They went by. Still love you. She left empty bottles and soda cans at the openings of lean-tos and took other bottles to be redeemed, buying food for the squatters in the park and telling them there was a man from far away. Omar took her into tenements where he did his swift business in figures of speech she never quite caught on to. There were tile floors in the hallway and they had these punctures in the door where they put in locks and took out locks. It was a civilization of locks. A pointing hand painted on an alley wall seemed to lead nowhere.
In the loft she went through many books of photographs, amazed at the suffering she found. Famine, fire, riot, war. These were the never-ceasing subjects, the pictures she couldn't stop looking at. She looked at the pictures, read the captions, looked at the pictures again, rebels with hoods, executed men, prisoners with potato sacks on their heads. She looked at the limbs of Africans starving. The hungry were everywhere, women leading naked children in a dust storm, the way their long robes billowed. She read the caption and then looked at the picture again. The picture was bare without the words, alone in open space. Some nights she came into the loft and went straight to the pictures. Delirious crowds swirling beneath enormous photographs of holy men. She might study the same picture seven times in seven nights, children falling from a burning tenement, and read the caption every time. It was suffering through and through. It was who is dying in the jungle rot. The words helped her locate the pictures. She needed the captions to fill the space. The pictures could overwhelm her without the little lines of type.
She talked to Israelis and Bangladeshis. A man with sparkly eyes turned halfway in his seat, driving breakneck downtown, and she formed a picture of the taxi in a steep careen, shooting still-life flames. She talked to all the drivers, asking questions in the cash slot.
They went by. Still love you. Went by. Still love you.
There was a dialect of the eye. She read the signs and sayings near the park. The Polish bars, the Turkish baths, Hebrew on the windows, Russian in the headlines, there were painted names and skulls. Everything she saw was some kind of vernacular, bathtubs in kitchens and old Waterman stoves, the liquor-store shelves enclosed in bulletproof plastic like some see-through museum of bottles. She kept seeing the words Sendero Luminoso on half- demolished walls and boarded storefronts. Sendero Luminoso on the cinder-block windows of abandoned tenements. Beautiful-looking words. They were painted over theater posters and broadsheets on all the peeling brick walls in the area.
'I'm not in too good of a mood,' Omar said.
'I'm only asking.'
'Don't slime up to me. All I'm saying, okay.'
'I'm asking a simple question. Either you know or you don't.'
'No time for sex, okay, then you come around, which I don't even know your name.'
'I found out how old you are. They told me in the park.'
'Hey I make my living. I protect my corner regardless. Know what I'm saying. Be it I'm six or sixty.'
'So all right, you're mature and experienced to the sky. But that's the way I feel about it.'
'The Shining Path. Sendero Luminoso. Spanish for Shining Path.'
'Is it religious?'
'It's guerrillas and whatnot. Making their presence felt.'
'Where?'
'Wherever,' Omar said.
Bodies stirring in the bandshell, lost children on the milk cartons. She recalled the sign for DEAF CHILD and formed a picture of a Sunday hush on a country road. It's just like Beirut. She talked to certain familiars in the park, telling them how to totalize their lives according to the sayings of a man with the power. In the subways she read the Spanish emergency even if the English was right next to it. She reasoned that in an actual emergency she could switch to the English if needs be and in the meantime she was trying out voices in her head.
In the subways, in many of the streets, in corners of the park at night, contact could be dangerous. Contact was not a word or touch but the air that flashed between strangers. She was learning how to alter the way she walked and sat, how to hide her glances or sort of root them out. She remained in the deep core. She walked within herself, did not cross the boundary into the no-man's-land of a glance, a fleeting ray of recognition. Like I'm a person and you're a person, which gives you the right to kill me. She formed a picture of people running in the streets.
She liked climbing the ladder to Brita's bed with the little TV in hand and the loft all dark and sitting near the ceiling in the glow, watching without sound.
A daylit scene comes on of a million people in a great square and many banners swung aloft with Chinese writing. She sees people sitting with hands calmly folded over knees. She sees in the deep distance a portrait of Mao Zedong.
Then rain comes on. They're marching in the rain, a million Chinese.
Then people riding bicycles past burnt-out vehicles. Bicyclists wearing rain shrouds and holding umbrellas. She sees scorched military trucks with people inspecting closely, awed to be so near, and lampposts in the distance arching over trees.
A group of old men come on stiffly posed in Mao suits.
She sees soldiers in the darkness who come jogging through the streets. She is mesmerized by rows and rows of jogging troops and those riot guns they carry.
Then people being routed in the dark, great crowds rent and split, the way a crowd folds away, leaving a space that looks confused.
They show high officials in Mao suits.
The soldiers jogging in the streets, entering the vast area of the daylit square although it is night now. There is something about troops jogging out of streets and avenues into a great open space. They are jogging in total drag step almost lazily with those little guns at port arms and the crowd breaking apart.
Then the portrait of Mao in the daylit square with paint spattered on his head.
The troops come jogging in total cadence in that lazy drag step, row after row, and she wants it to keep on going, keep showing the rows of jogging troops with their old-fashioned helmets and toylike guns.
They show a smoldering corpse in the street.
There are dead bodies attached to fallen bicycles, flames shooting in the dark. The bodies are still on the bikes and there are other bicyclists looking on, some wearing sanitary masks. You could actually say a pile of bodies and many of the dead still seated on their bikes.
What is the word, dispersed? The crowd dispersed by jogging troops who move into the great space.
One crowd replaced by another.
It is the preachment of history, whoever takes the great space and can hold it longest. The motley crowd against the crowd where everyone dresses alike.
They show the portrait of Mao up close, a clean new picture, and he has those little mounds of hair that bulge out his head and the great wart below his mouth that she tries to recall if the wart appears on the version Andy drew with a pencil that she has on the wall in the bedroom at home. Mao Zedong. She likes that name all right. But it is funny how a picture. It is funny how a picture what?
She hears a car alarm go off in the street.
She changes channels and a million Chinese come on in the daylit square. She is hoping to catch more shots of jogging troops. They show the bicycle dead, a soldier's body hanging from a girder, the row of old officials in Mao suits.
What does it mean that all these old men are dressed in Mao suits and the people in the square are all in shirtsleeves?
The motley crowd dispersed.
They show the great state portrait in the deep distance and she is pretty certain there is no wart in Andy's drawing.
There is something about troops entering a square, jogging row after row in lazy cadence. She keeps changing channels to see the troops.
They show the bicycle dead.
The daylit square comes on again. It is funny how a picture shows the true person even when it is incomplete.
And in the street when she goes out later there is a taxi that has skidded into a parked car and a third car's
