Imaginary Lives #2
One time a traveling music troupe rides into town.
This must have been the first year you and your father lived in the city.
Your father passed out as usual after drinking, so you wander down to the square alone and try to get a seat near the front.
They play lots of music and tell jokes and even have some puppets.
When you tell your father later he grunts like he wants to tell you something but can’t remember. He does that a lot.
All the best writers are Russian for some reason, but you still prefer H.
Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne.
Niagara Falls is only ten thousand years old.
You hate coordinating plans with friends through text.
You think Prince is amazing but a friend who listens to a lot of podcasts thinks he’s overrated.
Mix the water and lime and then add sand.
The infield fly rule treats fly balls in the infield as caught when there are forced runners, even if they are not caught, so there are balls that might not be caught but by definition were already caught even before they were not caught.
Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area were thought to be the centers of language but actually it’s clear that now language is distributed throughout various neuro-networks.
The first time you nail it is junior year.
Your school puts on Singin’ in the Rain, and you play Cosmo Brown.
When you perform “Make ’Em Laugh,” jumping and flying all over the stage, running into walls and falling down, there is actual laughter from the crowd.
Not the satisfied high-school-musical laughter of adults watching their children, but real laughter that comes from something you did.
Your brother wants to build bridges and you can never understand why.
In graduate school you always stay late at the lab, and one night you walk home and see a busker strumming a James Taylor song on his guitar. “Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep,” he sings. You haven’t listened to music in weeks and suddenly begin to weep.
You don’t watch movies after the war. But you remember the old ones well.
Your favorites were the westerns. They were earnest and innocent and a little bit dumb.
In the last one you ever saw—you watched it in a sweltering cinema, the day Hitler invaded Poland—a bunch of strangers come together to ride a stagecoach across treacherous terrain.
They bicker and argue and eventually become a kind of family.
An outlaw named Ringo kept them safe. When Ringo first appeared onscreen, you gasped: The camera pushed in quickly on an actor you had never seen before.
He twirled his rifle, and the camera fell out of focus and then in on him again, his face taking over the whole screen.
That was a hero. There were shoot-outs and exciting escapes and in the end Ringo rode off with his new lady love, running from the law but happy together.
“Well, they’re saved from the blessings of civilization,” the drunk doctor said, and you thought that might be the most beautiful thing you had ever heard.
Your friends just laughed. Too many horses, they said.
Your brother goes to Annapolis—a good way to study engineering, he claims—and drowns at sea during one of the wars. That’s something: There is always a war, somewhere. Your father fought at the Somme, in Iraq, in the Great Wizarding War.
You apply to NYU and get in, even though your mother says she can’t pay for it.
Your father lives in Denver now. In college you are not what they call a “natural talent.” You really have to work at your craft.
Some of the other students have a way of just disappearing into their roles, but your teachers constantly criticize you for trying too hard.
Which is counterintuitive. Aren’t you supposed to try hard?
Shakespeare is better than Chekhov is better than Ibsen is better than Williams is better than O’Neill.
Oh, Pinter. Pinter is better than O’Neill.
No, O’Neill is better than Williams. Arthur Miller is shit, actually, except when he is great.
Ben Jonson is annoying. Your favorite writer is still Mark Twain.
Still Beckett. You don’t read literature. You don’t read.
Sophomore year you meet Jules, who starts out on an acting track but switches to playwriting because, he says, “No one remembers actors, not really. You hear about Sarah Bernhardt but was she even good? You don’t really know.
” Jules is very concerned about how people will think of him.
Your friends in the lab—not friends, really, but people with whom you socialize on occasion—are also obsessed with status.
Getting published. Getting grants. The master mason wants everyone to know his work but there’s a rival mason from over the river and people keep getting them confused.
Once you have true publishing success you wish you hadn’t.
After college you stay in New York and wait tables between auditions.
Wendy gets into wine and you travel to Santa Barbara but when you taste the wines they are all the same and you realize the cigarettes have finally ruined you.
Private research pays better and you hate yourself a little but when you tell your father what your salary is he is genuinely impressed.
Computers communicate in binary but you don’t know what that means.
You like to tell people you can talk to cows and when you’re drunk enough you believe it.
Your mother is sick but you land a small role in a small play at a small theater in Ossining, and you can’t come home right away.
You have two lines—you run onstage and tell another character he has a phone call, and then a little bit later you tell that same character that the mayor has arrived—but the show pays real money and it feels too important for you to leave and visit your mother in New Jersey.
After all, if you aren’t there, who will tell everyone about the mayor?
The next year you spend a lot of time with lawyers on the phone closing up the estate, a ridiculous word for the belongings of a woman who died broke.
The house sells to a developer who wants to flip it.
Your father calls you on your birthday, asks how you are doing, and doesn’t mention your mother.
He dies a year later, and you let his new wife handle all that.
You do a book signing in Dallas and decide it’s the worst city in the world.
The owner of the coffee place in Greenpoint is mobbed up but the Danishes are good there.
You’re still young so why does your back hurt so much?
Elvis was a sergeant in the army and he also stole music from Black people.
Sex in pornography is always so confident and aggressive. Peppermint mochas are disgusting.
Stalag VIII-A. That was the name of it, over the river from Gorlitz.
It had once been a camp for Hitler Youth.
Ten thousand Poles were already there when the French and Belgians arrived, and you are placed in a tent while more barracks were built.
There wasn’t cholera or diphtheria in the camp yet, but there would be, along with British and Canadians and Russians and Americans.
You spend over four years there before the Germans marched you back into the interior of the fatherland, and the whole time you try to imagine how it’s going to end.
The flooding in Manhattan means a lot of closed theaters and a lot of out-of-work actors.
Jules has a couple of shows produced. His breakout is a financial flop but a critical success that finally gets him a phone call from Los Angeles and a flight west. He says he’ll be back but you know he won’t.
You move to Philadelphia and take a job pretending to be Thomas Jefferson for tourists.
You have no close friends. When the lights are on, you can’t even see the audience.
You’re an apprentice working long hours and the musical troupe returns.
Or it’s a different one, you can’t tell.
They do their act, you make sure to catch it after working in the sun all day.
You laugh a lot, louder at jokes that are familiar.
You don’t know if you like it or if you just like the memory.
You watch hundreds of people change their entire personalities right in front of you but decide such a thing would be impossible for you to do, even very slowly.
Sometimes Glenn shows you an actually good movie and the daily slog seems less impossible.
You don’t tell him this because he takes too much satisfaction when you like something.
The last book is almost impossible to finish. You are breathing with an oxygen tank now. The winters are felt deep in your bones. All you can think about is the camp.
The Tempest does it for you. You have one good night and you never really act again.
The Malicarn calls and you help develop the set.
It is a living thing. The Malicarn isn’t real but it’s not fake, either.
It takes you a long time to understand that.
Jules never understands, not one bit. But Lilly understands, right away.
You think this is because she is a scientist, but it’s because Lilly doesn’t like to live in her own head.
In fact she hates it. That is the difference between the two of you.
You tie a slipknot by folding the rope, taking the end and looping that around the double line a few times, then pulling. Lift is achieved when thrust forces enough air under the aircraft’s wing that pressure is higher than above it. Bluebirds have orange chests.
The first winter in the camp was the most difficult, because you had no idea what to expect.
You are a child of intellectuals, a child of Paris.
Your father would rail about the people and revolution but you never suffered for it.
Now the snow blows into the barracks and you trade for extra rations and try not to look at any of the guards the wrong way.
You don’t have the right coat. The dying dreams start, where your body falls apart, dissolves into dust, and you try to capture the feeling the moment it happens but you always wake up.
You get sick, very sick, and cannot keep down food.
For three days you retch, you become dehydrated.
You lie on your bunk and realize you don’t have the strength to stand.
You are going to die and nothing ever happened. The world ended and nobody remembers.
There are twenty-four hours in a day, three hundred sixty-five days in a year.
Except in leap years. The earth is round, circles the sun, and spins on a crooked axis.
The earth is at the center of the universe, surrounded by the circling planets and stars.
Strawberries taste best freshly picked. People complain about the weather but that’s because they are afraid to talk about anything else.
Sometimes when you look at a wall you help build you realize that the world can be really beautiful, but you don’t know what to do with this knowledge.
You spent the first half of your life trying to understand things and the second half trying to forget. You’re like your father, in that way. In the end he managed to forget everything. But even if you forget it, it’s still true.
It is January, the first winter. You are feeling better, drinking and eating again.
But you have lost a lot of weight. The cold is worse now.
The guards tell everyone to come to the main yard.
There is a stage, and chairs. You sit with the other prisoners.
The guards are going to give a speech. No, not guards.
There is a piano on the stage. Four other prisoners ascend.
One carries a cello, another a violin, a third a clarinet.
The fourth man, his blond hair dirtied, his round glasses hiding his serious expression, sits at the piano.
He places his sheet music, handwritten, on the music desk.
The musicians tune their instruments. The sun is out today, but the air is sharp and cold.
There is a deep silence in the yard, as if at the opening of the seventh seal. Then they start playing.
You know now why you could play Prospero, how you made it work for just one night.
You were an understudy, called up at the last minute on the last day of performances.
There wasn’t time to prepare, wasn’t time to overthink.
So you stood onstage and you didn’t try to control it.
Like the old sorcerer tired of maintaining his little island, you finally let it all go.
You didn’t work too hard. You didn’t act. You just existed.
But this rough magic I here abjure,
The music is soft at first, the instruments rising together, almost as if they are still tuning.
Discordant but not apart. The piano hits louder notes, erratically.
Then the clarinet comes in, fliting over it.
The four instruments clash and find harmony and break apart again.
The sound is angry, it is sad. It searches for some way to be whole.
Sometimes one instrument will fall silent for a long time, sometimes all four will sound at once.
The violin takes its time to cry out a melody while the piano taps behind it.
The man playing the piano closes his eyes, he does not see his own music, he does not need it.
You understand this man completely. The world is over and you have already died.
Someday when you are beside the fire in your Boston home, your wife and son in the next room, you will play a record and remember what it was like to live through the end of time.
And so you will take out your sharpened pencils and your blank pages and you will scratch out some imaginary lives.
I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And that’s it. What do you remember? You spend your whole life telling made-up stories about made-up people and looking at their brains and thinking about when your father fought with wizards and wondering what it feels like the moment you die.
and deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.
You let go.