He was hungry for news. It was cold and he was reading Wittgenstein. Wondering if a weed was a tree. If all houses were houses. If he, in fact, was himself. Some people had been avoiding him. Refusing his entreaties. Leaving him in the lurch. The world owed him nothing. These people were not his friends. Friends, he thought, had nothing to do with it. He would keep reading. Keep being cold. This was a story, he thought, not a poem. It was decidedly not a poem, but a narrative that changes over time. Or a frame that gets added to little by little until it is no longer a frame but something else he wouldn’t dare to call the house of solitude. It was cold and the dog licked her paws and he found a receipt in the book he was reading. The book was purchased at Moe’s on May 18, 2001. It was $1.62 with tax. In 2001 the sales tax was apparently eight-percent in Berkeley. The day was Friday, the time 1:32 PM. He knew he left Berkeley later that year. He was in Pittsburgh on September 11th. He was working in a Squirrel Hill Starbucks that morning. He always worked the morning shift. He was older than the others by a year or two, but at that age it made a big difference. People kept coming in with more and more grotesque tales of burning and destroyed buildings. He didn’t believe it until he got home and turned on the television. He still can’t bear to watch that footage. These people, he thought, these so-called friends could get in touch and tell him where he stood. They could at least do that. Why, he thought, did he buy The Conquest of New Spain at Moe’s on Telegraph Avenue in late spring, 2001. He was taking courses at the community college (called Vista then). He was trying to better himself. Trying to build up his intellect. Women, he thought, preferred intellectual men. Women, he thought, would like him more if he talked to them about Montezuma and Cortes and the people of Tzompantzinco. Women, he thought, would let him gaze into their eyes if either he knew a thing or two about the past or saw him carrying around a black Penguin Classics pocketbook with a Zapotec figure on the cover. It wasn’t the kind of thing a dilletante would be seen carrying. He was always thinking about women then. Not sex, but women. Not women, but companionship and mutual affection. He wanted to sleep with them. Not sleep with as a euphemism for sex, but actually slumber together and wake up in the same bed with. He remembered two or three of them. He remembered tiki bars and bars with old license plates and candy wrappers and business cards nailed to the walls. He remembered drinking scotch and soda and going outside to smoke. And if it was raining, he remembered smoking beneath awnings or eaves and looking at the rain fall in sheets. Those were happy times. Times with no beginning or end, which is to say innocent times. He noticed how the sky had no clouds in it. He could see two older women hugging right outside his window. Were they friends? Sisters? He had no idea but they were either genuinely happy to have seen each other or genuinely sad to see each other go. They clung to each other, reluctant to part. One of them watched the other get into a blue car. Pittsburgh was cold the winter after 9/11. Much colder than anything he’d ever experienced. The steps froze and he slipped and fell after a night of heavy drinking. They had a fight, a falling out. The snow didn’t melt for months. They lived on the top floor of a three story house. The man who lived on the ground floor had a bumper sticker on his car that depicted Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes urinating on the words Bin Laden. In Pittsburgh he would frequent a cemetery so massive that huge thoroughfares were allowed to go through it. There were deer and corpses in the ground, some of whom had been born in the eighteenth century. The deer would leap and run and eat leaves with heavy aqueous eyes that, if he had a camera, he would have taken pictures of. It was wooded and had great stone crypts with yellow moss growing on them that made him think of petroglyphs. When did he switch from Wittgenstein to Bernal Diaz. Why did he have these books out. Why was he looking through them. Was he reading them or just being with them. He thought at one point they’d call and let him know if he was up or down. He was down and out. They didn’t need to tell him, but he wanted to hear it from them, hear their voices, the catches in their throats. He wanted to hear them breathing in silent sadness on the other end of the line. He wanted to be consoled. No one consoled anybody anymore. Nobody cared. Everybody seemed to think that even the most minimal conciliatory gestures were signs of weakness. There was, he thought, no more kindness left in the world. The Wittgenstein was purchased at a thrift store in Long Beach twenty-something years after 9/11. It was a dollar. He bought it along with a book about J. Edgar Hoover. He liked aphorisms or the idea of aphorisms. There was something attractive about sentences or paragraphs that were self-contained. That were part of a larger whole, but not explicitly or sequentially integrated as it is with unnumbered paragraphs designed to interpenetrate or flow into one another. He liked the idea of not going in order, of there being no order. When people leave you high and dry they don’t always know what they’re doing to you or how you’ll take it. They’re thinking about their children or their children’s children. Or their gardens. Not their gardens but their yards which need to be weeded or mowed or otherwise tended to. They’re thinking about their own lives. Their own inner-lives. They’re planning trips or organizing the details of a loved-one’s death. They’re sitting with the mortician in his little office watching the wind whip the sand across the highway. He watched a crow land on his car and eat what looked like a piece of cake but was probably something else. He wondered if it was bad luck to have a crow land on your car, even if it might be eating cake. Crows gathered on his street because there was a dumpster nearby. For some reason he couldn’t imagine crows being female, they all seemed male to him. Perhaps it was because crows seemed hostile in their movements. Or the way in which they seemed to bring to mind death and killing After a long period of listening to the wind chimes and feeling the sun on his feet, he looked at the book and realized what it really was. It was some kind of totem. A thing that was a book but also something more than a book. It was small and smooth and soft. It was pliable or malleable in a way that gave him great tactile pleasure. It wasn’t dry and falling apart like his copies of Crime and Punishment or Of Plymouth Plantation whose pages would scatter and break apart like leaves if he were to open them. It had the quality of aging without ever threatening to disappear. There was a warmth to it as an object that he could not describe, though he knew the subject matter could be cold in its depiction of violent conquest. He opened it, and as if seeing it for the first time, there was a name and date inscribed on the inside of the first page—Mirielle Broucke, 1986. She had used blue ink, this Mirielle, that in the light of day looked more royal blue than navy. More blue-blue than blue-black. When he looked her up he was surprised to find that she was a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto. It was the right Mirielle Broucke. He knew this because, according to Wikipedia, she had gotten a Masters-Degree from Berkeley in 1987. Originally she was from Texas. Her father was a Belgian immigrant who taught engineering at the University of Texas. What, he wondered, did this engineer want with Bernal Diaz. She must have gotten rid of it when she moved to Toronto. Another cold northern city. Her book was now his. They shared something, a kind of link or kinship. A link or kinship that, because of her signature in royal blue ink, could never be broken. She was stuck with him or the ghost of him. And he was stuck with her name written in a childlike script that made his heart hurt. It did make him a little sad that she didn’t find the same totemic quality in the book. That she would have turned her back on it and sold it to Moe’s for seventy-five or eighty cents. It made him like her slightly less. This book had come with him to Pittsburgh and then to San Francisco, where he moved between three separate rooms or apartments (one by the beach, another in the Tenderloin, and yet another in lower Nob Hill). And then to Claremont and San Diego. It had been with him through thick and thin. For one reason or another, he treasured this book. And then it occurred to him that there was a rift between him and her. A minor one that may, in the end, become major. He was a humanist and (according to Wikipedia) she had summer jobs with General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin. Warmongers, he thought. No different from Bernal Diaz and Cortez the Killer. Perhaps someone at General Dynamics bought the book for her and said, look through this and behold the most advanced weaponry the sixteenth century had to offer. Dogs and horses and iron and gunpowder. Maybe, for a certain kind of person, it went with Machiavelli and Lao Tzu and Marcus Aurelius. And then he noticed how she didn’t underline a thing. Not a single passage or sentence. Every time he opened it though, it was to the same page, 219, the last sentence of which he’d read hundreds of times. It went, “So, with luck on our side, we boldly entered the city of Tenochtitlan or Mexico on 8 November in the year of our lord, 1519.” It must, he thought, have been some kind of sign. A call to be patient with the universe, or else defensive against encroachments. Someone or thing telling him that the world is a cruel and dangerous place. That we have no idea what is coming from beyond the sky or clouds. That we are not the protectorate of vast oceans or inhospitable jungles. That even gods might be evil and call for our miserable submission to their awesome power. That a knock on the door may bring a thousand diverse things, one or two of which may be death or destruction.
~
Bryan D. Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023) His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Santa Monica Review, Diagram, American Chordata, Mississippi Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.