The weather has finally broken. It rained heavily for a number of days, soaked the concrete and in a few select places forced earth worms to rise from the muck and die on the street. Though beneath the city is dirt, dirt everywhere, it may as well be miles away. Think of the thousands of worms that rise up when the ground floods only to bump their soft heads against the underside of 6th Avenue. An inauspicious end.
Not long ago I was walking on Jane St. and before me was a construction team. They had cut a perfectly square hole out of the ground, lifted the asphalt and revealed the wet dirt beneath. I was revolted and felt the urge to vomit and looked away. Like the impact of seeing someone you love on an operating table, their generic entrails turning black in the air, the physical sensation of wrongness is overwhelming.
Elizabeth Edwards has told Oprah that when her husband confessed to being physically intimate with another woman she vomited. The bodies insistence on purging itself is quaint. It works with alcohol and putrid food, and it's funny to think that the same technique will get the truth out of us. I'm sure it helps. To see floating in the toilet before you a mess of matter, and to know that that was in you when you found out the wrongness and that now it is no longer in you: That's a start.
I was standing on line getting coffee yesterday. A girl with a shock of red hair was in front of me talking on her telephone. As she was hanging up, she made a pun to which I laughed and found myself, without a word, in a conversation with her. I asked her if she made it up.
She shrugged. "When you're a faith healer with sock puppets for the kids a little jive is required."
There we were, in a muggy, cramped coffee shop and she had the strength to reach out across oceans and time and pluck those silly nouns which seems so far away. I laughed. And wondered, can one have a shock of red hair or only white? I was shocked.
It reminded me of a story that I may well have told you. If so, stop here. Myself and another character were traveling through the backwoods of upstate New York, looking for a state park to burry Iroquois arrows we had purchased at a museum gift shop (we do enjoy this sort of archeological jest). It was late at night, miles and miles passing between junctions, and we were quite hungry. Against our judgement we stopped into a McDonalds. We were however, not the only ones there. Perhaps 10 or 12 ate at 3 adjacent tables. In the center of this group was a large, deformed woman in a shapeless dress. Her eyes were colorless and her forehead wide and her hair pulled back. Surrounding her were her children. The were all dressed like her: big dresses, white shirts for the boys. Some of the older girls gleefully nannied an infant while the older boys sat in silence. The way they interacted with each other as if in a bubble, not even seeking out our eyes or noticing my stares.
My first thought, based on their appearance, was that this was a minor religious sect, perhaps Mennonite, maybe matriarchal, likely inbred. But among them was one anomaly.
She sat at the edge, perhaps 12 years old, socializing with two other girls her own age. She was wearing a flowery print dress and a fleece pull-over. Her hair was bright red. In this sea of colorless, mottled skin and dun hair was her, her appearance was screaming and wailing. She noticed me, or I should say she noticed me noticing her. She was different in every way she possibly could be. Did she know?
My mind began immediately forming narratives of how she got there: she met one of the sisters in a school play and has become part of the family, though she obviously doesn't share their beliefs. She lives near them, and because there are no (normal) little girls for her to play with she and her parents have shrugged their shoulders and allowed her to socialize with Mennonites.
Either way, the mother stood up and without a word all the children began to finish up. They walked as a body outside and got into two unmatching vans, one being driven by the mother, the other by one of the elder sons. I'd like to think the red headed girl looked back, but I doubt it. I didn't think she needed saving or rescue or anything as dramatic as that. Maybe just recognition.
One more story I will bore you with. This one brief. I was walking down Jane St again (the hole long having been filled in). I was walking behind a girl, again red headed, who could have easily been the same girl I saw in the McDonalds, at least from behind. Flowers have been planed around all the trees on Jane St. and she knelt down to smell one. She inhaled, twice, then reached out her hand and felt the flower. From the way it moved in her hand I could make the discovery with her: plastic. She laughed in the flower's face and walked on.
It is bizarre, Iqbal. Everywhere I turn I am faced with the one open eye of a sleeping man.
-Robert de Saint-Loup
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