrop Frye. His skin is stretched taut over a fine Christian frame. Such refinement leads him into territory he occasionally finds too challenging to bear. Strong, subtle, but brittle - that's Jay. There are a few photos of the two of us together taken during odd moments in our scattered lives. My favorite shows us on the Staten Island Ferry, our eyes facing Manhattan; behind us stands the Statue of Liberty; I am disheveled, my hair is gone with the wind. Lady Liberty appears even less elegant.

Restoration work has her surrounded by wooden skeletons. She seems less a classical figure than cubist, like one of Fernand Leger's deconstructed darlings.

I met Jay in Boulder, Colorado at a writer's conference devoted to the work of Jack Kerouac in the summer of 1982. He was heading to Key West and Hawaii, while I was on my way to nowhere. Well, in fact, no. I was on my way to this nation's capital, to pursue graduate studies in comparative literature and linguistics. That is, I had my sights set somewhere. It was days after my second abortion and we could not 15

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fuck. For the next year, while I sat alone in my underheated basement apartment in Washington, D.C., legs crossed on the concrete floor, I grieved over this inopportune timing. This was the year in my life when I ate little other than peanuts and talked politics with my law student roommates. It was also the year I wrote the poem ‘17 Ways To Be Happy’ which was always a favorite at readings. Many people who discovered that poem in a mimeo magazine later became dear friends; friends of the first category, as I have described earlier herein. Anyway, because of that poem that year was not a total waste, though it was marred by acute loneliness, confused existential longings, and fallout from my attempts to accept indeterminate ways of thinking.

Jay was lovely. He visited D.C. once on his way to China, where he stayed for a year, until he concluded that Mao's poetry was no better than Trudeau's, and so he packed his things and returned to Canada, where he has since largely remained. Jay has a peasant's chin, and is not easily bothered by the grim reality of the city. While visiting my cramped New York studio apartment, he wrote a poem about the beautiful arrangement of my clothes as they were draped to dry over every conceivable piece of furniture. And he was the one who had no qualms about trapping a mouse in a paper bag and taking it out to the street; I'd been battling that mouse for a month; his solution was grand and Alexandrian.

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Still, Jay was not K., who also visited me in Washington, and stayed with me there. K. worked in Senator Cape's office for some months, and because of the professional association kept a photograph of the Senator in the bathroom. It worked wonderfully as a laxative; no one ever complained of constipation in our house. Well, that was K. I feel miserable and divine at the same time when I think of K. Though he is so far away, and I am even further away in his heart. I would do anything for him to open it for me again; I would even die. But he won't, so it seems. No matter. I'll die anyway - if only not to think of K. for a while.

In death, I prefer to consider Jay, or the stream of acquaintances that pass through my life, as I jump through hoops, or gallop to the tune of a paying master. Or make an appearance at the peculiar phenomenon known as writer's conferences - which invariably attract the dullest possible crowd. After attending yet another of these writer's conferences, I wrote the following pages. I was fortunate that this affair did not, in the end, shipwreck my heart once again. *** It was not until the 1890s that scientists identified a singular mosquito as the agent that carried yellow fever.

Before then, without an adequate understanding of the disease's cause, nor effective medical procedures to prevent 17

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its damages, fear of the disease was translated smoothly into a hatred of foreigners.

As a major port and immigrant gateway, New York City was especially vulnerable to epidemic diseases from other parts of the world.

In the Lisbon of 1858, a penitential procession through the city during a yellow fever epidemic exemplifies the continued dependence on religious ritual to combat disease, in the absence of a clinically proven treatment. ***

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Hello, my name is...

Vladimir Zivancevic, Tito’s principal hunter & guardian of his grounds

A writer's conference is not to be admired for its literary inelegance, nor for its arid educational atmosphere, nor for the competitive backstabbing that proceeds the presentation of awards to serious writers, authors who yearn for recognition from an indifferent public. However, contrary to my expectations, this particular writer's conference did have its charms. It took place in early spring in upstate New York — at a time that is already summer for the rest of the civilized northern hemisphere - at an attractive small college, 19

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nestled in a distant, mountainous region of the state. It was fated that this conference should bring me enlightenment: for the first time I was being paid for something other than performing my poetry, or the calculated exhibition of my legs. I took that as a sign.

The mountains have a way of healing me. How should I put this? Their presence is holy, holistic; it reaches deep inside and set off waves of whispering undulations that vibrate through my body. The energy of the mountains is a potent hushed whisper. I am drawn to this energy, just as I am drawn to energetic people. And it's true: I am infatuated by the electric charge of energetic people. I am fascinated by the burning flames of the stable and the unstable, the hardened and the fragile - as long as they burn with intensity. But there I sat in a college gymnasium, listening to panelists drone into microphones, a sea of middle class students on folding chairs before them, slowly munching at chicken salad sandwiches - all the candles in their eyes blown out.

Or so it seemed.

I left the gym to return to the hush of the mountains.

The great expanse of green, so much green, green everywhere - obscuring the distant movements of people and cows. I found a perfect spot on the lawn and sat. But the hush was marred by a conversation that drifted across the lawn - someone saying that the key to getting published is the perfect cover letter, since editors won't read 20

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manuscripts. I pushed the words from my ears and lifted up my mind, then shut my eyes tight.

It was then that I spotted a spark of energy. A flame in the form of a face. The face was a smiling face. And the smiling face was smiling at me.

So what should I do with a smiling face such as this?

Capture it in words, reduce its magnificence to syllables, and place it in a story? Or pass on it entirely, say “It's no more than another face; everybody's cursed with one,” and let it go? Or say, on the contrary, “This face is leading me to an unusual place,” and continue to lift my mind to where this face is heading, and follow it? I present this as if I made a choice. But that is just a narrative device. In life, decisions of this sort are rarely presented to us cleanly and even more rarely do they provoke conscious actions in response.

As it happened, later that day I opened my eyes, and before me was the face again. This time the face was fixed upon the face of a Dutch writer, who was fixing me a cup of coffee, stirring in the sugar, and who was quite annoyed by the presence of this other face so close to his. The Dutch face was soft and shapeless, with heavy sinking eye lids that shielded his interior from unpleasant intrusions. This other face was different. It was a man's face. Calm. Gaunt. The shape of its head was bizarrely chiseled while its profile refused to assume the same expression the face had when looking forward. This face would not 21

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collaborate with itself. Nor would the hair above the face agree to participate in a coherent statement attempted by features below the scalp. The hairs themselves were in fierce disagreement with each other, what few hairs there were, since they were cropped short, though erratically, as if by a blind barber in a hurry. Or, perhaps, it was this: the self behind the face chose to cut his own hair with a steak knife, intending to draw blood. Below the scalp, the face had no trace of hair, none at all, like a woman's.

The face parted its lips to speak: “Would you know where I could buy those books they talked about at the panel discussion?”

“At any bookstore in New York,” I replied.

“But I live in Los Angeles,” said the face. “Nobody reads in L.A.” Ah. So the face resides in Los Angeles. Yet another face from celluloid- obsessed Los Angeles, trying to make it with words at a writer's conference. “Why not have a bookstore to order them for you?” I said. Then the face disappeared.

That evening, in the middle of a long panel discussion, I opened my eyes yet again and found myself dreaming of that certain face. I leaned forward and heard myself speaking into a microphone. “In Yugoslavia the tendency is for younger authors to accumulate the recommendations of their elder colleagues. A good word can go a long way, 22

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particularly in publishing. Like buying a blue chip stock on Wall Street, you receive regular dividends.”

Following me at the microphone, the face held everyone's rapt attention for two hours. The face appeared youthful, honest, aquiline and bony. A face from the Russian aristocracy as described by Dostoevsky, or painted by Rembrandt; ageless, unshaken by passing centuries.

I remember saying, “I would like to interview someone with a face like yours.”

The face would not be taken at face value. Rather, it wrote its phone number on a scrap of paper and said it would be on the plane that night to Los Angeles.

I heard someone ask the question: “What's the advantage of getting published by a multinational media giant?”

I glanced at the dynamic yet soothing face before me, and found myself saying, “You hope to reach a larger audience....” But what audience would that be? An anonymous audience that collapses into the shape of a single face.

We inhabit the intricate mansions of our own universes - mine is truly lovely, with medusa snakes on its bookshelves; from the window I can see yellow parachutes drifting from propeller planes across a clear blue sky; they float into the scattered green of distant mountains, where my friends live under the rule of a government of their making; in my utopia, 23

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there are no graves to visit, and births are delivered with ease to caring mothers. As writers we gaze out from our universes in the direction of one reader, a single face; within that face is contained the impersonal world - all that is outside ourselves, in its entirety.

The face before me had no parachute, nor an independent government, but it was animated and free. It stared at me carrying art orange leather bag and smile. It wore a jacket with the word AUM embroidered on the back At first this smile seemed foolish and innocent, unbecoming for the strong trunk beneath it.

'Tell me about the literary market in L.A.,� I ask. The literary heritage of Los Angeles is a sad American story, having nearly killed Faulkner, Brecht and Bunuel, as it most certainly disposed of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The face offers me a joint and a stroll. “You know nothing about how writers live in this country,� it says. I consider the possibility that the rich are always petty, while the poor learn to be generous - but decide not to encourage any jingoistic rebuttals, so don't reply. Rather, I discover that the face contains a blue vastness in the landscape of its cheeks.

The face breathes, meditates. I see that it has battles of its own, lands of its own to inhabit, many deaths of its own to forget - perhaps even my own death among them.

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“So what do you do?” I ask, persisting in my lovely pursuit. It would have been even lovelier had it replied, “I teach people how to catch the air between their fingers.” But this face was heavy with memories, and remained silent.

What happened next is lost in a blackout. Words began to turn hazy and lose their precision. At one point the face, moved by my tears, jumped to his feet and danced between empty chairs - as if we were in a Himalayan spa rather than in the polished, polite climate of a provincial American bar. Why was I crying? I can't say. Somehow I am always unexpectedly affected by these writer's conferences. In fact, now that I think of it, there was another writer's conference, a conference that introduced me to another face, one that also touched me deeply. I nearly lost my life for it. That face was starting its car. I stood in the glare of the headlights. “Please don't go, don't run me over, I love you, I love you....” It was snowing and I was covered in white. What a scene that was....

“You don't seem serious to me,” I tell this new face, Then I add, “ Actually, you're quite transparent.” We are at a train station. We have made it as far as the platform. The train is pulling in. The face runs to the far end of the platform, away from me, leaning his head over the edge toward the tracks. The train rushes forth. For a moment I think disaster is inevitable - we are quite drunk - and I gasp, but the face pulls away just when I was sure the train would separate it from 25

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its body. “You are an illusionist,” I say to the face, later.

But the face is too shy to admit it belongs to a performer.

The face and I sit in a train bound for New York City, eating peanuts that the face brought back from a solitary, middle-aged woman in the compartment next to ours. The woman empties pill boxes onto a plastic plate. The face says, “This lady is so well preserved,” as if she were an antique couch. I pretend to watch the passing dark landscapes, while in fact I peer at the face's reflection in the train window.

It's appearance is exceptionally refined. It says little, but its few words are convincing. Here's a game: If you convince me, then I'll convince you. We played it like masters. Throughout I resisted: You can't possibly convince me of anything, since there remains nothing left for me to believe. But the face assured me: I am the face that convinces; I am, in fact, your face. It was a subtle maneuver. He continued, without speaking a word: With the movements of my face I will activate the wave-like motions of your mind. See how your legs come together.

Now they are spread wide, and I will put my face between them.

This was not a typical tongue lashing. This was a love in honor of nothingness. The face became my face, which I deleted in an act of sorcery: My lips spell out insignificant truths, which lead you through paths of ice and fire. Your lips are no more than frozen memories.

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The train slowed to a stop, and the conductor announced that our arrival at Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan.

The face walks me to the subway. Already I miss it, though its body is still with me.

“Come to my reading this weekend,” I say, not bothering to mention that every performance I give is no larger than life itself.

The face embraces my thought. Of course, it will not come. I see it smile at me, again, but this time flat and without feeling. The face's owner takes my hand.

“You're such a busy person,” it says.

Black out.

Another face appears from the crowd. I gasp for air.

The light is blinding. I am on a subway heading downtown, left alone to stir my perpetual confusion.

Luckily, I am no longer invited to writer's conferences. I am equally glad I've stopped dreaming of snakes. In my last snake dream I was bitten several times by one of those gray monsters. These were sexless bites, cold and painful. They startled me awake, where I lay trying to drive snakes from my mind. Since then, they've stayed effectively repressed.

I'm also glad Beau has chosen to leave me alone. He described it as a moral decision. His explanation hurt me more than any real snake bite would have, simply because it was stupid. Too stupid to even laugh about.

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He said, “You (meaning I) are always trying to prove your intellectual superiority, because you (meaning I) are so poor you need to prove that you have something (meaning my intellect) that can make you feel superior to me, You (meaning I, again) burden everyone with it (meaning my intellect).�

Well, dear reader, if you feel similarly burdened, you are invited to unburden yourself, and put this book down now. For the rest of you, I shall introduce a twist.

28

Vienna Circle

I wake up early one June morning to a tableaux vivant from the late 19th century—humidity hangs in the air. It is a wretched summer day in Vienna, and I am greeted by a blurry Viennese sun and the clip-clop of horse’s hooves against the cobblestones. I have a smallish, private apartment near the Ringstrasse. It was recently purchased by my ailing grandfather, who had even more recently passed away. Among his final acts was this attempt to cheer me, since I also felt poorly, and I had been among his favorites.

I wake with a chest pain and a headache. June is certainly the most lovely month for intimate strolls in 29

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Vienna, but the sun never relieves me. I draw the curtain shut to stifle the light. Wandering to my heavy walnut dresser, I open the top drawer and find a folder labeled “Must Read.” Inside the folder is a recent issue of Ver Sacrum, an inflammatory publication that is best kept hidden. The way that people gossip... you should never provide enemies ammunition. The newspaper was given to me by Karl, who insisted that I page through it with the greatest attention.

Why do I care so much about his opinion? Once I was dependent, much too dependent, upon his approval; this led me to shrink from ideas asserted by others.

The effect it had on me was awful. Even worse, it made me want to see him every day, all the time though I was supposed to be past that sort of impulse.

Count Von B., now my husband of three years, would disapprove. Still, not a moment since our wedding has elapsed without K. in my thoughts; nor had he stopped thinking of me. From this source flows my exquisite misery.

K. is just like me in one respect: his “joie de vivre”. It overwhelms. It is a dynamo that electrifies the street.

Each time I recall this quality, it brings back the day K. and I met. I would give all my riches - and certainly every last gold coin of my husband's wealth -to own that day again, to live through and experience it in nuanced detail. It was June then, too. The third, in the year of 1896. I was enjoying the Prater all by myself, 30

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soaking in the afternoon sun, strolling the park paths, attuned to the Bohemian uncertainty and sadness evident on the faces of those who passed by. I tried to imagine the strange lives of Moravian immigrants new to Vienna. An intense young man in a worn dark jacket and a copy of the Arbeiter Zeitung under his arm asked me where in the park the Social Democrats were gathering. I told him that, despite my interest in politics, it was a shame to waste the first gorgeous day of summer at a political discussion.

He looked at me, annoyed, and said I was “a petty bourgeois thinker.” That was a surprise. I mean, he accused me of being a “thinker!” What an assumption!

It implied intimacy, though we were less than strangers. I became curious; also, he charmed me. At the same time I was angry at his presumption, and was ready to make a bitter reply. But I was, in fad, a very lonely thinker at that time. I made no effort to grow close to others - absorbed as I was by the intricate lines of my own thoughts, as they painted themselves in delicate patterns along the walls of my own cage. My friends credited me for being content in my loneliness.

The strange man persisted: “You probably suffer as a lace maker, or a flower girl, or a dance teacher, and refuse to listen to a single word that could improve your life. Not only your life, but the lives of millions of young women like yourself who suffer from serious,” 31

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he emphasized the word 'serious', “problems, here in our beloved capital.”

“What's in your pocket?” I asked. He produced Theodor Herzl’s book “On The Jewish Question,” published the previous year in Vienna.

“Take it,” he said. “And read it. But you must return it to me in three days at the address stamped inside.”

I remember how I almost choked at his impertinence.

Angry, I asked him why I should read it. Was he a schoolmaster handing out assignments? Still, his voice was very sweet. “So I can see you again,” he said.

And he did. We continued to meet. As he proved on that first day, K. knows how to get his way with me.

By which I mean, he knows how to lead me back to reality - to the challenging, charged, changing, boisterous, intellectual, unpredictable, energetic rush of the modern world. During the years of 1896, 97 and 98, K. enrolled me in a small circle of doctors and students that included Sigmund Freud, whose recent book on dreams had been greeted with shock and skepticism, though we agreed it was disturbing, illuminating. He introduced me to a group of younger artists that included hardly a new talent Klimt and Kokoschka. He encouraged my interest in the writings of Lily Braun, a champion of women's rights who had risen to prominence inside the Social Democratic party, of which I also became a member. For my part, I know I succeeded in kindling K.'s interest in the theater. I convinced him of Arthur Schnitzler's 32

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brilliance, and brought his attention to Karl Kraus's funny little plays, which K. later parodied quite successfully; he even won an award for one of them. “I wrote it out of boredom,” he'd say.

Often K. and I would go to the opera, and, along with our friend Max, laugh at the spectators, who threw stale cabbages and rotten apples at the musicians who earnestly performed Schoenberg’s early cacophonous pieces. Those were wonderful days.

It took some time before we discovered the rare quality of physical attraction we felt for one another. It would be no exaggeration to say we thought it something holy. But words are not adequate to describe these things. What I can say is that it did not appear at first. Only after the arrival of Count von B. did it become apparent. The Count threatened our carefree encounters, and brought our easy enjoyment to an end. I remember that after Count von B.'s first visit to my family home, I drew a caricature titled “A Crow Comes Knocking” and showed it to K., who laughed; it was such an accurate portrait of my clumsy new suitor.

Count von B. was an acquaintance of my father's. He wore a monocle, and walked with exquisite German rigidity. The street vendors outside our house found him intimidating. Children would sneak behind him and shout, “Herr Dreck, give us a penny!” He would jump, startled. Then, to discourage them from rubbing their dirty hands against his immaculate, sleek, hand 33

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tailored topcoat, cut from the finest Austrian wool, he'd toss a few coins into the sewer. The hungry children would plunge after them, searching for hours for pennies down that dark hole.

But I only laughed at the Count. He was not a man I could take seriously. I had no inkling of how the future would unfold, or how significant his visits would become.

My father and Count von B. would sit in our parlor and sip cognac. Subtly, the Count would remind my father of debts owed to him. Occasionally, he'd imply that these debts would disappear were my father to place his daughter at the Count's disposal. At the time, I knew of these indiscrete advances, but thought nothing of them. The prospect seemed ridiculous. He was not young. He was slow. He was unbearably stiff.

On occasion his left cheek would twitch – an involuntary nervous action that shattered the composure of his face, undoing the forced coherence of its surface, and revealing a shallow sense of selfimportance I never could embrace.

But little did I know of the volume of my father's debts. How little I knew of his life in general!

One thing I was sure of: I never thought that the Count's presence in my house would alienate K. But Count von B.'s visits led K. to suspect that I was plotting to marry the Count, for his wealth, while keeping K. as a lover, for my pleasure. The thought of 34

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such a duplicitous life filled K. with rage. More than once I had to soothe his jealous fits.

The Count, for his part, encouraged my public meetings with social democratic friends, who, like K., he considered his enemies. This is how his perversity expressed itself. He would tell my father, “Certainly, your lovely young daughter should spend time in the company of those her own age. They could never make her love me any less.” Such presumptions sprang from the sense of power his money gave him.

He looked no deeper than the surface of things, and in all surfaces saw reflections of his formal, immaculate, miniscule world. He was pleased with what he perceived as the leisurely progress of our courtship.

He handled me like a china doll.

Then one day, anxious and frustrated, I remarked to him brusquely, “Your Excellency,” I always referred to him by a title, “I suggest you don't look too closely at the contents of my head. What you'd find may disturb you.”

Before that day, I don't think Count von B. had even noticed that there was a head on the delicate trunk of my body. Or, if he did, he must only have observed the ridge of my nose rising from the landscape of my face, framed - as he'd quote from a poem found for him by a paid advisor - by “locks aflame with burning crimson.” The Count was warned by some in his circle about my unconventional inclinations, but he paid them no attention. He was a blind goat, ambling in a 35

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meadow, chewing on the grass, unaware of the poisonous roots that were everywhere around him.

Inevitably, though, the time came when K.'s visits were considered an insult to the Count's dignity, and my father ordered me to stop seeing him, or else be banished from the house and exiled from the family.

Here is how it happened: It was winter. K. and I went skating. The brisk, clean sharpness of the air enhanced the clarity in our hearts. After skating for three hours, as it grew dark, we returned to my house. We sat in my room, in the candle light. K. unlaced my shoes, slowly, pulling long at the laces. Then he began to massage my feet, gently, with the tips of his fingers.

Then he was massaging my ankles, my thighs. Soon he was massaging my back, then my breasts, my forehead. My pulse quickened. He was massaging my arms, and they became K.'s arms. Sweat gathered on my skin. It was K.'s sweat, it smelled sweetly of his breath. I began to cry. I screamed. I bit hard into my hand, but it was not my hand, it was K.'s thigh, and he spoke a single word that reverberated like a cry, it convulsed through me and I inhaled hard, I couldn't catch my breath.

Then the door swung open. My father stood in the doorway. Everything stopped. We heard the sound of wax dripping from the candlestick. “Get out, you swine!� my father barked.

K. left. I was unable to move. I was appalled, embarrassed, but in such a sweet agony that, for all I 36

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cared, the world could have come to an end that minute. In some ways it did.

From then on, Count von B.'s visits to our house became more frequent. I couldn't prevent him from asking my father for my hand. He took my hand from me, and buried it in his feudal graveyard.

There it remained, until yesterday, when after three years of silence I saw K. again, quite unexpectedly, in the street. His sorrow was so sweet and obvious.

Three years, but it felt as if no time had passed. I had to invite him to my apartment the next day, the private apartment that was a gift from my grandfather. K. did not refuse the invitation. He handed me his copy of a new arts journal, Ver Sacrum, and insisted I read it thoroughly.

I take the newspaper from the drawer where I'd kept it hidden, and leaf through its pages. Something catches my eye: an announcement for a performance

by Alban Berg, scheduled for tonight. K. and I had seen him a number of times, and adored his music.

When K. arrives this afternoon, I'm sure he'll certainly bring tickets, his way to demonstrate his musical interest in my heart!

Later, there is a knock on my door. A servant announces the arrival of “Herr R.� Puzzling, but I am relieved to see K. standing in the foyer. He had presented himself as an acquaintance of the Count's to fool the servant, and to prevent unnecessary gossip from reaching my husband. He smiles at me with 37

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genuine affection as he enters the room. The servant brings us coffee. Not a word passes about our long silence, the aching separation. Is such talk even necessary? K. produces two tickets to tonight's concert, which makes a far more eloquent statement.

When it is time to leave, the servant brings us our jackets, then steps outside to hail a coach. A carriage pulls in front of the building. From it steps Count von B., who has picked this inappropriate moment to visit his ailing wife. Unfortunately, he can see at a glance that my illness has abated. And when he recognizes K. beside me, he leaps to the conclusion as to why.

'This will not be tolerated!” he shouts, cursing, storming past us into the building. He turns and grabs my wrist and pulls me close. “I smell his cologne on your skin!” the Count seethes - though K. in fact never touched me. “Get out of here now!” he shouts at K. He rants. He writhes. Once again I witness K. being dismissed from my life. This time I refused to allow it.

I jerk my arm free of the Count's grip and follow K. into the street, turning one last time to spit in the Count's direction. I join K. in the carriage, and the coachman has the horses pull away.

I throw my arms around K. At last, we are alone. He brushes my hair with his finger tips and looks at me long.

“My dear, now you are really free,” he says. “A woman like you should lead her own life, and not be trapped by the demands of tyrannical men. You'll be 38

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so much happier, on your own. We will all be happier!

I have to tell you the reason for my own joy. I am soon to wed Fraulein Gustava Schleeman. I came today to ask for your approval.�

Black out. *** Cholera and tuberculosis were the most deadly afflictions in the 19th century. While scientists sought preventive vaccines and curative drugs, social reformers and doctors tried to control infectious diseases by working for better housing and nutrition, cleaner streets, purer water, and improved personal hygiene. *** It's a piss-poor afternoon. No one knows where to go or what to do with themselves. They putz around their apartments, listless and bored. The sky is gray and heavy with rain that won't fall. I wish it would rain so I could continue with this massive, amorphous letter to no one. I wish it would snow so I could write poetry and sleep in my sleeping bag alone. I wish it were an Indonesian summer. I wish I had a gram of hash. I wish I was in Kandahar with an Afghani hound on my lap. I wish I owned an imperial Mogul palace. I wish I could afford to buy an Indian meal. I wish that a Pakistani princess arranged for a special theatrical performance given only for me. But it's just a 39

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piss-poor afternoon, gray and lazy, and these things will never be mine.

They will be. Beau will call. All is immaculate. He tells me that they're staging a new production of Jesus Christ Superstar, though Jesus will not appear in it.

Not this time. Never again. I wish I could stop thinking of our departed JC. I wish I could escape from thinking in this language. I wish I had never been past perfect. Was once upon a time here, like Beckett, and now what? Words like hammers come pounding from my mouth. No. Not I. Not I am an old woman - though am quite old, a woman, with feeling, as long as it is necessary to feel.

In his advanced age, Allen Ginsberg says: “Everything I've written so far is shit.� Why such modesty? It's unexpected from someone who once worked in advertising.

Joyce in Trieste. Stein in Paris. Hemingway in Barcelona. I am a cow.

I must remember to continue to abuse my sense of personal worth. Which is buried. Modesty. That is a key concept in a healthy civilization. Modesty in drag.

Where does that take me? All those editorial offices. In the corner, my cat takes a piss. He is Egyptian, and wears a fashionable fur coat. Ur fashion. New York City theater. I wish I had a play written, something to play with. A gum ball for my friends to chew: ah, she's so sweet, she's written a play. I read that Dennis Brutus is granted amnesty.

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My love in drag.

It's raining dogs and body parts. Though I hate violence, it's not too demanding to picture it. You should not be scared of abstract thinking.

This passage is dangerous. This passage is a riff.

This silence is wide open. Subtext slides away in spirals. Well, you can't have it all, my friend says to me, and he is gay. While I am heavy and consider perhaps putting a period here, preferring at the moment only commas, and the stress of words themselves, and perhaps one semi-colon; perhaps a new paragraph soon, I can imagine the paragraph, I see it and know what it will say, but suddenly it bares its teeth, a vicious thing, and I realize it's looking right at me, challenging me with its resistance, to my best intentions, then it snarls a tease, before it disappears, No, you can't have it all!

Black Out *** Sometimes it becomes unbearable. Sometimes it drips with liquid pain. Sometimes this struggle with language is overwhelming. It has me backed into a corner. I want to quit, right now, return home to Yugoslavia. Walk the streets there full of lilacs and chestnuts. Rest peacefully in the decayed apartments of the European frontier. Listen to the cuckoo's song in the distance.

41

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My father grows older everyday. Now he's 73. Still, he's youthful, radiating the energy that made people think him mad when they were all young. The other day we spoke on the phone. He said: 'The bastards next door cut down the lilac trees we planted when you were a kid.” Back then, children from down the street would sneak into our yard in the evening and pluck the pedals. My father would chase them away, and I would cry with joy and fear. Real action had come to our quiet garden!

“Don't dwell on it,” my father said, referring to the lilacs. 'Think of better things in life,” he suggested, implying something practical, like the stable career he'd like me to have. But there I was, on the phone, fifty thousand miles away, or more, thinking of those fallen lilac trees, and the children who stole their blossoms. And I also thought of K., and how happy he must be, enjoying the cool weather of the Bay Area in Dreamifornia, inhaling the fragrance of the gardenias I once described in a poem about San Francisco.

Now I am crying. I hate to cry. It's demeaning. The tears turn into a scream. I scream at K., “Can't you hear me?” I know I shouldn't dwell on the lilacs, or on K. I should relieve myself of all thoughts about the West Coast.

Sometimes it becomes unbearable. Sometimes it's from the smell of coriander. Sometimes it's from the shade of a pine alley. Sometimes it's from the crush of 42

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a bar full of people. And sometimes I wish it would simply stop. And release myself.

Other times, I sit still and breathe steady, and am at ease.

K. must be shooting his movie by now. He left New York with a melodramatic script for a ten minute video about how I abandoned him one night outside the Horseshoe Bar, on the corner of East 7th Street and Avenue B. We had a fight. He was upset. In his script he put the clumsiest and the most sentimental words in my mouth. Now he's probably framing phony images of me between his dreamy fingers. Trying his camera from several different angles, training it on his fashionably pale, skinny girlfriend of the moment, who is portraying me - though her brain is the size of a pea. But still, somehow, the joke is on me. Perhaps simply because I am not somebody else.

I wish that this melodrama would end. I can't wait for the credits to scroll up the screen. I have no need for fallen lilac trees, nor for K.'s anemic friend pretending to be me in his awkward, awful imitation of reality.

Breath Unit.

Sometimes, though, it is quite bearable. This struggle with language energizes me. The melodrama of my life inspires an inexplicable amusement. The thought of San Francisco gardenias melts my heart. My father 43

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chiding my impracticality makes me feel loved. The same dosage of the same medicine, but, from moment to moment, entirely different results. Where is the science in this, I wonder? Is such science even possible, I wonder? I'm thankful it's not.

And so I continue to bear it my impoverished standard of living, and this particular midnight madness, by which I mean this poetics of absence. By which I mean that negation is an affirmation. Well, no.

I mean, rather, the moon in Sue Coe's paintings, huge and stark against the blackest black sky over South Africa. I'm sorry, I mean over South America. I mean, simply South, anywhere South. Since I am North.

Since I sleep late into the mornings, and can't tell the East from the West.

How high in the atmosphere am I? In the afternoon, I travel from door to door in the lowest parts of the city.

After all, I earn my rent by selling listings for a neighborhood map.

What am I then? Let me define myself: I am a salesperson.

Breath Unit.

My average day as a salesperson begins with theater.

I improvise from a basic script: Good morning. Are you the manager of this restaurant? Of this boutique? Of this travel agency, flower shop, whorehouse? Oh, I see. May I speak to 44

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the manager, then? Oh, I see. When will he be back?

No, I don't mind waiting.

You are the manager of this fine travel agency? Of this exquisite flower shop? Of this divine whorehouse? Oh, good. I know you must be busy, but this will only take a minute. Let me show you our map. Yes, it's of this neighborhood. Yes, it's very well designed. And waterproof, that's right. You are quite observant.

Our map is sold to 25,000 of your neighbors, each one a potential customer. All the best shops have bought listings in our next edition. Excuse me, which whorehouse do you refer to? Oh, yes. Of course they bought a listing.

It would be a shame for you to miss this fantastic business opportunity. How sad it would be if we printed our map without including your fine establishment, leaving you ignored and forgotten. But for only 70 dollars you too can take part. That investment will surely pay off, and quickly, with summer here, and tourists flocking the streets. Our map is for sale at all the popular tourist spots.

And it works. Of course it does. Look at me, I'm the perfect example. I arrived in this country just last week, and before yesterday I didn't even know what the word SoHo meant in your language. Then I got this map. And then I bought a fantastic, fashionable handbag from a boutique just around the corner from here. Yes, it was expensive, absolutely. How could I 45

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afford it, on my meager commission from listings sales? Well, perhaps I misspoke. I stole it. But still, if it wasn't for this map, I would never have known that store existed. Yes, you must go there. It's wonderful.

Remember, we only choose the most distinguished enterprises. And everyone in the office agreed, your whorehouse fits right in.

Breath unit.

Of course, you don't have to buy the listing right away. Take this map and think it over. And while you're at it, think of the starving children in Nigeria.

Think of the Biafra housewives whose bellies, swollen with hunger, their husbands cannot touch. Think about the woman sleeping in a cardboard box that you pass each day on the sidewalk. Think of the slashed eyes and gangrenous limbs and reeking unabated bodies lying only a few blocks from here on the Bowery.

Please think of these people, because they are among the anointed. While I think of Jesus again. His grandmother owned a bar that was shut down by the city because of its poor sanitation. All of us have our reasons, why we live and die.

It's a muggy New York July.

Breath unit.

In the dark, I light a black candle and close my eyes.

Before me is my image, reflected in a red lacquered 46

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Japanese mirror. My reflection is old, wrinkled. It speaks to me in German. I grow uncomfortable.

When I was a child, my parents spoke German to each other whenever they wanted to keep a secret. I was capable of such obnoxious behavior; this was how they tried to control me. When guests visited, I asked things like, “Why does daddy say you're boring?” But even in German, my parents found it hard to keep the truth from me. With a child's intuition, I'd understand them, regardless. I would question my aunt, “What does 'Seine Tante' mean?” Her face turned crimson.

“Who mentioned that phrase?” she'd ask.

“First tell me what it means,” I would reply, “then I'll tell you who said it.”

I was a manipulative kid, and strong-willed. But since I was pretty, my family adored me, and let me get away with the wildest behavior. At age seven I smuggled a book about ancient Egypt out of my parents' library, and copied Queen Nefertiti’s portrait onto the kitchen wall with crayons. Then, when I thought about what I'd done, I shook with fear that my parents would punish me when they came home. I hid in a closet, expecting the worst. But, instead, my father gave me a big hug. Life is unpredictable, I thought.

“Life is quite predictable,” my grandmother would say, “and it always turns out for the best.”

Grandmother was born to be a grand opera singer.

When she was in her late eighties, senile, she stood on 47

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the street singing arias from Rigoletto, and other operas popular in her youth. She was clearly having the time of her life. But she insisted that she never regretted leaving the Viennese opera to marry my grandfather. “I wouldn't have it any other way.”

But I could tell she secretly grieved over her abandoned dreams and aborted career. When singing to her grandchildren she often offered us advice, wisdom acquired from her disappointments. I would console her. “When I grow up, granny, I'll be an opera singer just like you!”

She'd hug me tight, then fix my little dress. “No, my dear,” she'd say, “instead you must study languages.”

I'd ask her why I had to study languages.

Grandmother would sigh. “Because knowing languages can save your life. With languages you can always escape to another country, even if you have no money. Also, look at me: if I didn't speak German, your grandfather would never have married me!”

Also spracht the old Jewess; she died with a smile on her lips.

My parents never talked of the Second World War. During the war, my father 's family hid in bunkers in Belgrade. My father was expelled from six different high schools because he was a Communist; his father, an anarchist, never disapproved of his politics. When the Nazi's occupied the city, my father joined the underground resistance, planting bombs in Gestapo headquarters. I once asked him why he didn't join the 48

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partisans and hide in the woods. “Are you kidding?” he replied. 'That would have been too easy!

Everybody went into the woods. Someone had to stay here and screw up those Gestapo bastards!”

I don't understand my father, but sometimes I comprehend my need to write in different languages.

Sometimes I understand my need to live here, among the mice, searching for Leo Trotsky's old tenement home, here in the lowest part of New York City. I say to myself, I'm not capable of doing anything that my family would fundamentally disapprove. Though that may or may not be true. But I am their product, after all.

And, of course, I have this singular heart to consider, with each step I take. And I have to maintain my deep, steady breath in the maelstrom. And I have to entertain these eyes, eager for new pleasures as they watch the world spin round.

And it occurs to me: if I must speak, why not in different languages?

49

It happened on MacDougal Street.

Me and Beau circa early 1990s 50

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Death approached in the form of a young man with a leisurely walk and a blonde mustache like a seal's that hung over the edges of his mouth. His eyes carried the weight of an inexpressible sadness. He was wounded and gentle, and exhausted in the manner of an opium eater killing time before catching the last train to White Plains, in the suburbs, where nothing ever happened - no sorrow, no hope, no fear. Such a tired expression it was, it stayed with me for days.

The morning before, I met Lew for breakfast at a dinner. He played bass in a band called the Grammons, and was also versed in the telling of unusual tales. He said, “I bought a bottle of wine and went to see an old friend, Larry, and guess what happened.”

I asked what.

“I found him dead in his armchair.”

“He died of a stroke?”

“Larry was twenty-five.”

“Let's change the subject,” I said.

“No, I need to talk about this!” He pounded his fist on the table. Everyone in the dinner turned to look.

“I'm scared!”

I tried to calm Lew with philosophy. “You know, Cocteau said that the themes of life and death repeat every century with new variations.”

But Lew didn't listen. He gazed at me sadly, his mind a million miles away. “You know, it's awful that I can't 51

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fuck anymore. Everyone is a suspect! How can I relax?”

Black out. *** “Now we will begin our screening of Beverly Hills Cop. Please lower the shades of your windows. Thank you.”

Alone in an airplane, on my way to Bolinas. I think of Harvey. Has he changed? Could he still love me through the others, or find the others in me, and love them in this person? Where has he disappeared to, since his last attempt at departure? Is he still inside the belly of the whale, trying to light a candle and find an escape route?

Five years ago, I threw myself in front of his car. A ridiculous action, but it was necessary. Just as using a car instead of your own legs is ridiculous, but necessary. Just as loving Harvey proved to be a painfully ridiculous but necessary experience. It crystallized into a diamond of illuminating torture.

Not unlike the act of writing this text. A torture of real beauty. And not unlike like the bagel with lox spread I treated myself to last night, bought from a 24-hour shop on East Houston Street to reward myself for finishing the 40th page of this exquisitely torturing enterprise. Satisfying pleasures can result from unlikely sources.

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The other day I had dinner with Ms. Emma Khayam, who arrived from Jerusalem intent on rescuing me from the lowest point of my Lower East Side life. She buzzed my door without calling in advance. I was in the midst of my usual disarray and had no time to affect appearances. After inspecting every corner of my apartment, with its sagging ceiling, warped doors and sloping floors, she exclaimed, “How can you stand it? People offer you fame, they offer you money.

Instead, you choose roaches and headaches! Only you and Louise would live like this.”

“How is Louise?” I ask, trying to change the subject.

“Next I fly to Amsterdam to take care of her.

Someone has to save the world's poetry!” Emma is a woman on a mission. She scoured my apartment with her eyes full of disapproval. Then she subjected me to a long, concerned stare. I appreciate attention, but I don't like being ex-rayed, so I went about my business. She watched me for a while without saying a word.

When she had apparently concluded that I was beyond redemption, she made us both Turkish coffee.

While I sipped, she read me her 563rd Peace Manifesto. In Jerusalem, she is an activist.

Later, we went with Beau on a tour of three former synagogues now serving as nightclubs.

After midnight we returned to my apartment. Emma, telling us about a group of Israeli children on a peace march, cried movingly into her handkerchief. Beau 53

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was affected by her maternal beauty. “You are so smart and sensitive,” he exclaimed. “Emma, you should be my third world correspondent!”

Emma asked him gently, “What would you like me to write?”

Beau thought for a moment. “Something international,” he said, finally. “And funny. I don't want any terrible stories about Sephardim being kept out of medical school, that kind of thing. People hate to read about that. I want something that's enchanting.

Jewish folk tales from faraway lands.”

Emma glared at him. “But I am a fighter for peace.”

Beau wasn't sure what she meant.

The phone rang. It was Allen Ginsberg, a friend of Emma's; what's more, a comrade — these were two wizened poet warriors who shared more than a few political battles. “Ach, there's nothing new on this earth!” Emma screamed into the phone when Allen asked her how she was.

After hanging up, when their long conversation was finished, Emma yawned, then invited me to yet another writers' conference - this one in Jerusalem — and left for her hotel. She took with her my letter to Louise, which was, in fact, just an empty envelope with my love for Louise inside. Louise, you see, is an experienced teacher in the Art of Emptiness. I gave her, I felt, the perfect gift.

In 1979, Louise introduced me to the writings of Henri Michaux, to whom I became devoted, and 54

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opened my eyes to the art of letter writing. We would sit together in her Amsterdam apartment, eating sesame crackers sprinkled with mescaline, and she would play the sarangi. Louise is a supremely musical being. She played so beautifully, the windows and doors of the room graced by her performance would cry for joy, flying open to Louise's music, swinging merrily on their hinges in time with her beating foot.

It's true that wooden objects rarely act in this way, but that's because they are so rarely inspired to do so - that may be why you've never seen it! However, in the presence of Louise playing the sarangi, I have seen this happen for myself.

Since that time, I've carried that song in my heart, and have tried to recapture the spirit of the swinging doors and windows in my own work, in paintings I've done on silk, and performances I've given on stage.

I've tried to imbue my various New York apartments with traces of that ecstatic melody. Strains of Louise's sarong should be everywhere!

Because Louise's love for music is so strong, it created in her a distrust for words, and from this her poetry suffered. She has a dissipated appreciation of the alphabet. Though this appreciation was enough to propel her into writing, words failed her, alas. For the musical Louise, words refused to testify against their own existence, and so often her pages were blank.

The evening after Emma left town I gave a reading in a small, poorly lit bar with exposed wooden beams on 55

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the ceiling, and muffled orange light coming from lamps on white plaster walls. The scene reminded me of London. I dedicated the performance to Louise. But my New York friends, who had come to hear my poetry, felt disappointed after I let them know that I would read fiction for the first time.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” I announced, to capture their attention. “Welcome to this classic English pub.

Tonight I will read poetry, as I always do, but don't be surprised if it turns you into a fiction. Which could happen, since anything is possible. Unless you think, for some reason, that a poem is entirely different from a novel, or vice versa.”

Then I read from this amorphous text, which still threatens to eat its own tail.

When I finished, the applause was deafening. The entire room rose to its feet in a single motion and gave me a standing ovation. People clapped until their hands turned raw like hamburger meat. They cried.

They roared. Saliva slid down the edges of their grinning mouths. They stomped their feet so hard the floor boards splintered. Champagne was stolen from behind the bar, and everyone had a glass. I was the toast of the town, the hit of the Lowest Sector of the City. This text was a success... and it chilled me to the bone. I thought: I must have done something wrong. It occurred to me then: this text is my own death 56

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approaching, its arrival announced in the form of clapping hands and stomping feet.

Have I written about sex yet?

Have I mentioned the Sandinistas?

Have I discussed the nuances of international affairs?

Have I crafted a work of immaculate pornography? Is there enough of everything in this text?

Will it sell?

Will it resist being talked about?

Look at how serious I've become, I surprise myself. *** The Aztec and other Native American communities were nearly wiped out by smallpox.

In Nigeria, the Yorubas made annual offerings to Shopona, the god of smallpox; the Chinese similarly knelt before their goddess, Banzhen.

During Medieval times, according to custom, certain European kings were thought to be able to cure disease with their touch. Those who received the Touch were also awarded gold coins. *** Following the reading, a party wended its way East, from bar to apartment to bar, finally arriving in a park by the water; the salty taste of the Atlantic was in the air. The face from the writer's conference was there.

And some drugs were there, also. As well as a graduate student in history. And Woody Allen's 57

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cousin, too, who invited us back to his home overlooking the water. The ocean had joined our party; a generous presence, soothing to strangers; a calming persistent force from out of a play by Samuel Beckett. Unnamable, yet well known.

The next day was the Fourth of July. I dressed in my finest flapper outfit, like a heroine imagined by a futuristic F. Scott Fitzgerald, added some glitter above my eyes, and smoked cigarettes from an elegant filter six inches long. The evening called for glamour.

Feeling obliged, I provided it.

I returned to the East River with Beau, Max, Joe and some others to watch the fireworks. Here Max and I saw ourselves once again as students from the school of Timothy Leary, and swallowed tabs of acid. We made ourselves open and vulnerable to a rainfall of hues and feelings that managed to soak all that's seen with the subtlety of a great painting.

Each spark was poignant in some way. Bursts of color sprinkled an ecstatic but momentary love over the dark towers of the city. The night sky rattled with abundance and mystery. Every action around us offered itself for examination from within the frame of an artist's eye. Bright greens reds purples blues exploded majestically before fading with sighs into the darkness, returning to the inky dark they came from, and then there was a black out.

The next day Max and I walked - or, rather, floated uptown to the Museum of Modern Art to see 58

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paintings on the inside of buildings, this time, the kind painted on canvases. Here we saw the fine edged pain of Egon Schiele, and wondered who decided to put Kurt Schwitter's drawings in the museum basement.

With summer's arrival a slow moving ambiance had come to New York. The air was thick with moisture. In such weather one cannot think, and so my mind wandered to thoughts of K. and Harvey, both of whom were in California, where the summer air is dry, but nonetheless people have no easy time thinking.

The night of the Fourth, when I took the tender pill, I telephoned K. Suddenly his mind seemed so close to mine. I felt a beautiful seduction was taking place. So I decided to buy a plane ticket.

When I arrived in Berkeley it was already evening, and I rushed to a bar on Telegraph Avenue for a reading arranged for me by my friend Jane. She had just won a prestigious poetry award and was riding quite high. Before I read, we had had a short talk that broke my heart. Over a glass of wine she told me how wonderful it felt to be a queen in the tiny orbit of her poetry universe, as if she had lived all her life to be queen of the scene, rather than a poet. Such a sad aspiration - I have always prized poets over queens.

Jane introduced me and I read from this text to a small number of fairly drunk writers, who responded with only polite applause. Their faces were stone, and afterwards they avoided me. K., however, was in the audience, and to my surprise was quite willing to 59

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listen to the chapters in which he appeared, though I expected that he'd find my depiction of him dubious.

But later he told me that the parts about him he liked, though he disliked the pages about my other friends.

For the next two weeks, K. and I took summer strolls through the streets of Berkeley, a city with more than its share of crazed acid casualties and angry disabled veterans - a town haunted by the ghosts of parties past. We spoke of Paul Virilio and Thomas Pynchon, paged through psychedelic hard-covers in the store of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (a space custom designed for bored suburban matrons looking for a pleasant distraction), discussed the possibility of driving together cross-country, and made plans for producing a play I wrote that next fall in New York. K. confessed how bored he was without me, and how he missed Max's antics. His California life lacked sparkle.

I suggested that when he returned to New York, he and Max should rent an apartment together, since they were such close friends. They were also the same size, wore the same sloppy styles!, and so could save money by sharing clothing.

K. laughed at the suggestion.

One day we crossed the bay from Berkeley to San Francisco, and, after wandering for a while, came to a park that had the markings of a Haitian voodoo sanctuary. The sky was gray, and fog hung low to the ground. Through the mist, I noticed stakes driven into 60

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the dirt near my feet, with colored strips of fabric tied to them.

The trees were hunched over and spoke a mysterious language in a low murmur. Haunted songs from the breeze blown in from the sea sang in the air. I felt that something terrible was about to happen. I embraced K., bringing his heart so close to mine that we were beating as one. His heart was beating for me, and it would never stop beating for me. But he pushed me away abruptly, and looked at me coldly. “I don't think we'll ever be lovers again,� he said. I was shaken, unhappy, but all I said was, 'Tomorrow, if you like, come by and help me transcribe an interview I did with M.T.,� who was our favorite aging poet.

Then I went home and wrote a poem.

I had taped the interview with M.T. just before leaving New York, and Beau was expecting it for the next edition of his paper. M.T. is a beloved genius, celebrated all over the world, though he does have one small, nagging emotional problem: he dislikes women. By that I mean, he dislikes the fact of his own sex, and suffers from an over-identification with his mother. Still, I refused to take his dislike of women personally, and at times he overlooked my femaleness and treated me like a human being. I was told this was rare.

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M.T. once deluded himself into following the example of Sophocles, and devoted his life to inspiring young men to challenge the middle class assumptions of their parents. He'd been famously corrupting the youth for over thirty years, introducing them to forbidden pleasures and alternative intellectual traditions; he'd given literally hundreds of interviews to that end. My interview, however, caught him in a different mode, and was quite strange. To me M.T. denounced all his celebrated achievements. He groaned about the damage he'd done, the wreckage he'd left behind.

“Don't think abstract! Stick to concrete images!” he warned me, irritated at how I followed the poetic example of his younger self. I suspect that he's right.

But my abstraction keeps alive a love for youth, for the universal and the ephemeral. I transcribed M.T.'s uncharacteristic counsel while I was in Berkeley, and though K. never stopped by, my friend Jane overheard me arguing with the tape and laughed. “Ah, all poets are the same!” she said.

As if being a poet was something extraordinary. As if we were born first as mechanics, or stockbrokers, or lawyers, and then were transformed into poets by some mystical device. But poets actually are all too ordinary - which is their beauty, after all. Why didn't Jane see that? I thought about her comment, which struck me as a strange observation to come from an award-winning poet such as herself.

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In her apartment Jane kept a dog that was threequarters wolf, but was still quite benevolent. She also kept a lover who lived on checks from the government, who was clinically psychotic; he was far more dangerous than the dog. During my stay in Berkeley, I felt myself at the mercy of unpredictable, supernatural forces. Haitian deities, growling wolves, lunatic lovers, and other spirited phantasms who appeared in the forms of my poet friends. Together they formed a disturbing, ghoulish ensemble that made me feel unwelcome in this town. It was time to make a move south.

K. and I met to say goodbye. It was night and we walked into the hills, out of the ghost city, sharing a bottle of red wine. The wind rattled the pine trees that hid most of the houses in Berkeley beneath us, and from these heights we looked on the lights of the city, where Indian chieftains once rode, and where their ancient souls were laid to rest. Such wide open space, and a stunning view of the bay.

But K's attention was drawn to a brick building we passed. 'That one reminds me of something from the Upper West Side,� he commented. I said nothing.

Though we were in the presence of hushed, echoing spirits, I let him continue with his rapturous remarks about New York. He talked about the history of tenement construction on the lowest side of the city.

This reassured me that he was homesick, and would soon return to the concrete mazes where he belonged.

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Later he told me I should push myself harder. “I have great expectations of you,” he said. Then he left. That was how we parted.

I knew my life would be more difficult and less gracious after leaving K., but Harvey was in Los Angeles, waiting for me. It was time to head south. *** During the course of the twentieth century, many have seen cancer as a “plague.” In the 1970s, scientists implicated viruses in the development of several cancers in humans and animals. Pursuit of this path provided the basis for identification by American and French scientists of the retrovirus that causes AIDS. ***

* The complete version of Living on Air is now available as an ebook. A print edition will be published in September (2013).

64

The Bay Area

LA circa ’82

The real reason I had to leave the Bay Area was to escape a sensation of sickness and despair that overwhelmed me during my stay. By the fourth day in Northern California I began to feel weak, sick. I could barely move. I slept long hours, and was exhausted when I woke. The presence of the plague was palpable throughout the city, though its streets appeared so serene and beautiful.

Ah, the city of Saint Francis is a godly place. It is conspicuously dreamlike, salty and hushed in a pleasant, soothing manner. Everyone who lives there 65

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has the vague sensation of having been there before.

The fog and the sea breeze offer a gentle embrace. The people are polite, lovely. Had it not been for the whispered rumors, or for the ominous leaflets left on tables in certain restaurants, it would occur to no one that the plague had come to town.

I felt like an old lady, an aging woman by the sea, who had come to observe the reflection of her skull in the sea's surface. To catch a glimpse. Ah, and such an old woman I was!

I told Jane, who had taken me to one of those uplifting restaurants, “I absolutely refuse to eat here, where they put medical warnings on the table instead of menus! It's like dining in a hospital. It makes me want to vomit.” And I did vomit. I could not keep food down for days, and began to grow thin.

It brought to mind selling map listings in New York's West Village, where it seemed that every other shop was shutting its doors, the giddiest stores going out of business. Their sad faced managers sighing in despair, “Unfortunately, the boss is out of town,” meaning that he was in the hospital, where in the corridors people shared warnings about certain behaviors, tips for protection against the plague, which hovered like a haunting metaphor, inexplicable, shadowing everyone's desperate lives.

But enough of myth. Let's return to facts.

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These facts contributed to my leaving the City of Doom: Beau's incessant visits; my friendship with Max growing claustrophobic; the tapering off of the season's cultural events; sticky sweet, oppressive weather that tainted everything with the smell and the taste of stale corpses; and my tired eyes, which could no longer embrace the landscape of the city where I lived. I've always been driven to escape from the places where I belong.

I called Beau's office from Jane's to say that he'd soon receive the M.T. interview, and also to report on the plague, my personal well-being, etc. He was quite mellow.

“Please come back,” he said, “New York is too quiet without you.” Well, why not make your own excitement, I wondered, and stop relying on me for entertainment? Perhaps Beau was tiring of his editorial duties. That was my impression. Most likely, he wouldn't even read the interview when it came. But who cares?

Certainly not he.

At times I also no longer care. But only sometimes.

Other times I become obsessed. I fixate on the struggles of the poor in Central America, imaging myself in the role of a Pablo Neruda, of Senghor or Aime Césaire - a poet politician! Then I wonder, would it be better to be a government poet or to receive government benefits? To be inside or outside?

Should I contribute to the final war between all 67

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governments? How to get to that place where even black holes disappear, destroyed in a Holocaust blast of madness?

Black out. *** As I said before, the San Francisco fog chased me to Los Angeles, where Harvey was waiting. Where it all began. Where at one time I landed from out of nowhere, on a silky April evening, a proud little girl in a Dutch checkered coat, taking her chances with the wide, wild west. Europe was no challenge. It was old, the joints creaked, the window panes were smudged by ash. It was serious, deliberate, unimaginative. It was so familiar, I felt I knew what was behind every locked door.

Los Angeles, on the other hand, gave me the sensation of stepping onto a fabulous strange playground! On new grounds players are forced to invent the rules as they go. It was a sophisticated game. It was research. It was a blinding pace. It was my mind on speed. I had accepted a sacred mission in the name of poetry! It was Ezra Pound! It was make it.

It was be someone. It was new. And it was Harvey, whose intuition and compassion waited for me at the Los Angeles airport. Harvey, who craved to keep me trapped under his fingernails.

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It was summer, palm trees and neon. It was the sound of an electric guitar, a sudden recognition, foreboding. It was an alley at dusk It was the pier the alley led to, and the paean we sang. It was a dream, and a shark was lurking in that dream, waiting to swallow me whole and carry me away. I waited for Harvey. Harvey waited for me. It had been a long time. It was in a dream that we met, and since then, each in our own way, we remained faithful to its landscape.

As I said before, I arrived late. That is, he had been waiting for me for years. But Harvey met me at the airport in his adorable lime green Lincoln Continental - he always drove splendid vintage cars - and soon we were cruising down Melrose Avenue, passing by hipsters and the sick scenesters. Harvey embodied the Avenue. Harvey was generous. Harvey was a poet.

But on entering his apartment, you would see a second Harvey peering from a photograph on the wall, and that image was of an aspiring, gifted actor.

The apartment was cozy, furnished with bright art deco flourishes. I put down my bags and noticed something missing.

“Harvey,” I asked, “where are my poodles?”

“Oh, she took them,” he said.

“She?” I inquired, more out of curiosity than jealousy.

I wondered who, other than me, would be attracted to an art deco lamp with porcelain poodles at its base.

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“Actually, she reminded me of you,” Harvey said, “so when she asked, I let her take your poodles. But you should still consider this your home.”

Then he led me into the kitchen to show off his most recent antique acquisition, a set of rare Japanese plates from the early part of the century. Harvey is a collector.

“Let me fix some dinner,” he offered.

We dine. Harvey sips from his glass of champagne.

“It's been empty here without you, Z,” he avoids telling me. Instead, he hands me my old Rosenthal cup, which we bought together at an open air market in Santa Barbara, and we share a smile.

“She's very cute,” he says later, “and such a brave woman, Z. You wouldn't believe it. She comes from Spain, and speaks three languages. She has the sweetest accent on Earth! Bold, but tender too, both determined and fragile.”

“I suppose that European women can be quite endearing,” I would like to tell him, but don't. Instead I ask, “So what did she do with my poodles?”

Harvey doesn't reply. Did she take them with her to Spain?

Is she attached to mementos?

Is she campy, or corny, or sentimental?

Wouldn't it be grand to escort a pair of porcelain poodles into the land of El Greco and the Inquisition?

Bunuel, I recall, cast some poodles in L'Age D'or, and had them stand in for the Church and the bureaucracy 70

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- another way of transforming them into porcelain!

Perhaps the mysterious She is taking the poodles back to Spain, where they belong.

“I'm suffering from writer's block,” Harvey the poet confesses. “But my life has never been so wild, so exciting. So much has been happening!” He emphasized “happening” as if the world were a vast entertainment, and he was star of the show. His voice was charged with nervous energy, the kind you find in people who have just touched success with the tip of their finger, and are reluctant to loose contact.

“Do you believe in God?” I ask.

“Of course. Don't you?” he replies. “How can we survive in this loveless world without God?” I look at him and wonder. Is God the only answer to a lack of love? I prefer to believe in a form of nature, I muse. I question. I consider. I'd prefer something that would bring us together, rather than the tendency for us to suffer alone, monk-like. Sometimes I'd like to confront the entire two thousand year long history of Christianity in a single instant, stare it down, and be done with it. It certainly was hard on Spinoza to believe in nature, after being expelled from his safe little world, a world that continues to exist today on the Lower East Side, and across the Hudson river in Williamsburg, where the black-robed Hassids carry their sins to their graves, after relieving themselves of their burdens in massage parlors on Houston Street.

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Harvey reads me a passage he once wrote about love, then a poem by Hart Crane.

“If you live in New York,” I tell him, “you have to believe in something.” Ah, this pulsating microcosm of a universe called New York!

Later that week I buy Harvey another set of antique china, and a flashy necktie with the words “Artist's Survival Kit” printed on the silk. Then I kiss him on the cheek, squeeze his hand, and return to the City of Doom.

72

The City of Doom

Only three weeks away and it felt like it had been centuries since I was last in the City of Doom!

As soon as I returned I was trapped in an intricate web of neighborhood problems. Beau's editorial office was in turmoil. Though the current issue was full of 73

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my work, Beau jumped on me when I phoned to announce my arrival: I hadn't done enough! “You ruined the whole issue!� he screamed.

I shrugged.

His ranting managed to extract a vague promise that I shall try to be more conscientious regarding timelines.

In my apartment, the water bugs, mice, and rats were strangely absent. But there were other problems.

While I was gone a pipe had broke and the building flooded; the manuscripts that were once piled on the floor were floating in a pool of turgid water, caressing pieces of plaster and plywood - a section of the ceiling had collapsed, as well! It occurred to me that perhaps I should have stayed in Los Angeles, and not have run from Harvey's house, where the avocado trees bloomed and Mickey Mouse waved at me from a poster on the porch. But I left for a reason that was phenomenological.

The afternoon of my arrival I received phone calls from each of my creditors. It was my firm belief that I did not owe anyone anything, though it appeared as if a half dozen people disagreed with me. I ran on foot through the muggy summer streets to the unemployment bureau to collect my benefits, then counted the change at the bottom of my purse to see how much money I had left for vitamins. The heat was heavy and unrelenting. I stood on the street by pay phones, listening to one side of anonymous 74

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conversations, trying to place myself within this alien ethnic environment, and to grasp the true meaning of art.

A man upstairs in my building had beaten his child to death. Someone showed me his photograph in the newspaper, and I recognized him from the hall. On the same page was an article about the mayor's office confirming that traces of plutonium were found in the water supply. I turned the page for relief, and saw this screaming headline: “Plague Advances Across City!”

How lovely, I thought.

Beau asked me to take on his editorial duties for the day, so he could visit his sister, a woman for whom he has a powerful and rather perplexing attraction. It was his chance to spend time alone with her in the country.

I sat in Beau's chair behind his desk, while a series of pseudo-journalists and posturing poets tried to force me into accepting every scrap of copy they had in their pockets, and publish it immediately. I resisted, as politely as possible, by declining their advances in French and playing a tape of Brian Ferry's “People Think I'm Just A Fool” over and over again to make my point for myself.

And perhaps I was a fool - if only because of my extended relationship with Beau, from whom I got nothing but a damaged ovary and. a bent press card that wouldn't even get me into a Brian Ferry concert!

But I saw his little paper as an opportunity to do something meaningful.

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I wanted to radicalize it, make it responsive to the times, and inspire it to say what others were either too shy or too serious to put into print. All the other papers reflected a ho-hum consciousness defined by MTV videos, Hollywood, and Wall Street. It should go without saying that the situation was nauseating; still, we find ourselves having to say it anyway - too many people seem incapable of recognizing their own nausea.

K. amazed me. He reminded me of the person I once was, growing up and turning into someone quite fine.

My friend Rasha Livada says: “If your teacher reveals all his secrets to you, that means he does not love you.� At times I detect a streak of stubbornness and cruelty in K., and a tendency towards being dogmatic.

He's able to make me think that I'm wrong about everything. I want to challenge him, and instruct him, but I've decided not to interfere with K's discovery of the world. I love him so, and would not prevent him from finding his own way; I can't keep him for myself, when he should belong to everyone. It's devastating, this process of looking into a mirror and seeing beauty opening like a flower beside you.

At times I'm afraid I could become like George Sand, who took a wounded Chopin with her to Mallorca and fed on his malaise for her own purposes; but I don't think that would be appropriate for me, and so take a different route.

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Still, it was wonderful to see K. in the ghost mists of northern California, and to bring this text to his attention.

Once I thought I could love no one as much as I loved myself, but then I'm sure I was motivated by harshness. Now no fallen angels cross my mind, and I'm committed to a kind of purity - and am at peace with the diversity of my previous existences, each of which has its own shape. But, no, I will not exercise my power over someone who loves me. Because love is letting go. And I will never leave K., I know. *** In 1892 New York was stricken by a wave of cholera. At that time, Robert Koch had already discovered the cholera bacillus. It was in the 1820s that citizens of London first realized the connection between the spread of cholera and the public water supply. ***

77

Nightclubbing

NYC circa mid 1980s

The days pass in a blur. Nightclubbing in New York City can be exhilarating but repetitive; eventually it turns tedious. I felt mad, driven; my body on fire. I passed through the doors of one club after another, wrapped in shiny colors like a Christmas candy, sipping champagne and dreaming of sleeping with K., while I take in the crystal reflections from cocktail glasses and mirrors, and sweat against the bodies of the hardworking people who escaped for the night from their midtown offices, after starving themselves 78

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during lunch to save cash for one extra drink, and a quick fuck in the club bathrooms.

I get to know the people that work in these clubs, the managers and bartenders, who treat me well because they envy my press card. And then I meet others who are like myself, whose eyes glow with quiet sadness; we leave alone before the party reaches its peak, and hover hushed on the sidewalk until a taxi stops to take us home.

One night an Arab cab driver asks me, “Where is your street, miss?”

I reply, “Lower East Side, the corner of Third Street and Avenue B.” The driver can tell I'm not a reveler, that I don't have the patience to party all night, so he doesn't ask how wonderful it was. Instead he says, “Miss, you must be tired.”

“Yes,” I say, as the cab pulls up at my corner. “How much is that?” “For a nice girl like you, it's free!”

I catch his eyes in the rear view mirror, and wonder what it is he sees. His Maghrebi wisdom is much deeper than my own. It's a wisdom of sunsets and bleached white houses with flat painted roofs, a wisdom that prays each day to the rising sun, and finds holiness in corners that our thoughtless actions tend to obscure. Such wisdom makes me bite my nails and cry.

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In my apartment I sit and type. Sometimes the awareness of this wisdom pierces me like a knife, and I feel chained to the typewriter, suffering that pain.

Sometimes the pain drives me from bed at dawn, to type in a fit.

Sometimes the fit hits during an otherwise pleasant afternoon.

Sometimes the North Star calls the pain back, and forces me to forget everything else for the night.

Most times, though, the pain is gone and I go on with life.

80

Lao Tzu's Ruling My Country Again

After one of my performances some guy picks me up.

Apparently he thinks I'm something quite special, and why should I deny it? But I try to explain to him that I don't sleep around casually, even though it appears I'm casual about nearly everything. But with sex I insist on good chemistry, a kind of alchemy -dating from the laboratories of Nostradamus, probably - and so tell him again -to the great relief of all my lovers

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now reading this page - that I never sleep with anyone casually.

For me it has to be something special, divine, holy, and so it must be either fantastic or forget it (how my future lovers must smile as they read this).

But any lover I choose, that person must understand my need to jump out of bed at any time, because I get the urge to write in the middle of the night, and it can't be denied. My friends say to me, “How can anyone love a writer?� What they really mean is, how can you not?

Anyway, what attracts me is a flair for movement my lover must be an acteur or actrice, someone who at dinner can babble equally well about carrots or Italian neo-fascists. Certainly this person must be someone I can watch political debates on television with, though we may never actually find time to watch them. Still, I require that potential, as we should both believe in beauty, as well as in democracy and socialism.

So I go with this guy for a drink. And he accuses me.

Every gesture he makes is an accusation. He attacks me for believing in China, though I'm the furthest thing from a Maoist. But it's clear that he will never understand Lao Tzu's observation that the big fish always devours the little fish; nor will it ever break his heart.

So I conclude that this night I'll sleep by myself. As I do from time to time.

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I'll explain why I had to leave Harvey - though I loved Harvey so!

At this moment, as I make love to the telephone in my hand while talking to K. long distance, I think of Harvey, of how dearly I adored Harvey, and so had to leave Harvey because I was scared of my own emotions. They were powerful and palpable, my emotions, surging like the ocean, scattered along the shore like a million pebbles, as dense as seaweed, which tangled around our feet while we were swimming. My emotions were wild and frightening as real as the sad eyes of the porcelain art deco poodle from Harvey's apartment. They had no relationship to nightclubbing in New York, and much more to do with the cramped exotic immigrant food shops on Delancy Street, where a fat woman in an apron asks, “How many pickles do you want, dear?�

I had no choice but to leave Los Angeles.

Now I am talking to K., making love to him through this monstrous device, the telephone. He says that he misses me, and that his heart is mine. I tell him how I feel it's time for my return to Europe. Having explored the heart of this dark continent, it may be time to go.

My job prospects were not encouraging, here in the City of Doom. Why stay, despite this tenderness I felt for K., which invariably grew stronger near midnight?

I can imagine how my search for K. might have begun. In this particular life I was very young. I 83

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opened the door to my small apartment in Belgrade.

K. stood in the hall, smiling.

He entered, and quickly gave me much to think about. He played the piano, softly, so gently my heart melted. He took me with him on a plane to West Africa, and there offered me a palace in the jungle, with three servants to wait on me, and called me his wife. He promised we would never part.

A woman who lived nearby loved K. dearly, and would not let go. Her skin had a fine dark quality, and with her coconut smell and the dangling of her silver nose rings, she tried to put a spell on K. Because our love was strong, we survived, and yet there were consequences. The ebony woman cast a spell on me which only later did I fully appreciate.

In the third month of my third pregnancy, I was lazily peeling the scales off fish while K. cooked us okra soup. Our servant, Bogombo, entered the kitchen with news from my doctor. “Big madam,” he said, “de doctor think you go to de h'opital now, or might die!”

My test results said malaria, and that I must have an abortion. K. stirred the okra soup, listening to the servant's report, while I saw death before me. Tiny gnats buzzed past my face, swarming in the mud hut I had thought was our palace. We stepped outside, where huge orange fir trees spread their needles overhead. The sky was clear and bright, though it was rainy season. The air hushed with silence. I was at peace.

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K. drove us in a blue van to the hospital, where I lost my third child, Umar. Three months later I recovered from malaria.

Time passed. The loss of the child drove us apart. We left Africa, each to different ends of the earth, moving continually and rarely seeing one another. Our child's death dimmed the light in K.'s eyes, and he said that while looking at me it would never return.

In that particular life, K. and I had several homes, each with its own garden, and we would fly from one to the next, often alone.

One was a house surrounded by chestnut trees, with a balcony in front where we set up desks to type manuscripts and play music.

Another was a cottage in Tuscany, the walls covered with roses, the living room home to a pack of wild kittens, where we smoked opium and had long, digressive conversations with a small group of friends.

Then there was a ground floor apartment in London, where we painted canvases and made love, waking up early in the morning to swim in the cool lake at a park across the road.

It was a comfortable life.

Eventually I chose to settle in London. There I lived as a painter, among a group of impoverished artists our apartment was where else but in the East End of the city, along the Thames. I used a long abandoned warehouse as my studio, and painted sunny images on silk. I'd plait my hair in the morning, and the let the 85

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wind caress my thousand natty dreadlocks while I danced down the pavement. For money I read Tarot cards on the street, though I did my best to read them for love. I became a young gypsy woman, a lady from the clouds, a woman of turquoise sunsets.

At this point of this particular life, K. left me for a bar dancer.

Not long after, while I was reading cards in a pub, an old Chinese man with a long pigtail approached me seeking wisdom. His name, he said, was Chang K. I laid out his past before him, and suggested a future which included me. He apparently liked what he heard, and hired me on the spot to manage one of the jewelry shops he owned along Kings Road, a street teaming with punks and people from all parts of the globe.

As store manager I had to attend to certain Oriental businesses, such as smoking opium with Chang K. during lunch hours, and explaining to American tourists the exceptional qualities of our merchandise.

“You see this stone, sir?” I'd say with my posh British accent. 'There are 400 years of civilization contained in that stone.” Then I'd wrap the stone in a smile, in Oriental fashion, because customers needed the smile more than they did the stone, though sometimes they bought the stone anyway.

When it came to selling my silk paintings, however, I smiled less freely. “This painting is 500 pounds,” I'd insist.

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“But it's a raw work, dear,” the British collectors would say.

“But just think of the pleasure you'll get from framing it to suit your taste and education.”

Selling your first paintings for next to nothing is a terrible business. You put so much of yourself into the work - like pouring your own blood, rather than colored dyes, onto the silk - then it disappears, leaving no trace of its existence behind, not even a Polaroid.

One night, out of the blue, the celebrity galleryowner Moira Roth appeared in my studio. Surprises of this kind can happen in London.

“Are these yours?” she asked in a bored voice, her hand waving absently in the direction of my life's work. She was tall and striking, and carried herself like a Count among the plebeians.

“They are, sir,” I replied, unintentionally acknowledging the manliness of her gestures.

She glared at me, and some time passed in silence.

Then I noticed her hard eyes soften, so I handed her my price list. She reviewed it like it was a menu in an exclusive restaurant.

The next day Moira Roth invited me to lunch.

Between sips of white wine and small, deliberate mouthfuls of salad, she tried her best to seduce me, though in the end she did no better than to simply fall in love - as we all do, from time to time. It was at this point that I privately changed her name to Beau. She strutted like a Beau, and bragged like a Beau. But she 87

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couldn't fuck me like a Beau; I mean, she lacked that kind of weakness.

In this particular life, K. reappeared in the form of an Oriental prince. He sat cross legged on straw mats, carving graceful wooden sculptures of long necked birds and mysterious sea creatures; a soft spoken, compact man with a fierce burning in his heart. We lived together happily for a year.

I would ask him how he felt, knowing what a delicate creature he was.

“I feel like a tiny broken circle at the top of a vast triangle,” K. would reply in his elliptical manner.

I'd put on water for black lychee tea, and fry him fish balls for dinner. In return, he taught me the Zen art of silence.

“K.,” I asked, “when will you take me with you back to Japan?”

“When they place me in a shroud,” he'd say. 'Then I will go back, on a stretcher.”

He built us a wooden bed that we could take apart and carry anywhere. Like everything else in our lives, it was meant to be packed up and moved, because nothing is permanent.

K. would write elegant haikus, which he spent hours perfecting. When they were finished he would read them to me, then destroy them. In one of these haikus he addressed me with a question which I was not able to answer. After reading me the poem he paused, then 88

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asked, “Lady Z., when will you stop treating me as no more than a transient form of K.?”

I don't believe I grasped the significance of his question until a few weeks later, when I noticed the smell of burning wax in my studio, and turned to see the old wooden warehouse exploding into flames. The fire consumed all of my silk paintings, all but the two I had sold for pennies. Everything disappeared -the expensive dyes, my tools, my work.

What did I have still? It was then that I became aware of the stubborn persistence of the idea of K. K. always gives me trouble.

Last night, as we spoke on the phone long distance, I said I missed him because no one ever gave me trouble when he was not around.

“You give me a hard time too, you know,” K. said.

K. was scolding me again because of the transient nature of my artistic formations, and how I refuse to stay still. He criticized my anti-Zen impatience, my screaming heart which turns itself into art when it can't continue on its own any longer. How un-Zen-like my heart is! Always in flux, changing endlessly, transforming itself from one form into another.

Yet, my heart always remains faithful to the idea of K. Though centuries would pass before he'd ever notice. ***

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Not only rats, but other burrowing rodents, including marmots, may harbor the bacillus that causes the plague. In 1911 a serious outbreak occurred when Chinese settlers in Manchuria began to trap marmots for their valuable fur.

Previously, the nomads in the region observed ancient taboos that kept them from contact with the disease carrying marmots. ***

90

Doctor Rieux Last night I found a dead mouse wedged against the refrigerator, behind my roommate Pete's left shoe.

Later he remarked, “At least you didn't find the shoe stuck behind the mouse!” Pete had a dry sense of humor.

Loose plaster was still hanging from the hole in the ceiling, and the damp stench of the flood permeated the apartment. The air of the plague hung over the whole city. A painter friend remarked that there had never been a time when people were safe in the City of Doom. Perhaps being an artist is symptomatic of some mental disease. But the plague in itself was so peculiar that it brought ambulances out to my block every hour. The scene outside was less surreal than repellent. Everyone felt disgusted. No one wasn't guilty. In this climate the plague began.

Still, people refused to acknowledge it. They might say, 'Today I found a dead mouse,” or “Today I found a dead man.” Always individual incidents, without connection, mentioned without drama. You'd be at a dinner drinking cheap coffee, listening to Elvis Costello on the radio singing his remorseful elegy “Little Triggers,” and it seemed as if acquiring a disease had become the latest fashion trend. Gaunt and pale was so attractive. How could anyone resist?

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Beau perhaps has got it too, though he doesn't appear to know it yet. Or, to put it better, he's so detached from that part of himself that resists disease, he's incapable of health. Nonetheless, he's incredibly vain.

A couple of nights ago we got into a huge argument on the roof of the Horny Hooker - a moronic club, oxymoronically named - a fight that had been building for a while. I had had enough of Beau being himself though I suppose there was little he could do about it so I slapped him.

Everyone on the roof turned to watch - all of them dressed in shades of black, men wearing eyeliner, women with white pancake on their cheeks, and an occasional dog collar around a neck. Beau's groveling servants huffed in disdain. Beau wheezed and heaved in fury, his eyes bulging, but did nothing. The bouncers came at me through the crowd, and I had to leave. In fact, I was happy to go.

The dead mouse greeted me on my return home, a hushed reminder that it might be time for me to reconsider my conception of final destinations. His timing was right. Perhaps I should leave this city and follow my Gypsy star. Somewhere out there, far away, is a lavender street where I truly belong.

K. is on that street, sitting at a sidewalk cafe, sipping espresso, leafing through a newspaper in his black jeans and old sneakers, waiting for me to take a chair across from his. Then he'd lean forward and hold my hand beneath the table. He'd say, “Stay a while. Relax.

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We have all day. We have the rest of our lives. Breathe.

Let us breathe through each other's nostrils, let us swallow one another's breath and mind. Let us paint.

Let's talk nonsense. There's so much blue space to explore, so many stars over our heads. Heaven is the roof of our house. Let's go home together.”

However, instead of having K. share my home, there was Pete making cryptic jokes about dead mice. Not long after I'd returned from the Horny Hooker, he came back with his jacket pockets full of blue stones from China, which he arranged on the tiny kitchen table.

Then he offered me the services of his bedroom, by which he meant the tape recorder that he kept by his bed to capture his private thoughts. He suggested that I sit with him and make a similar “quiet recording.” It was his belief that I was in need of a tape of my own voice emitting its radiance through the ether. I consented, and we had a wonderful rambling conversation in front of the microphone. He asked about my mother, about Belgrade, about the sweets I ate as a child - it all made me quite homesick. I nearly cried, thinking of how far away my aging mother was, and how far away K. was, as well.

Today Lew called to say that he had breakfast with my roommate, who spent the entire meal attacking me. While I had been moved by our intimate late night talk, Pete was livid with rage and could barely contain himself. He told Lew I was a slut, a junkie, a 93

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necrophilia maniac - the worst things he could think of! But apparently my greatest transgression was that I had resisted recording my voice in his bedroom for so long, and that when I finally did, I left only my voice behind, and gave Pete nothing more. This made him quite sad, Lew observed.

I can barely remember the last time I slept with anyone. But, if I recall properly, there wasn't much to remember it by. Still, it wasn't what you would call a one night stand. It was much worse. One late night I was trying to communicate something dear to a person I thought close to me, but I discovered that he was actually not so dear at all, and afterwards I felt dirty. That was enough for me.

Later Beau rang to apologize for his behavior at the “Horny Hooker�. Or, to be more accurate, he called so that I could apologize to him! Feeling diplomatic, I just changed the subject. Had he not called, we might never have spoken again. But Beau was unlikely to disappear that easily, not after investing so much effort into our relationship. From a strategic perspective, that would have meant poor management of his emotional portfolio. He had not yielded a sufficient return on his initial investment, and so couldn't afford yet to let me go.

But my thoughts were not with Beau. Rather, I was thinking of Lew. Recently we collaborated on a long poem that was close to my heart. Lew had a gay mind that sang in 94

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similar patterns to my own, so similar that at times it scared me. We'd puff on a joint, he'd twist his fingers through his tangled hair, and words came out of his mouth that could have been mine. Then one of us would type them up, lines of letters criss-crossing the page suggesting multiple meanings. But in the space between the words there was clarity. I felt happy.

The harmony between us led me to imbibe more of the fluid of music. I bought a cheap Casio keyboard and started to compose melodies. The simplicity of singing without words was divine, and its effect more immediate than any words I'd ever spoken. I found that the flow of music excited my tired mind, while it was the perfect accompaniment to my moments of quiet.

As I tinkered with a melody, the phone would ring another percussion element, a second drum machine.

Was it Beau? I never found out. My answering machine was broken. The phone just rang - while I sat on the couch, the Casio on my lap, improvising to its insistent rhythm.

It turned out that the insistent ringer was actually not Beau at all, but rather Dr. Rieux. He had received the results from medical tests I'd taken, and was concerned about the appearance of lymphatic lumps on my neck.

I mentioned to him that another dead mouse had chosen my apartment as its departure point to heaven, 95

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and then described it - opaque gray fur, and a streak of blood across its muzzle.

Dr. Rieux grew irritated. “This is not the bubonic plague,” he said, with his heavy French accent. “Now we have something else in town.”

He complained that the government didn't invest enough resources into investigating this particular disease, though he was hopeful about new research in France.

It's not surprising that in the country of Camus and Foucault scientists take the plague seriously - from the birth place of the Enlightenment you'd expect such concern. Dr. Rieux then advised me to report the appearance of dead vermin in my apartment to my “concierge,” as if I lived in a fancy, high-priced building in Paris. Unfortunately, our tenement's superintendent was strictly part-time: a gay high school substitute teacher who swept the staircases once a week, if that much. But his lethargy was understandable, since he was noticeably ill.

The super shared his cramped one bedroom apartment with two other men and three dogs. Each day between 5:00 and 5:30, the dogs led the men on a brisk walk around the block. This was usually the best time to ask the super anything, since he couldn't avoid me by picking up the telephone or simply shutting his door in my face. So one afternoon I caught up with him and his cocker spaniel on the sidewalk, and complained about the rash of dead rodents in my 96

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apartment. He just waved his hand in the air, as if this was nothing new.

Write to the landlord, he said, which was the same as telling me to go to hell, since the landlords in the neighborhood were happy to see their tenants move out; new tenants always showed up willing to pay higher rents. People all over the lowest sector of the city were being driven from their homes at a rapid rate, sometimes under drastic circumstances. “Be thankful there hasn't been a fire in the building yet,” he said, with no trace of irony. Anyway, he insisted, when it came to rodents he was powerless; his own apartment was infested worse than mine.

“And don't worry about this whole plague business,” he went on, with anger creeping into his voice.

“You're not black or Hispanic or gay. What do you have to worry about?” The myth on the street had it that everyone else was immune to the plague's seduction. But I found that hard to believe; the tabloids reported that the number of white women stricken by the epidemic had begun to rise.

Later in the week I stopped by the superintendant's place upstairs with a bottle of French red wine, which I was told helps to keep the red blood cell count high.

This time he seemed pleased to see me, and smiling widely ushered me through the door. His apartment reeked. The perfume of dog urine was overwhelming.

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glanced at it with soft eyes; clearly my gift touched him.

We were becoming friends, so he asked me a friendly favor. Would I take his dogs for a walk? He felt too weak for the jog around the block. Of course I agreed, and soon found myself dragged down the street by the dogs, who insisted on going the whole distance at a gallop. When I returned, the super felt he should try to repay the favor, so he offered some advice.

After struggling a moment with his own thoughts, which passed across his face in a series of tics and grimaces, he coughed twice, inhaled deeply, then barked, “What are you doing in this city? You should get out of here!”

“Leave the City of Doom?” I asked, surprised at the suggestion. I could think of nowhere else to go.

New York is the center - all winds blow in the direction of this place. Sure, that makes for turbulent weather, and an emotional landscape that can be heavy with humidity, or bitter cold. This city is insistent in its demands: that you dedicate your attention, focus on your work, and remain stubbornly persistent. But, at the same time, it offers freedom.

With effort, you can become whoever it is that you want to be. No other place enables such varied transformations. This potential for rebirth gives the City of Doom its potency.

“You'd be better off in Oran,” the superintendant insisted. “People there learned how to accept death 98

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long ago. It's so much more civilized. In the East they know all about death. They respect it. Here, no one understands.”

“So you think the counsel of the old world falls on deaf ears in this city?” I ask him, thinking of my own European doctors.

“Well,” he said blankly, “everyone has to be responsible for his own curse.”

Afterwards in my apartment, I took Boccaccio off the shelf. His stories were written especially for me during these days in the City of Doom. They speak of a pure joy, the triumph of life and hope in the face of rising fear and chaos. They capture the courage that people should find when in the presence of death. Ah, how I envied Boccaccio! - to be able to express it all with a few words.

After I finished reading The Decameron my first impulse was to run all over town, take my friends and lovers by the hand, and lead them to a faraway castle, to a dreamy countryside estate, a voluntary exile, where we could feast on sumptuous meals, make love on purple velvet cushions, stay up all night telling tales of beauty and fate - oblivious to the encroaching disaster that surrounded us. I actually phoned a few people, but no one was home.

The only person I reached was Max. As always, he was my most imaginatively receptive friend. He listened to my elaborate plans, then invited me over to 99

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expand on these Boccaccio-inspired visions. Five minutes later I was out the door. ***

100

Recollections of a Friendship

One of my weddings.

So. We did it again. It began innocently enough. Max and I were talking in the afternoon about some subject or another, and he touched my hair. A shot of electricity went straight down my spine. That evening we a saw a play called “Lucifer,” and I became worried for my heart.

“Nice rug you have,” I said to him, sitting crosslegged on his floor.

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“Yes, nice.” He would always speak in short snatches, that Max. “Your face sings,” Daniel Poe said once during one of our numerous midnight conversations. Max would never say that. Not that he didn't care for my face, but he would never mention it. Rather, he'd go straight for my pussy.

I thought he was a lunatic, but I liked him. When the Mel Gibson film came out, I was sure that the title referred to him: Mad Max. Most everyone else I knew maintained some measure of sanity and soundness in their lives. But not Max. He lost himself again and again in inspired impetuousness. He was an unchained id in uncharted territory, with an eager smile, a wiry body, and a mop of dark curls on his head. I loved K., and at the same time when Max wasn't around I missed him. I became forgetful of my own emotions.

I lost contact with my real self - assuming that I can characterize any part of my self as persistent, primary, and therefore in some way more authentic; but we do accept that possibility, somehow.

I lost my feminist perspective. I found myself riding high and low on the waves of my infatuations, as if I was the star of a soap operetta. Did I want to live with two men at the same time? Perhaps. I could imagine it.

But still, of course, I could see the problems. People are so different. Negotiating the space between only two souls is difficult enough.

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Nonetheless, I had my fantasies.

The other night on the phone, basked K.: could he live with two people? He said no. Just the thought of it made him uncomfortable. Was it guilt at the prospect of tasting forbidden fruit? So many generations have been devoured by this guilt. The devastating/legacy of Judaism and Christianity - the shackles of prohibited thoughts invade so many of those I care for most dearly. “Don't touch me, you're too beautiful!”

“Fuck me only when we're alone!”

“Don't say the word ‘pee!'”

“Never touch your private parts!”

“Make sure to wipe your ass!”

And on it goes. I wish it were possible to erase all these weighty conventions - just make them vanish.

But they remain, no matter what you do.

Last night I saw Max again. He said little. His fingers touched the fringe of my hair.

“It's so red,” is all he said.

“You're so beautiful,” I told him. *** In the morning I kissed Max softly. His face was relaxed and sleepy. I was very wet.

I got out of bed to dress and looked out the window.

The early September sun was rising over the abandoned buildings across the street in the lowest sector of the city. A fine pink light filtered through the 103

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shell of one empty tenement -all that remained was its skeleton: rusted veins and brick bones.

The light revealed the lime green leaves of young trees on what had once been the fourth floor. It was as if the city was remaking itself out of the carcasses , like a vibrant African jungle. The sadness that had clung to me for days had disappeared. I left Max's and bought a bagel for breakfast at a deli on my way home.

Zack in my apartment, silently went to sleep, luring a dream Max's face appeared, sympathetic and with a hint of gentle sadness. But then he turned scornful. He barraged me with questions. The questions became accusations.

My lover turned into my Official Inquisitor. At first I skillfully avoided his questions, but when things got worse and I saw no alternative I ran from the room.

What was I trying to defend myself from? When it comes to my heart, I can be such a coward.

I woke up, the room was bare - as Bob Dylan sang in ‘Simple Twist of Fate’. Shaken and unable to fall back to sleep, I went out for a soup and Sunday paper.

Everywhere I turned on the street, men approached me wearing Max's face. A man at the newsstand brushed against my shoulder, and for a moment it was Max, before I realized it was someone else. At the Ukrainian diner where I ate, I kept looking up to see Max walking through the door. On my way home I imagined living with a man who had Max's body and K.'s head. Then I decided to push the whole thing 104

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from my mind, and lost myself in questions about the mysterious geopolitical Trilateral Commission.

The next day I got a message from Max on my answering machine. He said he had something to tell me. I figured that he'd found the information he'd promised about a particular word processing class, or maybe he needed to vent for ten minutes about the millions of malnourished children who live in affluent America's inner cities. More likely, though, he'd want to read me his latest story.

Max, of course, was a writer of fiction, a teller of tales - which was the reason I adored him. He had a quirky genius for infusing a charged energy into his characters' most mundane circumstances. His stories buzzed with electricity, just as he buzzed with an overpowering force that drove people mad. His high voltage inspired me to keep tapping away at this typewriter. No, it's not only desperation that keeps filling these pages with words; it is the excitement of discovery; finding vibrant life in unlikely places.

So, Max called. Just as my heart was freezing in fear that he might never call again; we hadn't spoken since I left his apartment. What if he simply vanished from my life? Poof!

Certainly, it was possible. But I was relieved to hear him answer the phone, with his characteristically clipped sentences. Yes, there was something important he had to tell me - but he'd forgotten what it was.

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“Well,” I said, “when you remember, please do let me know.”

“Wait. Yes. I remember. Come over!”

I agreed, and we talked through the evening and into the night. Eventually his roommate appeared and invited us to join him for a slice of pizza. We walked the sidewalks of the lowest sector of the city, and after our meager meal parted company on the corner of Avenue B and Sixth Street. We kissed good-bye, and though a kiss is transient, this kiss lingered as if to announce its permanence - and it continues to exist to this day, as it will for centuries, vibrating from that corner in the City of Doom, echoing in its quiet way across the ocean and around the Earth, touching the sun which is the nearest star, and from that star reaching out to the Milky Way. Again I tried to reconstruct in my mind the loveliness of Max's features. In these days we have grown close, though we tried not to think about it, and never spoke of it. We made no mention of the attraction we felt when we first met, a few summers before at a writers' conference (yet another writers' conference!).

We both attended that conference to see in person a handful of names - writers who had been no more than names to us - to attach substance to the ethereal presences we knew only from their words on the page.

They mattered so much to us, those names, that we came in search of them. These names provided contact to a single Name that preceded us all. They were links 106

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in a lineage that led back to an original Name, one who sent in motion the writings of successive generations.

I think of Max and myself as closet Cabalists. Not that we spoke of this, either. But there was a search for something original and holy in our relationship. We were moved by a need for the Authentic, surrounded as we were by so much that was cheap, plastic, and hollow. I'm sure you know what I mean.

This search is what drew us to each other. But then I came to appreciate his physical presence, and miss him when he wasn't around. We were growing attached, our friendship was turning into a different tenderness, and this scared him. My fears from a few days before were justified. Soon Max disappeared.

He avoided me on the phone and in person. Nothing bad happened between us; there were no awkward conversations or tearful arguments. He just stopped calling.

Eventually I grew tired of this game and decided to challenge the rules. I walked by Max's building and saw his bedroom light on. I rang the buzzer; he let me in. That night it was Yom Kippur, and I brought him a flower as a gesture of atonement for our sins - those we cherished, as well as those we were ashamed of but the gift didn't please him. He shuffled awkwardly around his bedroom, grabbed a rubber band from his desk and stretched it nervously between the thumb of one hand and the forefinger of the other. Though I'd 107

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rehearsed several speeches over the previous few days, once inside Max's apartment I forgot them all, and so resorted to chit chat. I hoped that he might offer an explanation for his behavior - to even hint at one - but he said little, other than that he was late to meet someone for a drink.

Would I like to come along? Thinking that wine might make talking easier, I went.

At the bar Max introduced me to his friend - a tall redhead, Madeleine. That was all the explanation I needed. She became his new lover by the end of the week (and, I might add, a former lover by the end of the month!).

I went out of my mind with jealousy. It was ten days of tears, bitten lips, pale skin, rings under the eyes. I turned to some of Max's friends for comfort, and they apportioned me the appropriate servings of sympathy. Max is always running away, they told me.

He'll never take responsibility for anything, including his own life. Of course) this was an old story, which I knew, but at the same time I had managed to forget.

When you step inside the circle of a lover's magic, the dangers that had once been all too apparent suddenly turn invisible -but how else will you ever experience the fragile beauties a lover has to offer that others will never see?

K. was Max's dear friend, and I phoned to tell him the whole story. He listened, from the other side of the country. K.'s love for me was truly unusual, I came to 108

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realize. Even when he was so distant, he could move me by pulling the right strings. He spoke about Max's unconscious talent for cruelty. “He can be a selfish bastard,” K. said. But, more importantly, he added a few encouraging words that helped me rediscover my own strength that night.

Still, the next few days dragged by slowly. My stomach was a mess. My mind was always distracted.

I forced myself through the door of Beau's office and tried to work, but couldn't concentrate and got nothing done.

One evening, after we closed the latest issue of the paper and sent it off to the printer, I decided to try to cheer myself up and got tickets for the new Richard Foreman play. What a relief it would be to spend an evening in Foreman's mischievous theatrical universe, where madcap dwarves struggle to articulate spiritual mysteries, and God appears as a cheap plastic mask with a hooked nose. But as I was getting ready to leave, a distinguished poet came in the door - I had seen him at a reading once, and recognized him right away. He was looking for the poetry editor, and someone led him my way.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

My jacket was already on, and my purse slung over my shoulder.

His face was pale, as if he hadn't slept, and his thin, light hair was uncombed. His eyes were strained and red.

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“You have to publish this,” he said assertively, handing me a few wrinkled pages.

Well, I'd heard that before. But something about his manner made me want to read it right away. I asked him to wait a moment while I retreated to the back of the office, where it was quiet.

The pages were typed on an old manual with a faded ribbon - crooked lines of type with corrections marked in blue felt-tipped pen.

It was long poem titled ‘La Peste’, a chronicle of a small group of friends who had, one by one, fallen victim to the plague. It wasn't well written, in the classic sense - but it had energy, urgency. It was more accurate than most journalism I'd read on the subject.

Its raw emotion made palpable the burden of suffering, and it didn't shy away from faith in the redemptive power of love.

I told the author that I'd get his poem into the next issue, even though it had been already at the printer’s.

I ran to the subway station to catch a train to the printer's office in Queens. The sky was cloudy and drops of rain started to fall. The manuscript was in my purse, where it radiated its own sensation. I was carrying something of value, more valuable than gold.

It was a little package of compassion, waiting to be offered to the City of Doom.

What a grave responsibility I had.

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* The complete version of Living on Air is now available as an ebook. A print edition will be published in September (2013).

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About The Author Poet, essayist, fiction writer, playwright, art critic, translator and contributing editor to NY ARTS magazine from Paris, Serbian-born Nina Zivancevic has published 15 books of poetry. She has also written three books of short stories, two novels and a book of essays on Crnjanski (her doctoral thesis) published in Paris, New York and Belgrade. The recipient of three literary awards, a former assistant and secretary to Allen Ginsberg, she has also edited and participated in numerous anthologies of contemporary world poetry.

As editor and correspondent she has contributed to New York Arts Magazine, Modern Painters, American Book Review, East Village Eye, Republique de lettres. She has lectured at Naropa University, New York University, the Harriman Institute and St.John’s University in the U.S., she has taught English language and literature at the University Paris V and History of Avant-garde Theatre at Paris University in France and at numerous universities and colleges in Europe.

She has actively worked for theatre and radio: four of her plays have been performed for broadcast in the U.S. and Great Britain.

In New York she worked with the legendary “Living Theatre” and the members of the “Wooster Group”.

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Currently she lives and works in Paris. Much of her work, including new work, is documented on her website: www.ninazivancevic.com.

BARNCOTT PRESS

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