BODY Chapter 10.0.1 & 10.0.2

10.0.1

From the Last Divan

I have wasted another day
staring into the wrong side
of the mirror.

My wedding hands
red with henna
have been amputated.

I left them
neatly folded
in St. Maudez.

So the city fathers
look at me & they say
You are lucky little tree

What are you
rebelling against ? & I say
Whaddya got?

When we are in motion, we come closest to invisibility. To be truly seen you have to be motionless. If you think about it we have known each other for quite awhile. For six months on the N Judah. Half the time on the way downtown to work and fewer times than that on the way back to the Sunset. So six months at about five trips per week that is twenty days per month. Six times twenty is 120. Let’s say we only coincided on half those trips; so that is 60. And let’s say that we coincided on ¼ of the trips back home. That is thirty. I am being conservative. Each trip is > forty minutes but we will call it thirty minutes just to be safe. So that is a total of 90 trips at 30 minutes per trip. That equals 45 hours. I have not spent that much time with any other man in the last 6 months, except one.

            It was Eadweard Muybridge, he was the one who did it first. He was hired by Leland Stanford to capture a moving object. I saw the pictures in my college biology course. The images were transformed into a film of a moving horse and you can see it.  Sallie Gardner at a gallop: He froze a series of stillnesses in the gallop of a moving horse, whose hooves, we can clearly see, are in the air all at once. We couldn’t see that before. It was therefore invisible and we need to know that. People are invisible when they are moving, like horses. You need to stop them if you want to see them. Eadweard Muybridge killed a drama critic in Calistoga 1874 for sleeping with his young wife and fathering his son Florida. Well, he was acquitted and Philip Glass wrote an opera about it.

            It was only … sometimes he read a book, sometimes he listened to something in his earphones but he never tapped his foot or bounced around, not that I could see, so it may have not been music. Quite often he would use his phone to watch something on the tiny screen, maybe a movie even, because he would get that bite your lip kind of stare and be silent for a long time. I was glad to see he did not play video games. That would be wrong, not for his age which was clearly about the age of Matt Damon. Most of the time, though, he just sat and looked, which is what I like to do. I may seem to be bundled up and somehow enveloped in my scarves and hats on cold days with the collar of my coat up mostly to hide my uniform because it makes me look like a dork. But I am really looking around all the time.
            I have an obsession about looking. It makes me happy to see people and it makes me feel safe to be on the look out for any thing that seems out of the ordinary. I am quite insightful or I should say perceptive and astute about what is going on around me and about people. I have had to learn to reason them for my own protection. It comes from a long time being the only person lieme in a place where I know that people are making judgments and where anything can happen. It was remote, an exile, after we left Quebec City and moved to the north in the city where almost everyone spoke French and not English and certainly not Pashto or Urdu or any language I was familiar with. My French is awful. I saw that he saw that I was reading Babar that day I brought it to give to the children of my Lady. It was in French.  The elephant I am told and told, every night it seems, is a traitor to his people, his elephant people I guess a Mir Jafar, a stooge of the colonialist western powers. But the book is cute. I would read it at night before I fell asleep, but it was getting to be only a cause of argument so I wanted to give it away to someone who might appreciate it.
            The greatest disaster was that I left college in Quebec City where I was happy to be studying something hat had nothing to do with laundry of housecleaning. It was my father’s desperate scheme to get rich: Start a few B&B’s in the tourist areas and make a killing. Which he did not. But he did manage to get me trapped into being the you must do everything in a place where the people would come and go in a few days and I would never get to know anyone. I worked twenty hours a day. I was a drone. It was like that. Maybe less hours but too many.

            I had to get out. But Of course I really had to get out after Etienne injured me and when I could not seem to convince my father that I was not to blame, not a disgrace, and then Etienne was threatening everybody if they didn’t tell him where I was or what I was doing all the time. He had decided that I was his or something. It was crazy. It is not so bad to want to meet someone else and to try to find someone who is nice and who is not trying to make me do things all the time. I have a life. I want to have a life.  He sat next to me when the vehicle was almost deserted. It was an unusually quiet day on the N Judah. But he sat right next to me with only a smile and kind of a nod, a bow. Then he looked straight ahead as if that were the most ordinary thing in the world to do, to take a seat right next to me when almost all the seats were empty.
            It was almost six blocks before he said How are you today? Like he was bumping into a friend on the street. Well, I said Fine. He has peculiar skin like someone who has spent much too much time indoors or maybe his skin is so pale that it does not take the sun at all; he is the kind of person who has no chemical or whatever it is for absorbing sunlight and transforming it into a kind of a tan. Melinin? He is permanently pale. His lips are very much like Matt Damon’s, somewhat disappearing but noticeable and unique. He also had that kind of square face and his hair was short like Matt Damon’s is short, but maybe he grew it out. I don’t know. But when he had it brushy on top. That was what it was like. He had different eyes than Matt Damon. I don’t owe anybody anything. I can do what I want. I sat there thinking this over and over as if I were trying to argue with myself and losing the argument all the time. But in a while I let the topic drop and just listened to him as he told me about himself.
            It was a bit harsh and I think he should have had more patience and let me talk more. To do that he had to stop talking and wait and let the moment happen but he was in a rush of some kind. So first, it is about how the trip downtown is getting to be tedious or boring except he is glad when he sees me. He thinks that I am from the middle east. He spent sometime there he said. I was surprised by that except then I thought Oh he was a soldier or something like that, a contractor one of those people who work in a war zone and that scared me a little but he did not give the impression of anything at all scary or dangerous, really kind  of nice like Matt Damon. Then he did something brave. He touched the scar and said how did this happen? Like he was asking what di you have for breakfast? That was when the dam broke.
            It was like lightning. It was like a knife that cut through the ordinariness of life. He was the only person who ever asked me that, not even you. No one had ever said, So tell me about it. Like it was an everyday thing. I was staggered, but I did not show it. I smiled as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, but it felt like he was breaking some kind of etiquette code and it was something that washed over me like a swift river, like the white water I saw in the woods of Quebec. It thoroughly washed me and at the same time battered me and I was changed. When you have such a scar you think that everyone will look and everyone will be constantly looking at it. But they don’t. In fact, it is a kind of cloak of invisibility that makes people go to the opposite extreme of refusing to look and getting a kind of look on their face like Nothing to look at here look! It was what I needed to hear. What I always feared hearing at the same time. But it was easy. I just said it was an accident and the moment was over; it was over; I was no longer thinking that he was looking at it but not looking at it at the same time. It was the moment when the scar finally disappeared. It was gone. We could then talk and I began to open up at that moment, It seems like he had found some kind of hidden trigger that changed everything in a moment. So it was a short distance from there to saying Yes I will have lunch with you today. Where ? At the Waffle truck? Okay.

10.0.2

Everyone was watching us on the N Judah. I thought that any hesitation would be a disaster so, like I had planned for days, I went straight the empty seat next to her when I got on and I looked away as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Everyone saw. I was silent for a long time. The city was cold tat morning and the cars were rushing by. I watched them as if I were interested in them, but I was, of course, fully conscious of what I was doing, where I was sitting. I wanted to move over and squeeze myself against her, but she was not anywhere close to me although she is a little wide in the hips, like so many women from that part of the world.  I said that we were already traveling companions that I was getting a little bored of the trip to work everyday. I was glad that she was there too so that I knew that someone else was suffering as much as I was and she smiled. I told her that I thought she was smart because I saw her reading a book in French. And she said it was poetry. I then asked her if she liked poetry and she said, Yes. Then I said that I sometimes wrote poetry and she said that she did too. I asked her if I could see some and she kind of put her chin down and shrugged her shoulders, which meant maybe yes, maybe no, maybe we’ll see. I didn’t follow up on the point. It seemed like she was shy about this. But it is always a good strategy to tell a woman that you want to see her poetry even if she won’t ever show it to you. It is a kind of intimacy thing. It melts them a little; it stuns them in some way, like you have already seen them naked. Then I thought, Well, we are already half way downtown and pretty soon the vehicle was filling with people. We might be squeezed, but we also got more private, because we were a little more hidden in the crowd of this and that. So I thought, Well, let’s plunge because I have no time to waste and I said to her, Can I touch it?  No. That’s not true. I really said, Excuse me, you have a piece of splotch on your cheek. And I quickly moved my finger to the scar on her left cheek; She was thunder struck. I could feel it more than see how it shattered her. She was paralyzed. It is always a good idea to somehow make a woman dizzy, put her off her balance. And then you can catch her before she falls. You can be a hero. I didn’t wait for her to speak because I was sure she never would and I thought, Well, this is it. If she pulls away and slaps me and says What the fuck! I am lost, but if she doesn’t, then I have been to the mountaintop already and there’s no kicking me off. So I touched it, a smooth motion the complete length of it, a gentle caress more than a cold stroke and said How did you get this? And she said it was something that happened when she was a little girl. You know it looked fresher than that, like it was more recent than that. She had to be 28 years old and it was not a scar form 20 years ago; it looked like it happened last year or last month. It was smooth but still an angry red, when she was blushing it would light up, and something about it was beautiful, striking to set off her other features, which were unquestionably beautiful. But this was her critical point of focus, the crucial place on her body. It was like this was the zipper in her beauty suit and when I opened it everything inside would spill on the floor. So I asked her to lunch and waited to see if I had destroyed the momentum. But I have found that you can get somewhere faster with a woman when you try to be honest and at the same time compliment them on anything that they do not think is their strong points like I told her when I said You are obviously smart. And I said the scar was somehow gorgeous. I like the word gorgeous because no one ever forgets when you use that word. It is gorgeous, you are gorgeous. It is not an everyday way to describe some thing pretty or even beautiful. And it is never a word you say about a scar. So it happened that we decided to have lunch. I will tell you how that goes when it happens.