Ghost of a Flea

that film, he up and gave it to me. Said why not, he don’t never use it no more. Someone ought to get the benefit of it, boy said. Don’t mind telling you it’s been a blessing. Now I can really cover ground.” This from a man who regularly, every day for well over forty years, had covered most of the city on foot.

“That’s good. You take care, now.”

“’Spect I will. Mostly have. You too, Captain. Don’t let them beers back in there go wastin’ neither.” Halfway to launch, listing starboard on the seat, left leg cocked, Doo-Wop paused. “Word of advice?”

“Always.”

“Boy asking after you as well. Had some stories he’s heard, old ones for the most part, near as I can say. He don’t tell them too good either, mind you. I thought you’d be wanting to know.”

“Appreciate it, my friend.”

“Welcome.” And Doo-Wop went sailing off to whatever port came next.

That night I sat out in the slave quarters reading David’s message again. I’d left on lights in the house and kept looking across, half-expecting heads and bodies to appear, as in previous, happier days, in that blazingly white kitchen.

I have no idea when you might find this-tonight, tomorrow, next week. I don’t even know, really, how to begin it.

I read David’s message over and over, slowly, leaving space around each word for it to expand, working sememes and syllables like bread dough. At one point I looked up to find Deborah’s face there in the window over the sink, across the courtyard. She was drinking a glass of water from the tap, and after she put it down she waved, face tilting like a bird’s to ask should she come out. I shook my head. She blew a kiss and laid head obliquely on joined hands: moving towards sleep.

We always have to understand, don’t we?

Life’s not a particularly good editor, but it can prove a quarrelsome one. David had careted in his message among notes I’d been sketching for a novel. There it was, rude actuality, thrusting up like a ragged tree stump from my own pale version of the same. I thought of David’s postcards and how the texts of our lives seem always overwritten, events scribbled in between lines, corrections tacked on at the end or written in at a slant.

Life for each man (this from Eugene O’Neill) is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors. Looking out, we think we see someone signaling, a warning, a wave, a plea. But it’s only our trapped selves measuring with hands the limits of their world.

From long habit, music forever asimmer on back burners as I worked, I’d turned on the radio when I settled in out here. Classic jazz had given way to a talk show on which prizefighter Eldon Truman was being interviewed, and I came skittering to a stop on its surface.

Scooped from the street following a series of central Baltimore burglaries, Truman went on to spend some twentysix years in America’s worst prisons. Two, three minutes into the interview, Truman, a biography of whom had just been published, took exception to the host’s use of the word commune and went on taking exception. Taking exception was a way of life, a creed, for him. Just as in prison (he recounted) he’d refused to follow the white man’s rules. Refused upon induction to divest himself of civilian clothing, of rings and necklaces, refused to have his hair cut. “They had to put me where the others couldn’t see me, finally. Had to get me out of sight. Out of sight and mind, you see.” Solitary. Out of sight there, he’d spent a dozen years reading law books obsessively, then (out of mind, many said) turned just as obsessively to metaphysics. Castaneda. Ouspensky. Husserl.

Phone calls came in from Al and Ian in Keokuk, Iowa, Sharon in Sharon Center, Georgia, Cheryl in Highland Park, Illinois, George from Irving, Texas, Roberto (call me Rick) out in Tucson, Arizona. They never tell us the truth, one caller said, never. Whatever they do tell you, just turn it over. Mr. Truman’s right. Another said: Up here in the heart of the heart of the land, we’ve built us a model community. Grow our own food, bake our own bread. Simon called in to say there was so much wrong in the world, so much pain, and ended with a favorite quote, from Brecht: What times are these when a poem about trees is almost a crime because it contains silence against so many outrages? Bret from Milwaukee: The disparities just keep unfolding. Ever since Reagan, Bush, that sorry lot, water rising, a flood. Executives now pull down three hundred and twenty-six times the average worker’s salary. How in God’s name did this come about? And why do we let it go on?

I keyed in Select All and sat for a moment with my finger over Delete, then hit it. Notes for a novel that might have been, and David’s message, washed away. Enough stray words in the world already.

“Somewhere, among the wastes of the world, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom,” Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow. That’s where David was now, I hoped-out there in the wastes of the world where the keys are kept. And there in the dark (for now I’d shut off radio, computer and lights to welcome it) I bent my head into the vast silence that is our lives, and listened.

Chapter Nineteen

“Lew. Do you hear me? Lew?”

I drifted up slowly, all the time in the world. World up there waiting for me. Patient as grandfather’s hand when we’d walk down by the river. I was four, maybe five, and he’d come up alongside the house, up the hill, hobbling, to fetch me. As a young man Grandfather had broken his leg. With no doctors around, his father built a box, a small tailored coffin, around it. He was a carpenter, this was what he knew. The leg healed, but forever afterward Grandfather listed to port and starboard with each step. As Grandfather came he’d be reciting some poem he’d learned back in school forty or more years ago. More like ninety, now, I guess. Longfellow, Whittier, William Cullen Bryant. The whole of “Thanatopsis” or “Snowbound,” Booth led boldly with his big bass drum. Not just reciting the poem, but declaiming it as had been the fashion in his youth, an auditory equivalent of Palmer penmanship. Lines, stanzas, rhymes spun and leapt like dancers, like high divers, from his tongue, providing my earliest intimation that words might do more than simply express needs or convey information: that they could transform the world, recast it. Down we’d go then by the river, this hobbling old man and upreaching, diminutive me, past tar paper shacks and along the levee as barges lugged their tedious way upriver towards Memphis or down to Vicksburg and New Orleans, barrel-like pipes running out above and across (carrying what? I never knew), cement slabs piling up crisscross by the hundreds as trucks ran over legs and wood risers collapsed, burying workers paid $3.50 a day, at the slab field just south, the sandbar at river’s center growing ever wider through the years. We’d bob and weave along the levee, through cement floodgates thick as tree trunks at the bottom end of Cherry Street behind the abandoned train station and just off Niggertown (where, at the Blue Moon Cafe, age ten or twelve, I saw my first live blues musicians-Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Lockwood, I later discovered), and stop off for watery fountain Cokes in the alleyway behind Habib’s. Habib’s was run by one of two Jewish families in the town. Aside from the restaurant, they kept to themselves.

“Lew?”

No telling how much food went out that backdoor and down that alley year after year to those who might otherwise have gone without, itinerant farmworkers, folks in town hoping for positions at the tire and chemical plants, whole families trucked up en masse from Mexico to pick cotton, bluesmen in town playing jukes and streetcorners, local blacks, poor whites. All the lost tribes.

“Lew. Damn it, answer me!”

No longer was I drifting. Now I’d begun struggling my way upwards. Age ten or twelve, about the same time I came upon Sonny Boy and Robert Junior at the Blue Moon, I saw Houdini at the Malco halfway up Cherry, from the balcony cordoned off, weekends only, 25 cents, for blacks. Wrapped in chains and shut away in a trunk, Tony Curtis got thrown into freezing water. He rose, manacles and trunks left behind, only to encounter a sky of ice.

But now the ice gives way and I’m moving up again, ever closer. Deborah’s face swims into focus there above me. Lovely as always.

Years ago, after I found Alouette and her child, both desperately ill, in a hospital up in Mississippi, she told me what it was like to be so sundered from life. “Suddenly I broke free. Really free. I was floating. Nothing could touch me, nothing could hold me down. I remember thinking: How wonderful this is, I don’t even have to breathe