Tody Wode set the book down on the nightstand frustrated not by his inability to concentrate, which was fine, but by the years that had gone by since he had last sat reflectively and done nothing. It is the realm and duty of the poets, he reasoned, this meditation. And people don’t do it anymore, not in this practical, rational world. He realized a few times, in the car next to his wife as she listened to NPR, again, that modern living was all about the input of stimuli, or the material of other people’s thoughts, or the complex inextricability of our societal web, and not the simple, clean thinking of the unaffected individual. He had these thoughts as the car bombed over the bridge and as a supertanker lolled underneath and another refilled its bosom at the base of the refineries. The refineries with pipes and lights and steel, painted to blend against the brown hills, to appear innocuous and even public relations-wise in-noxious. He possessed these thoughts on the steel bridge in the tonnage of vehicle and a baby on the way and NPR on the radio, again, and the years upon years of books and then he had them again in bed, last night, laying next to Mrs. Wode the Wonder, the Volvo station wagon broken down and their neighbor with a Volvo station wagon and college stickers on the back window and a bumper sticker that said “Harvard Crew” and memories of the Charles River and autumn and those insane nights whereon he lived his poet brilliance that was rare and simple and finally ended with real living. Tody, remember those days? Shit. A thought, a thought, one clean, simple thought, unforced, arrived without effort, an uncomplicated arrival upon the whim and muse of Nature, from elemental watching, seeing. What did you notice last night? “That I noticed,” he answered. He turned the radio off for the drive to his sister-in-law’s house, his niece’s house, the casual Saturday of commonplace and real life, not a life of ideas. He wasn’t bothered. Only, the radio this time was off, and Mrs. Wode turned to him after forty minutes and said, “Pumpkin? I just had a thought.”
“No.”
“Yeah, I did. Do you want to hear it now, or later?” She had seen that he was curiously involved inside himself.
“Later,” he said. The passed the prison on the water in which they terminate prisoners with the protests outside. The sun was shining. “I’m thinking about last night,” he said.
He worried that he would commit suicide. Oh, no, not that he was unhappy, really. But that he would eventually run out of reasons to live, his essential enthusiasm dissipated, his early aspirations tossed away for real living. Grow up, his father had always told him, while still in college on that damn Charles River. “If you want money,” his mother wisely intoned, “Then, why, get a job.”
Thinking, meditation, the cat, and last night. Damn, is that the way of things? He considered the roses and the palm. At his sister-and-law’s house. And he needs some time, he needs some time alone.
On his back that night and like tonight, too, and the night before last, after making an oath to not buy an expensive bottle of whisky again for at least four months, he set his book down – a curious refusal to continue; with enough freshness to continue – and he turned out the light. It was after eleven. A mysterious concoction of emotion and nostalgia and he recalled the old days. He used to read poetry to a lover after midnight and then hike through the thick layer of snow, flakes falling in streetlights’ glow, after she fell asleep. They would not argue about God and the Buddha until much later. And here, or we should say then, the thoughts arrived pure and rapid, at a time when they meant something, when it seemed as if he were contemplating fresh things and new arrivals, an arising. And he seized upon these thoughts and he wrote them down, at home, after the traipse through the snow, after witnessing the two men beating a third in an alley, after smoking the ‘jane underneath the bridge on the river, after seeing Elvin Jones at the Reggattabar. At a time when the thoughts meant something. Now, it’s not cynicism or aging or standard middle-mass responsibilities or watching the hippos on PBS or pulling on his chin during a discussion of election results on NPR. It’s a loss, from lack of practice, from assuming that he wasn’t allowed to do it anymore.
“I’m bored,” he thought. “And I’ve got shit to say.” He felt, this early in the night (early according to his poetic notions, or his romantic, or his adventurous), sleep arriving easily, ready to take him, ready to ease him quickly to the breakfast table and his shower and his way to work. He was restless, however, and he refused sleep. “I want to do something,” he thought. “I want to do something new, or adventurous. What is this place, this house? What is this quotidian bed moment? Oh, read . . . just shut up and read a book. No. I cannot tonight read, won’t. There has to be something else.”
Then he opened his eyes. He’s not going to inject some heroin, man, come on! He’s got a wife and family, he’s got things to accomplish, his answers are simple, pure, honest. He swung his feet to the hardwood floor and he smelled the breeze through the open window – an accident of waft and a crack in the venetian, purely coincidental, the way things are meant to be, so say some – and he walked to the armoire, his grandmother’s, and he lowered the desk top where they keep envelopes and pens and stamps (books of them they forget about) and postcards from friends. He reached for the tin of Excalibur cigars his grandfather, upon the occasion of their last visit, had given him. He’d read somewhere that when Thomas Wolfe was a boy he smoked a cigar to achieve an altered state, and as a boy he thought that some of those feelings were hallucinations.
Tody Wode walked to the closet and grabbed a pair of jeans and a shirt and a sweater. He found a book of matches near the phone, a book that had for six months sat untouched and had found its way to the phone-side of this non-smoking couple by the excited hand of Tody’s younger brother, who’d visited a steakhouse and who’d grabbed a free book of matches and who left it by the phone as a clue, some hint that would show how his vacation had been, some small token that told a small story. Tody’s brother was fond of such touches, like the crow’s feather in the glass vase on the living room table, or a photograph of his son on the mantle, or a book purchased for 50 cents from a library book sale that occurred while Tody and his wife were on their trip to the Grand Canyon, or the punch card of holes from the coffeeshop fast on the way to a free coffee on number nine, as Tody’s brother had visited every morning on their stay and had written his paper there, finding these people strange and not his kind of people. That book of matches, you see, still there. And Tody Wode didn’t want the large box of matches that rested with the camping equipment in the closet, the only matches that he knew about; and they did not own a lighter; and he did not want to take a trip to the 24-hour liquor mart lest the succinct groove of his inspiration fall by the practical wayside.
He fingered the book of matches and thanked his brother for the thoughtful trinket. He held one cigar from the tin. He smelled it under his nose and felt that the world was opening to alternate sensibilities, to secrets, to nifty late night things, and thus to meditations that might stick with him and make his life worthwhile. Simple thoughts that he would at some point form into a poem or a phrase, nothing beyond that, nothing special, always rejected by the big literary magazines and anyway the point being that it made him feel like he was alive, as if he were aware. And awareness was his own unique circumstance, the various levels by which he judged others, the very essence of being to Tody Wode.
He walked to the top of the building, four flights of stairs on his tiptoes, not for fear of waking anybody; but for fear of encouraging somebody to open their door and say hello, his ascent a rarity; he did not like chance encounters in the confined space of a hallway under the bright lights of the stairwell and he wanted to be alone.
He met with no resistance. Recollections began to flood back to him, from some genetic plane and from an experiential plane, one of a long-ago time, moments of youth and belief and faithful frenzy. Yes, that time when all things seemed possible. Tody opened the door and he stood in the cool darkness on the roof. How shall I paint his rejoice? How shall he express it? He pumped his fist in an athletic way, and hissed “Yesss!” He looked around, in a sort of wild-eyed incredulity, a wonder that was rare and precious. He did not see the moonrise yet; nor did the cat enter the scene. Before lighting the cigar he walked to the edge of the building and looked down. He walked to the rear of the building, hyper-aware of Suzy alone in her studio apartment below his creaking feet. Wondered if she wondered. There a tall redwood tree, proud, vestigial. The shadows of a nighttime urban landscape, seen from above. Bay waters flat and impressive; the BART train three blocks away and loud as it traveled; the Red Cross building dark and alone on Broadway save its backlighted sign of the cross; antennae on top of the Red Cross building. Down their street the Post Office, and next to it the rehabilitation center and behind that the tall apartment building with condos for purchase and old matrons with cats; apartment buildings in a variety of sizes as the hill sloped down toward Danny Keyes’s bar, and the breakfast joint across the street and Art’s Crab Shack and the Asian Massage Parlor that has yet to be busted and the 24-hour liquor store in question, owned and run (proudly and defiantly) by a phalanx of urbanized Pakistanis who love the Raiders, and who bet on the Raiders; the darkened, shadowed house-light-spotted hills to the east, above campus and the Campanile, a mean scream toward the Central Valley and the rest of America; the Mormon Temple, always well-lighted against the darkness and a well-rooted establishment of secrecy and earnestness.
Next to the redwood tree and behind their apartment complex with the flat roof stood three small bungalows, chimneys sticking upwardly from the slanted roofs, urban cabins they seemed from Tody’s height, a porch light on one of them and he was consumed by a contemplation of various prairie scenes in America, or of an icy night in Taos, New Mexico, when he sat in the natural hot springs and his hair froze and it was heading toward New Year’s Eve and he was alone, alone, that is, save a Native American from the reservation who worked construction for the white man and who claimed a life of manual labor led him to experience harsh and often severe joint pain, for which he sat in these springs every Friday night, without fail, summer or winter. The small bungalows behind Tody’s apartment building reminded him of these tiny cabins with the porch light and smoke from the chimney, and they combined somehow a vision of Los Angeles and of some studio’s gang of scriptwriters, housed warmly in the conquered desert that is now this dramatic oasis. Tody Wode held a strong desire to walk down there, in daytime, and say hello to the cozy dwellers his neighbors in those sleek and mini-houses that were like one-room apartments but houses just the same, and he found great difficulty taking his eye from the light above the front door on the porch.
He allowed his mind to wander. And whenever it stuck on some cogitation that to him seemed for the moment unsavory, he repeated “Let go. Just let go.” This included being interviewed on Teri Gross and included great wealth and vigilante ideas regarding the current administration, and acquisitive ideas that merely set him to drooling for more, for desirousness and covetousness, images that led to material possessions and away from pure thinking, from poetry, from philosophy, from engaging the mind in tight rhetoric and rigor. “Just one thought,” he said to himself. “Just one new, original idea, now, find it.”
He was still standing, facing east toward the darkened and light-spotted hills that rise against the sky. Two folding beach chairs near the door to the roof. They faced west, as might immediately seem natural: hipsters watching sunsets on the roof eating burritos from brown paper sacks. “To sing like Wordsworth,” he muttered. He then quickly discarded the notion. He attempted to keep the thought train going, directing it and not directing it at the same time. He meditated on sticks and on limes.
When he walks, an essay, he has something in his hand, flicking about the fingers and the thumb and often tossed, caught, tossed again, a constant reminder, an engagement. The small stick he rips from the attenuated ends of dead branches, low-lying from some tree or a bush. And he walks while fingering the small stick break, pressing the sharp end into his flesh, a kind of nervous movement that at first drove his wife nuts (at the dinner table especially; during speeches certainly) but now she has allowed to slip away into the broad current of time. “Just let go,” he said. He smelled the cigar. He eyeballed the two beach chairs, their backs folded over, onto themselves, so as to protect the ass and back, besotted quickly and thickly elsewhere. The chairs a white plastic, easily showing their exposure to the urban elements. Deep lung fulls reminded him that this was a city, and he didn’t care: he inhaled sharply, again. The cat arrived from his right, from thin air, from the tree.
The door to the roof was closed, so the cat could not have come from the stairway. The cat’s name was Frederick. Fred lived with Suzy in the studio below Tody’s creaking footsteps. “Did you come from the tree?” Tody wondered to the cat. This white cat with reddish brown spots had never said hello before, preferring in daylight to dash under parked cars in the back parking lot, or choosing to bolt up the wooden staircase to a cat door and into the apartment. Now, however, in this late-night darkness, Fred rubbed against Tody’s standing legs. Tody reached down to pet behind its ears: “Kindred spirits, are we?” he said. The cat purred.
Tody Wode walked to a folding white plastic beach chair and he unfolded it, caught grooves properly for its backrest, and he sat down. He lighted the cigar and he smoked it, clearing all mind wanderings that were not pertinent to beauty or to strangeness or to originality or to humor. He refused to consider his job, his family, his prospects; he did not acknowledge the ongoing World Series and he worried not about his father or his mother, not a fret offered for his younger brother, struggling with unemployment and drug abuse. He set it all aside, all of it, and paused for the breeze, waited for this nighttime wind to bring the rich mental moment to him. He smoked the cigar and he waited, patient. And this waiting paid off, and he smiled, smoking, Fred now on his lap, the Bay Bridge all headlights coming this way and tail lights going that way, incessant, an unforced never-ending that brought rhythm to the capacities of Tody Wode, and to night and to the urban star-scape above and to the hospital in full view, binoculars would aid his spying into the yellow windows, a man recovering there and the maternity ward there, an incubator and a doctor and a father’s face set to deep concern.
It is the manner of the bath. And the way of the midnight bowl of cereal. The greatest poetry ever imagined. He paints Wallace Stevens into a corner and there the maniac laughs. The diminutive stick in his hands he pokes into skin and flesh, slowly turning it over, aware of the organic nature of wood and tree and growing things. “It’s the way the stuff of the earth feels on my hands. Not plastic, Jesus fuck not plastic.” A sea shell next to his bedside and he remembers in a flash why he has it there in the first place. It represents the passion of a quality moment and the hope for a future filled with interpreted and understood moments. Or, he would say, moments of awareness. “The complete goal of my life.” The seashell worn smooth, by ocean, time and his rubbing thumb and finger. The shell is purple and white and is from a sand meld among the dolphins of Assateague, in a quiet solitude November, alone with an impression swirling as a tide in his mind. Horses walked next to him, paused, continued. His future son would fall into the surf wearing a down coat right there on that island at that beach where the shell found him.
Tody Wode sat in the white plastic chair with Fred and he smoked the cigar his grandfather had given him and a cigar he had smoked with his grandfather, on his porch with a martini, when he was still alive and he possessed brain enough to hold conversation with hilarity and wit. “Comrades of the night,” Tody said as he looked down at the purring and vividly contented Frederick the Cat, who had climbed a tree to attain the roof, a tree whose limbs grew thin by the time the blacktop pitch is reached, and which, upon inspection, Tody pulling branches aside and peering into the thick set of leaves, it was understood that Frederick was one hell of a brave and skillful cat. Fred left the warm lap and walked to the pristine edge of the building and looked down, paws a pause half over and half on, as if showing off his ability to remain calm under a period of precariousness. Tody pulled the smoke into his mouth and said, “I suppose you know what you’re doing.”
Unlike the woman next door in the yellow apartment building (theirs was white with brown trim), Diane Hellenback, who refuses and is anyway quite unable to look at the city’s billboards, Tody uses them to enhance and at times enchant his poetry. The poems that always remain in his mind. Tupac, his huge head, probably a bandana, the man long dead now, stares back at Tody from the street, from below, advertising a movie about his dead self. Tody calculated: “It is twenty-three feet below me and one hundred yards away directly.” He paused, “Yes, that is a football field, I can see it.” Tupac providing a fore-frame to the Bay Bridge, white headlights in one long, snaking stream that will quit when does humankind. A train squealed on the tracks at the end of his view of 40th Street, the concatenation of individual window lights impressive as the trains streaked through darkness. And down there – Dos Passos would be proud of the method – ramming its lights into the sky in order to be visible from the 80-mile-an-hour car traffic from the freeway squats Home Depot and Office Max and CompUSA. Just beyond their sky lighting advertisements there currents the bay, and beyond, the deep silhouette of mountains.
Next to Tupac there a line-up of soda and juice and water bottles. Yes, tap water marketed and sold as fresh water and there, right there, is what I should be doing to earn my riches: should run it from my kitchen and sell in the backyard. “He started from humble beginnings . . .” The line-up of soda and juice and water bottles owned and marketed by Coca-Cola, and the billboard advert implores us to think of Coca-Cola, the corporation, in all its forms, when we choose a refreshment. “Tupac liked Coke drank Coke in all its forms, and now the man is dead, in heaven still a bandana on his head,” Tody Wode said to Fred. “What do you think, boy?” and the cat, perched on the edge of the building – a drop would kill him – looked over with severe nonchalance and probably yawned. The hospital the Red Cross the bridge, concrete and steel and pavement and billboards and the sound of the freeway and the train, an urban expansiveness that for the first time Tody did not want to escape, rather, he wanted to be a piece of it, a total immersion. “Make me,” he said to the city. The hill leaving the tidal plane and the tall pine trees against the sky above Monte Vista, keep sweeping and there the Mormons again, entrenched, rooted, and the United States Post Office and the rehabilitation center where ambulances arrive daily to discharge or retrieve drooling hurts, most often elderly but at times the maimed young, leg still in traction. Walk by during the day, though, and most likely you’ll see pops in a bathrobe seated in a wheelchair, snoozing in the sunshine, ankles purple and swollen and leg veins taking the term varicose to its culmination. “Clear the mind,” Tody said to himself, “Like the lime.”
He stood from the white plastic chair and moved away from the street side, away from the lights toward the back shadows of the building. Fred followed, thinking it was time to play. And here in its half-state rose a golden moon. Its rounded bottom earthward and a flat tabletop offered upwardly, as if cradling an important charge, the moon lifted from the eastern hills and rose into brief striations of lingering fog and cloud. Fred rubbed against Tody’s legs, back and forth, figure eights, while the human raised his arms above his head for a spate of deep breathing, the cool cold of night on the bay, a kind of chill that will never be as Cambridge in December, but that impresses you nonetheless with its penetration to the bone. The chill seeps, deceptive at 51 degrees, and you layer yourself against it. You build houses and you start fires. Tody shivered, his arms above his head and his lungs full, Fred doing figure eights still, and both took note of the rising moon, adding its hue to the sky and pallid lights flicking on the eastward sides of trees and urban structures and Tupac’s head, not smiling, and the Red Cross building and Frederick the Amazing tree-climbing roof-obtaining cat.
“An altered state,” Tody said aloud, “and I am not alone for this.” He looked down at Fred who in turn looked up at him, not imploring but a what-should-we-do next? Tody flicked the cigar butt to the tar and pitch roof and it hit and rolled. Fred ran over to it and sniffed cautiously. Did I not tell you about the bathtub and the midnight bowl of cereal? Not yet. Tody made his decision on the roof and he implemented it. In the bathtub, his favorite type of soaking, hard heat, red skin and sweat pouring from forehead into eyes, wiping his hands on a nearby towel, Tody read books. Fiction or non. Or magazine articles. Or computer printouts or the newspaper or the “Week in Review” from last weekend or books, yes, fiction or non. And the sweat pours and sometimes the paper is dampened or stained, and he reads and overheats and finally drags himself from the bathroom and falls naked and often still wet into bed. In bed he reads until he turns out the light. Then he wakes with the family and goes to the job and the process begun again, over and more, the innocence of his youth buried in experience and in printed words, and the magic of small moments of the past, those that he would write down then, melting away like the March snows in Cambridge and his winter walks at two a.m. gone, liquid down the storm drain eventually making the river and the harbor and the end of it.
The next bath Tody sat and overheated and stuck his feet high above the faucet, feet upon the sweat-beaded tile, and he left the books on the shelves, left Robert Lowell on the shelf, and he forced images of great wealth down and he set aside green envies and deep acquisitiveness and he waited for something real. There were no fantasies, no lustful designs that snatch the mind and lead it away from quality or goodness. He simply filed or fished through the possibilities in his brain until he met with beauty again, simplicity, insights, aphorisms, truths, understandings. In this state, altered, finally and with effort, purity arrived and he saw the meaning of life. Tody endeavored, red skin and overheated head and sweat pouring, to arrive upon the words to describe the thoughts that duly and properly arrived. He did not write them down. “But I’m getting closer to knowing why we’re all here,” he said. “I’m closer to the great thinkers, from Plato to Kant, I’m getting closer to coming up with something original.” Of course nobody cared.
The oak table from his grandmother in the kitchen he visited every night, if cereal or milk in the house, and if it’s not cereal it’s yogurt. His wife long gone to sleep, many hours earlier, and Tody finally ready for it, he stands and moves to the kitchen for this perennial snack. Nothing big, nothing special. On the table rests a large volume of history, say some bit on the Civil War or Vietnam or Halberstam’s The Fifties, and the game is, while eating cereal, he reads quickly and effortlessly and without worries of memorization or recollection or written notes or marginalia, without repeating sentences or phrases and without allowing the mind to wander and without allowing a spot of milk on the page to throw him off his line. A habit he developed in order to “get through all the great books. To read every book on my shelves before I die. To do this I’ve got to read all the time, you know. Constant effort. Read on the train, too. You know, I used to stare at people, at developments, at life on the train. Now I don’t. I read, and almost miss my stop. But I’m churning through those books. I’ve heard of a great writer from the past, I don’t know, perhaps he was Elizabethan, who had books read to him while he wasn’t reading, you know, during moments where he couldn’t be the one reading. He had people read books and provide him with synopses. This is what I’m talking about: a hungry absorption, perpetual. Harold Bloom, you know, reads a book a day. I’ve got to catch up.” That’s what Tody said when describing the large volume of some history on his grandmother’s oak table in the kitchen. And it worked, too, this method: the bookmark slowly churned through the text and soon another massive six hundred pager was finished, and he had the Civil War inside him and Vietnam and Trotsky’s treatise on the Russian Revolution.
The magical now of it! He sat at the table and spooned the cereal to his mouth and he did not read a book. He allowed the mind to wander, to search and ultimately find that thought, the one that would spark a poem, the one he would write down. Tody pushed aside imagined interviews, after his greatness was revealed, with Charlie Rose before the bathrobe reveal, pushed under water and away the imaginative chord that wrought an eagerness to possess millions, that desired his placement in Who’s Who, that desired to equal Coatzee and even for fuck’s sake Bob Dylan and win the Noble. These designs were allowed to wither while he searched for true meaning, for honesty. For a great, simple, penetrating thought. He waited. He ate a mouthful. “They always come,” he said. “New and original,” he thought. “This is my moment.” Milk, milk, liquid water cereal always eating, we always eat, a man alive, a chimpanzee freed from his cage of experiments, set to the wild, polio vaccines, the spelling of vacuum, spelling, vocabulary lists, pronunciations, the Oxford English, England, the moor, cold wet muddy travel in search of some form of momentary greatness, to live a rich, vivid moment, the dry dust of California, a haircut, I need a haircut, wait, I’ve got an appointment tomorrow, a wedding, marriage, accidents, the baby, changing diapers, shit. Shit, eating and shitting, no, move away, pristine glacial lakes, I’ve got gas, shut up, shitting on pristine glacial lakes, shut up, move away from the bowels, from eating, move to more simple climes, love, that’s not simple. Afghanistan and Iraq and North Korea and the current administration. Petroleum. World War II and the dissipation of the colonial powers, Iran, the shah, the CIA, hardliners, Watergate, Richard Nixon, patriotism, this country, Canada. Damn it, I’m not getting anywhere. Plato, the cave, the light. See the light. Meditation. The Buddha. Reincarnation. Arrival. I am already there. That’s it! We have already arrived, have we all. The difference is that some know it, some don’t. Buddhists and their Nirvana, Christians and Catholics and Muslims and notions of the afterlife. Dante and Milton, even. I’ve got it. Their problem is that they hold on to some mythology, looking forward or toward some future event. When, in fact, it’s right there in front of them. We have already arrived, we have attained the exalted station of the saints, of the enlightened. This is so because we choose it to be so. It is a decision, born of awareness. We have arrived!
Tody spooned the next milk and cereal and reveled in his moment. Effy Ulysses this moment. From shit to salvation, he pondered. From shit to exhalation. From the hippo muck spray to enlightenment. The struggles of the great philosophers, the great meditators, the mentors and leaders and spiritual mavens, I sidestep them all by a mere decision, a choice. We have arrived upon the beginning and the end of their cognitive struggles. There need be no explanation: I am already there. I have achieved enlightenment, I have been Saved, and now I remain among the living masses in order to pass the knowledge along, and in order to experience a simple human existence, a wife and children and a midnight bowl of cereal. I am the poet of the ages. The man of all missions. Right here, now, I have seen it all.
Tody was breathless and he desired to write it all down, to capture the moment in verse or in convoluted prose that would need to be interpreted by all the great minds in centuries to come. He did not think, by the way, while resting upon his exalted throne, that the Noble was his. He was free of self-love or titillation: He was merely and only loving the process of thinking, of the thought trains that spin through the night mind, the power of the brain alone, the crystalline precision when you allow it to do its thing. The lime. The lime, the way it feels in his hand. He possessed another thought, from the stick to the lime, from the bathtub and the bowl of cereal to the lime.
The moon continued to rise and as it did moved away from golden slick to the white of standard impression. Fred wanted some action; enough of this standing around; he jumped and clawed at Tody’s fingers, which had been moving against a seam of his jeans, unconsciously. Tody reached down and petted.
On a walk the other day he had been bothered. He was staring at all the homes on the streets of his walk, staring at them with an eye and a desire to buying them. I want that one and that one and that one would be nice. And, ooh, I could so get some work done in that room upstairs. My, that one has a view of the bay. Eight hundred thousand dollars, 1.5 million dollars, 2.2. What am I going to do. Perhaps we’ll buy a condominium. Yes, that’s a nice one. No. He commanded to himself that he stop. “Look at everything, not just the houses. Look and see this life. Rove with the eye and the mind and find something unique, of quality, a great meditation. Recall the days of your earnest youth, see everything, please.” It wasn’t begging, which with Tody was possible, it was insistence. The lime tree rose in front of him and his eye caught one fruit in green perfection, the proper size for his hand, not a baseball, but smaller. He plucked, for it was (and is) a pluck, it from the tree and further tore the stem away and held the quality of the lime in his right hand. He flicked it to his left hand. The lime, the true and honest organic essence, the feeling among his fingers. He rubbed it. He tossed it into the air and caught it.
Tody, the seer of the new mythology, turned down to Frederick and began, the cat looking up and cocking its head, an ear twitching, already replete with understanding, already there:
“A God, yes, the one and only God, yes, and Allah the Holy, the Bible and the Koran, yes, I am already there, I wrote the Bible and the Koran, those are my words Gutenberg dealt with and now rest in Mainz, Buddha with his lotus and the orgiastic modern yoga instructors, gangs of yoga pants rushing from work with their rolled-up mats under arm, Nirvana and Heaven, I am already there, I am he who invented them all, already standing upon the culmination; I invented the myths of Greece, those are my gods; I wrote the great plays that stand the test of time; my Insight and my Emersonian essays: Do you see, my beastly rooftop friend? Of course you do. And there is the daily bread and daily prayer, I have already prayed a million years and now pray without obeisance or obsequy; I am the Pope’s father and son, at once, and I worry that his struggle is for naught, that all of mankind’s spiritual struggling is a spurious waste of time. With one twist, with one frame of mind, you can decide to have Arrived. Like us, the two of we. We’ve done it, yes. I wrote the Good Book, read the Good Book, and destroyed the Good Book. This is my Only Lifetime and the Every Lifetime. Already there, the train has arrived, my friend. And Zion and repatriation and the dream of homeland and of overt Nationalism?: I have lived through them all and cast them aside as useless, already. Whitman I taught how to pen, and his eagerness was my design. I had already done what Dante had accomplished and I said, ‘It is about time you arrived.’ He struggled to be like me; he was frustrated in his attempts to be as I am. There is your Jesus and your latter day saints – look at them over there, friend, rooted on the hillside with their house aglow – and I instructed them to their visions and their actions. Poor Castaneda with his peyote and his mystic man; if he’d only seen what I have.
And musicians all, painters too, their artistic worries to be divine, or to taste it, can be absorbed in one go, in one second of time, as I have done. I am John Lee Hooker and Miles Davis, who some say worked so hard for the devil, who forsake their God. I am their God and their devil, already Arrived. You see, don’t you, I know that you understand, on this rooftop with your tree, and my lime of course, and the understanding that is my lotus position and my funky body movements and my daily bread, my ten thousand years of struggling human history, my pyramids and my Sphinxes, my traveling to the moon, the mythology of Science and more belief, more travels through the brain: I am the Brain and I have already foreseen what you deem to design. Observe me on Mars, go ahead and see it. A journey to the center of the mind. Each religion and mythology a belief, you understand my friend, I can see that; and each belief system a construct of a human mind, nothing else. Therefore, take the plunge and see it all at once, the past and the future, do it by choice. We have already Arrived, my heaven and yours. See me with your lifetime of work toward Insight, and know that I exist where you want to be. “This is not a pipe,” I believe that showed itself from Foucault. But I still say to smoke it. Nietzsche pushed so human hard to find the end of thought. And when he got there, to this end, he found only us, waiting for him patiently. And there was Kafka with his books and his curious Cabalistic twist, his workings for and toward interpretation. And when the gatekeeper finally allowed the old man inside, they both, to their astonishment (because in a bar I’d had a conversation with Kafka, who was immediately my supplicant) found me seated, in a lawnchair, painting in watercolor. Nobody and no one has out-maneuvered me, no single one has done what I have not. For example, Van Gogh was my impression. And tortured Milton? He could not have found his lost paradise had he not listened to me. I offered suggestions. You see what I’m saying, your tree and my lime, don’t you? There is nothing to find. There is nothing to find that is not already here. And there is nowhere to go. Sometimes I feel sorry for us. And sometimes I rejoice. We shouldn’t be too hard on the struggling monkey, never no.”
The cat on Tody’s legs spun the figure eights. A breeze licked through its lone tree, a tree that struggled to overtake the roof. Tody felt the cold for the first time; or, this time he allowed it to get to him. A body shivered. He saw the walk with the lime again, felt a prick from the stick, skin against tree skin and rind skin and skin, a miraculous cloak.
From the lime’s tip that had been attached to the twig and thus to the tree – through which, by and by, the life force did flow, amazingly – there was necessarily a tear, a finite tear, that offered a small conduit to the inner juices of the citrus fruit, a tear then fell to his tongue, lachrymose. He continued to walk and thought not of a lime, but of something else, something at once deeper and the same, some bit of thing that allowed Tody to contemplate greatness, depth, wonder, beauty, interpreted reality. And this something he represented in verse, memorized from Mr. Dixon’s class in the ninth grade, in the classroom that was on the courtyard side on the first floor of his old school, gray days and sometimes rain, and his lips with the gentle tear that wept from the tear in the lime flowed the following, easily:
“But he had felt the power/Of Nature, and already was prepared,/By his intense conceptions, to receive/Deeply the lesson deep of love which he,/Whom Nature, by whatever means, has taught/To feel intensely, cannot but receive.”
Tody whistled on his walk with the organic lime, the rind a feeling upon his fingertips, gentle, honest, impressionable. He saw the billboard in front of him in the cool darkness, recalling this walk from the rooftop, and he said, “Whew, Tupac, that was one sweet rap. You got that kind in ya?” And there the modern and there the late; and maybe they all meet in the same place, eventually. “Check out my hill and my vale,” Tody said, staring over the misty concrete and the sublimely dark Red Cross concrete fortress, its connective antennae in multitudes on the roof of the building, a crop; the bridge, the Bay Bridge they showed with streaming traffic on TV for that one football game, a stadium among the grime and mess, a Mormon temple fixed and rooted because they came up with an Idea and made it real. “Here is my moor and the desolate, pastoral poem. How is it now done? From where comes the magic?” The moon was now righting and white and rising, one strip of cloud and then a sky bare; the folding beach chair, wet, a cold cat wondering what Tody planned. It was not incertitude on Tody’s part, merely reflection, and a desire to linger with his moment. Frederick concluded that he’d had enough, and with a flicker jumped into the leaves and slim branches of the tree, with what seemed to be carelessness, and disappeared amid the shaking.
Tody was alone and he was not alone. A thought arrived, and stood tall in his brain. A beanstalk stretched from his mind to the heavens and the standing up was a giant. Look how tall and wide spread his head! What am I going to do now? he said. Now that I have seen it all and experienced the beginning and the end? I could use a drink of water. I have to go to the bathroom. I have a wife and family. Tomorrow is a baseball game in October, the best type of them. Shit, I’ve already seen who’s won. Does this diminish my experience, this knowing? I think not. For shame, bastard! I know that it does not. Should I tell my Christian friends and my nationalist pledge allegiance American friends and my Jewish friends and my What sign are you new age friends and my shave-headed and be-robed Buddhist friends? Should I tell the fireman? Should I tell them that I’ve seen it all, have already experienced their experience? I think not; I know not. I’ll keep that whiff of magical stuff to myself. Perhaps set it to a poem before I die. Or, perhaps not.
