City of Saints and Madmen

Emily visits me at lunchtime. She visits me often during the day, but our nights have been crisscrossed, sometimes on purpose, I feel.

We go to the same park and now we feel out of place, in the minority. Everywhere I look dwarfs walk to lunch, drive cars, mend benches. All of them like individual palm prints, each one so unique that next to them Emily appears plain.

“Something has happened to you.” She looks into my eyes as she says this and I read a certain vulnerability into her words.

“Something has happened to me. I have a wound in my palm.”

“It’s not the wound. It’s the plants out of control. It’s the sex. It’s everything. You know it as well as me.”

Emily is always right, on the mark, in the money. I am beginning to tire of such perfection. I feel a part of me break inside.

“You don’t understand,” I say.

“I understand that you cannot handle responsibility. I understand that you are having problems with this relationship.”

“I’ll talk to you later,” I say and I leave her, speechless, on the bench.

X

After lunch, I think I know where my center lies: it lies in the sentence I must create for David Jones. It is in the sentence and in me. But I don’t want to write anything perfect. I don’t want to. I want to work without a net. I want to write rough, with emotion that stings, the words themselves dangling off into an abyss. I want to find my way back to the sea with the darkness coming down and the briny scent in my nostrils, before I knew my parents were dead. Before I was born.

David Jones found his way. If a person drinks too much alcohol, the body forces the stomach to vomit the alcohol before it can reach a lethal level. Jones never vomited. As he slept, the alcohol seeped into his bloodstream and killed him.

My shaking fingers want to perform ridiculous pratfalls, rolling over in complex loop-the-loops and cul-de- sacs of language. Or suicide sentences, mouthing sentiments from the almost dead to the definitely dead. Instead, I write:

From birth, David was learning ways to leave the flesh.

It is nothing close to layered prose. It has no subtlety to it. But now I can smell the slapping waves of the sea and the alluring stench of passionflower fruit.

Before I leave for my apartment, Emily calls me. I do not take the call. I am too busy wondering when my parents knew they might die, and if they thought of me as the wind and the water conspired to take them. I wish I had been with them, had gone down with them, in their arms, with the water in our mouths like ambrosia.

XI

When I open my apartment door, I hear the scuttling of a hundred sticky toes. The refrigerator’s surface writhes with milk-white movement against the dark green of leaves. In another second I see that the white paint is instead the sinuous shimmer-dance of the geckos, their camouflage perfect as they scramble for cover. I open the refrigerator and take out a wine cooler; my feet crunch down on a hundred molting gecko skins, the sound like dead leaves, or brittle cicada chrysalises.

I sit in my underwear and contemplate my wound by the TV’s redemptive light. It has healed itself so completely that I can barely find it. The itching, however, has intensified, until I feel it all over, inside me.

Nothing holds my interest on my palm except the exquisite imperfections: the gradations of colors, the rough pliable feel of it, the scratches from Emily’s cat.

I walk into the bedroom and ease myself beneath the covers of my bed. I imagine I smell the sea, a salt breeze wafting through the window. The stars seem like pieces of jagged glass ready to fall onto me. I toss in my bed and cannot sleep. I lie on my stomach. I lie on my side. The covers are too hot, but when I strip them away, my body becomes too cold. The water I drank an hour ago has settled in my stomach like a smooth, aching stone.

Finally, the cold keeps me half-awake and I prop myself sleepily against the pillow. I hear voices outside and see flashes of light from the window, like a ferris wheel rising and falling. But I do not get up.

Then he stands at the foot of my bed, staring at me. A cold blue tint dyes his flesh, as if the TV’s glow has sunburned him. The marble cast of his face is as perfect as the most perfect sentence I have ever written in my life. His eyes are so sad that I cannot meet his gaze; his face holds so many years of pain, of wanting to leave the flesh. He speaks to me and although I cannot hear him, I know what he is saying. I am crying again, but softly, softly. The voices on the street are louder and the tinkling of bells so very light.

And so I discard my big-body skin and my huge hands and my ungainly height and I walk out of my apartment with David Jones, to join the carnival under the moon, by the seashore, where none of us can hurt or be hurt anymore.

[Article excerpts taken from newspaper accounts in 1988 and 1989 by Michael Koretzky in The Independent Florida Alligator and by Ronald DuPont Jr. in The Gainesville Sun.]

THE AMBERGRIS GLOSSARY

— A —

AANDALAY, ISLE OF. The mythic homeland of the piratical Aan Tribes. According to the tales of the Aan, the Southern Hemisphere once consisted of a single landmass, the Isle of Aandalay, populated solely by the happy, peaceful Children of Aan. Only after a great cataclysm — the nature of which varies more from tale to tale than the weather in that part of the world — shattered the Isle into a thousand pieces did the Aan become warlike, each faction certain they possessed the mandate for restoration of a united Isle of Aandalay. Thus did piracy become rationalized as a quest for a homeland. Some Aan even attacked the mainland, claiming it was merely a huge splinter exiled from their beloved Isle. See also: Calabrian Calendar.

ABRASIS, MICHAEL. The first head librarian of the Manzikert Memorial Library. Abrasis is best known for his collection of erotic literature and lithographs. When he died, in his sleep, his body could not at first be removed from his apartment because the piles of pornography had blocked the only route from bed to door. Oddly enough, by the time Abrasis’ relatives came to collect his things, the apartment had been picked clean. Abrasis bred prize-winning cababari in his spare time. See also: Cababari; Manzikert Memorial Library.

ALBUMUTH BOULEVARD. A rather famous thoroughfare cutting through the heart of Ambergris.

The site of both the Borges Bookstore and the headquarters of Hoegbotton & Sons,Albumuth Boulevard has long been privy to the inner workings of the Festival of the Freshwater Squid. During the civil disturbances of the Reds and the Greens,Albumuth Boulevard served as the main battlefield. Certainly the recent armed struggle between Hoegbotton’s publishing arm and the inscrutable Frankwrithe & Lewden could not have occurred without the events that first unfolded on the boulevard. No one can agree on the origin of the name “Albumuth,” or on the limits of the boulevard. As Sirin once said, “Like the Moth,Albumuth Boulevard has a thousand tributaries and