Sophia (8 page)

I’m the mayor of a lonely country. A passenger on wax wings tilting left to right, diving toward a river as the peasants go about their day. Another politician is found with his dick in his hand, a belt tight around his neck. I scratch the scratch-offs and play the numbers, the ponies, the fights. There are longer shadows later in the day. Darling takes my hand.

I want so bad to be a saint but I’m a coward and barely Christian, I say.

That makes you a good candidate, she says.

The urbanites dress like sinners and I love the sin. I rank folks mainly by their vice and folly. A blond with daddy issues sucks heroin up her nose. Hurt me, Lord, she says, I want to feel more nightmare. I seek the love of the Trinity but there is only my DNA, my center of gravity, my supercilious mouth. I step to the edge of the roof.

What are you doing, asks you, Eli.

Feeling the pull.

Thinking of cashing in, are you?

I’ve already done that, Eli. I’m just waiting for the horses to carry me away.

For millions of years no creature had an eye. When did life start eating itself, growing as it diminished?

We are born to eat each other, I say.

But we have hearts and brains and courage, Darling says.

The baby kicks in her belly.

What color was the first eye, Darling asks.

Manhattan is a place where all spirits go to die. My mustard seed of faith can move no mountains here. I take the elevator to the top of the Empire State. It is the godly cock of the island, reaching heavenward. The Chrysler is the godly cock of art. The Freedom Tower is the godly cock of grief. I will soar between them with my homemade wings. Nono irons Cataract’s shirt in a fleabag motel. He makes instant coffee and plays computer chess. Everyone on daytime TV is a psychopath.

Two NYU bros argue over the best cut of steak, grass-fed or kosher. A maid vacuums a dead man’s hair from a motel bed. Nothing in this city can be thrown away. Every sin settles in your heart forever. I seek the right questions that will make the silent Father speak. The Holy Ghost tells me I’m an elephant killed by a small arrow.

I’d like to die and live forever, I say.

Or give your life to someone else, says Darling.

I touch her forehead.

You’re warm, I say. You should lie down.

Does the Lord suffer, too? Does he have woe? The Krishnas and Adventists throw their hands up in Union Square. The happy throngs, Eli, full of love and misery. We hustle chess on this old sunny day but then a thin kid puts a knife to your throat.

I thought this was a safe city now, I say to him.

It was till whites started killing brothers.

I have Cherokee blood, I say.

Everybody says that, he says.

Yeah, everybody says that, I say.

Give me the cash, says the kid.

I give him my money and my rabbit’s foot and dagger.

I have no answers for the fading American empire. The streets are quiet now but souls are heavy with gold or the anger that comes with too much hunger. Cataract scouts furniture for his dream house. This might be a good place for him to settle down once his mission is complete. I go to the Met and take my time. It is my church, my house of worship. To the Japanese garden on the second floor.

Damn, this shit is tranquil, says the woman with the purple hair.

It’s Zen, I say.

Tranquil as hell, she says.

I build my wings in the basement of St. Thomas Church. A cigarette between my lips and some hymns playing low on the boom box. The ATM signs make whores’ faces red and the crusty kids from Idaho stay warm cuddling black labs with red bandannas. An old man in his underwear runs after a girl with diamonds in her ears. Then to my personal heaven. I rock Darling in my arms after a long day of work. Flesh of my flesh, I say.

You really think I came from your rib, she says.

I don’t care where you came from baby, I say. I’m just glad we’re here.

On the subway I catch the eye of a girl who looks like Tuesday with a man who looks like Finger. I run for them but they get off the train. I squeeze my way through the doors but my leg is stuck. A drunken lacrosse team pushes me out just before I’m sliced in half. I run after Finger and Tuesday. I knock over a German tour group and nearly push a blind babushka onto the rails but save her at the last minute. I run up the stairs. I can feel Tuesday and Finger’s comfort again. Their friendship. Their weirdness.

Tuesday, I call. Finger!

A man dressed as a woman and a woman dressed as a man turn around.

Sorry, I say. Thought you were someone else.

The summer fades to leafless trees and the rapists on Rollerblades fill the parks again. Cops’ walkie-talkies bark out numbers and a drunk girl is always crying in the street.

I lost my dog, she says.

What’s the name?

Mr. Nobody.

Nobody?

She weeps.

Nobody. Nobody. Nobody.

I am among the long-distance runners in the long-distance race. They enjoy their strong hearts. They say running gives them great sexual pleasure.

Where are we running, I ask a runner.

To the finish line.

Where’s that?

Depends on how far you want to go.

St. Edmund dies in the arms of a peasant girl. He’s known for wearing shirts made of human hair. Tonight at St. Thomas Church we dine on rotten peaches and stale coffee, Eli. I shall set sail into the great expanse of sky and to that Lady Liberty and fill the voids of my heart with a new child for the nation. I am the wings, bad saint of the sky. I am the lover of wonders. Peace be with you.

And also with you, you say, Eli.

Go back to sleep, I say. There’s nothing good out here to report.

From sea to shining sea, lift up thine eyes. To the serious nurses going serious places. To the asinine lovers of fine wines
and cigars and the food-obsessed. There is nothing worse than an aficionado. Darling, come closer to me and let my hand rest on your belly. Just a little and let’s weep together for this the most awful and beautiful nation in history. The stranger asks the stranger, Will you watch my stuff? I fall in and out of love with humanity again and again. A cop kills an unarmed kid. Hate. A Korean wedding party laughing on a double-decker bus. Love.

St. Charles dies in the dunes of Arabia holding the hand of a lost rabbi. They pray together to the same God in different ways. They feel the pull of the long-dead kings of the world, their slaves and wives and plagues and firstborns murdered in the streets. Eli, we could eke out some romantic vision of the South, go back to the old time religion of Mississippi. Stay closer to the cave than the drawing room. Destroy the poets with their hearts on their sleeves.

Cataract reads Penthouse in braille. He writes songs about the rapture on his yellow guitar. Nono jogs in her velvet black tracksuit and brews kombucha tea. The living long to live more life. Cataract gives a quarter to a one-legged trombone player in Washington Square then takes ten bucks from his cup. My visions are escalating. The tiger and lamb make love. The snake and Eve commiserate. Adam takes another bite.

St. Sylvia clowns on the streets of Budapest for her supper when the prince finds her and makes her queen. From the seat of power she protects the Christians from being thrown over bridges. She walks the promenade with orchids in her hair. Her throat is slit by the descendants of Spanish Moors in the afternoon so everyone can see.

The man with horns in the West Indian parade has a message for you, says Darling.

What did he say, I ask.

He says you will only know yourself when you see your face.

What?

Physicists explode the world to bits to see what we’re made of. The signs of everlasting life are all around us but I don’t have the right eyes. Gods are dreaming up new stuff to baffle everyone and the snakes in the grasses smell with their tongues. I am stretching myself toward the streetlamps that fill the empty heavens. The news isn’t even news anymore. People work and work and work for tiny numbers in the clouds. The ditch digging will never end and the thin, sad girls of the East Village all live in Brooklyn now. Eli, there is nowhere to preach the gospel, no gospel left to preach. No sun I can see. Nowhere left to lose my mind in peace.

I wish people still smoked cigarettes, you say, Eli.

They do.

Yeah. But not like they used to.

Below the sports bar is a grave where the dead Indians slumber. Darling and I fight all morning. She is suicidal and so am I. Then we make up with kisses and cups of black coffee and the stars of the night fading into day.

I want to marry you in a French country church with the baker as the witness, I say.

I want to marry you in the wheat field where van Gogh killed himself, she says.

Cataract is fishing in the Hudson River. He smiles at the bankers and fools, his dark eyes seeing everything but the physical world. He knows every dream we have and every fear and every highway happiness. Nono cleans the fish and they feast. They seek the carnivals and fairs and go antiquing in the good part of Bushwick. Darling’s father’s father was a great crooner of love songs and her mother’s father owned a condom company. She darns my socks and makes my breakfast. Eli, we are men by desperate means. I rub my wings and pepper the night with prayers to my lovers and friends. I go to the chapel and weep for better ways to make my bed.

Thinking now, Eli, of all the people I have known who I don’t know anymore.

I’m making a Dr. Pepper and whiskey, you say.

Make me one, too.

Perhaps we should situate ourselves in the long expanding mendacity of time. The space between the spaces between the spaces. Eli, might we come to some battle with Cataract? A final end of endings? Much of my day is spent finding
something to do with my day. I’m tired. I came here for adventure and ended up with the same old restlessness and desire. I fold up my wings and walk uptown. The saints are born and live and die forever. Sick and blue, I head for the great cock of the city to fly.

You don’t have to go, says Darling.

You know I do.

Go then, she says. But think of me when you fall.

I’ll think of you when I fly.

It is midnight but could be morning. Eli, I’ve wrung my hands a good bit and gazed at my navel far too long. Up there in the clouds I will see the enemy and raise him one.

Do you really need to do this, you ask. Couldn’t you just rent a helicopter?

There are many things I could and couldn’t do, I say.

You know how this story ends.

No one knows how the story ends, I say. Just where they left off reading.

St. Kirk is hung from a lamppost in the waning hours of Palm Sunday as church bells toll the wrong hour. His feet are tied together with barbed wire and his eyes are pecked at by sick crows. His Hawaiian shirt is torn half off. His mother washes the blood from his feet with warm milk.

I take to the sky with my improvised wings. I am above the buildings and the parks full of dying leaves, van Gogh yellows
and Gauguin reds. Listen here, Eli. I’ve got nothing on my mind as I mix things up from one thousand feet. My heart is an avalanche of possible things. I see Cataract driving in the sunlight laughing. I see the grey girl and the white waves lapping at her feet. The Holy Ghost sits on her face and takes the Freedom Tower in her mouth.

Might you come down a moment, you say, Eli. You have a child forthcoming.

I’m awakened from my flight.

You are a sweet man, says Darling. Her dark eyes are full of the promise of the world to never end.

Agape, agape, she says. The greatest of these is love.

I fall into the East River and no one bats an eye.

An envelope with my name left by the door. In it a square of black paper. It is winter, strange.

Darling and I walk through the nightly confusion, the red buildings and blue windows. Throngs of literate people in this city, even the man picking up cans reads Dostoevsky. In the skylights of million-dollar townhouses you can see the planes crossing above you like there is no ceiling. When you’re rich, things are easy and the food is better but your soul is rotten. Serve only one master, says Christ. Eye of a needle, all that. But then again—take off your clothes, Eli, and feel how nice these high thread count sheets feel in this strangely unguarded townhouse.

We are maddening in the neighborhood. A film crew on the street, a show about spoiled children. Eli, you go over and scream until they give us a hundred bucks to go away.

I have a vision of Cataract and Nono at a local greengrocers in some hippie Carolina village.

Get in the car, says Cataract to Nono.

I need kale twice a day or my bowels get funky, she says.

There’s no time for kale, says Cataract. Bounty’s worth at least six fucking figures.

You don’t have to curse, says Nono.

Cataract licks his finger to test the direction of the wind.

Yes I do, he says.

Darling and I snuggle in the January snow. We’ve rigged up camouflage around our bed, nicely hidden—bunnies in a briar patch. There comes forth a vision. Cataract exits his ’87 Oldsmobile wood-paneled van and scopes the city. He breathes his smoke on me. I wake to a single blade of lightning.

Two old ladies smoke long cigarettes and sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the F train. Hasidic families with Hasidic babies pray to the Hasidic god. A homeless girl kicks a drink machine. Somewhere in the Middle East a war just started over a bottle rocket and a wink to the wrong girl. My mind is full of past.

We wake up early in the East Village, where all the good poets died. We go to our boat parked on Fourteenth. Eli, I will grab us bagels. A few coffees, black. Darling and I read the Sunday paper and relax. We are aboard our vessel minding the business that is rightfully ours. I am very much high on narcotics when this woman calls to us. A parking cop. A cartoon of a woman.

This ya boat, she says.

Lovely Rita meter maid, I say.

This ya boat, asshole, she says.

Yes, Rita. I am her captain, yes, I say.

You gotta a license? I’m gonna run these plates.