Only the wind’s mattered to me. Not the sun, the rain, the heat. Just the winds, and clouds opening and rippling across the sky like scarves. Leaves and sand whirl around and over shoulders of rock, of soil, and skid skitteringly toward your eyes or away from your head.
I suppose that if I could’ve stayed in one place or time, I’d find some way to end my days with the late autumn, on a beach. Alone, with nothing but my own brath and blood curling around splintered rocks and driftwood. Whether the sea glazed with the sun or grew heavy and gray with the sky, it always carried my image, or rather my echo: always a storm within, rising in a rage that turned and spilled itself on whatever, whoever came too close. They’d grow angry, they’d rage, but there was nothing they, I or the sea could do to change.
No, the rage isn’t against the dying light. What kind of light, anyway? (Amazing, the nonsense they had us take seriously in school! No wonder I’m practically illiterate!) I always preferred those days colored like gunmetal and brass to the polished, gilded jewels of spring and summer days. That kind of light, colorless to some but really clearer—that is to say less of a shield against sight, if not vision—than any other, brightens and darkens the way a day enters and leaves when there’s nobody to embrace against, or embrace, it. Or dress it in words it would never echo unless someone—someone I didn’t know growing up—uttered them, in colors I’ve never seen to this day.
The light doesn’t die on those days, on those beaches because, without those distractions of all of those men who’ve been called poets, your eyes adjust. So do your ears, because as the gray cloak of the day disappears like the walls in a darkened room, the rushing, rustling wind and hissing tides mimic each other’s voices, but you can still tell one from the other.
Some people stay away from those days that turn beginnings into endings, and back again, moving in circles around caverns and sinkholes fill of names, full of gazings. But I look for them when I’m awake; any dream I can remember the next day takes me there.
Those days by the sea—I’m not talking about a beach, a piece of sand to which people cling, or to town like the one Vivian showed me—grow colder. But my skin opens, like my eyes to the grayness, and rasps its glaze, a prickly film of misty needles, over me. I’ve always gone to the sea as late, or early, in the year as I could without getting sick. As long as I had the sea, the tides of clouds, and the wind that brought them all in—the wind that gave them life, the only life that didn’t assault or abandon mine—I could stand the cold, the wind, the rain. No, I wanted to be there, awake or in my dreams.
As I’ve said before, there’s really no such thing as memory. Some people’s recollections simply have more tangible, tactile reference points than others. Sometimes those touchstones are buried or locked in the vaults behind people’s eyelids. There’re recollections, for me, for the ladies at mother’s funeral, of this block. Of course, they brought me back, for mother: her funeral, and for other reasons, I’m sure. But somehow those recollections presented themselves—no, they nudged their way to me—more forcefully, more vividly, along those windswept stretches only a few steps from water too cold to swim, from the first hint of frost through the deceptively mild first days of November.
Then there was the fifteenth. That’s when you knew the winter’d come, and how long and cold it would be. Grandmother—mother’s mother—told me so. The firteenth—the day when an uncle, my mother’s brother—whom I never met—entered the world. She told me—actually, mother told me she said this—that she knew winter’d be long and his life’d be short. And that both would be difficult.
As I’ve been told, he died away from this block, on the opposite end of this planet. Still, he died the same way as all the other boys are snuffed out: from violence carried out by another boy, who may or may not grow up somewhere else. But, because he was taken from this block to a place marked only by two coordinates on a map on the other side of an ocean he never saw until he got on the troop ship that carried him across it, his death seems—no, is—more arbitrary than any other on this block. At least on this block, a boy dies because of something he’s done. He may not’ve recognized its possible consequences at the time, and most often, the act—it may be a single word uttered at the wrong time, in the wrong tone of voice—seems, at least to anybody who hasn’t lived and escaped death here, not to warrant the price of someone’s life, whether at the moment the act was committed or a few years later. Hey, someone can die simply for allying one’s self with someone whom someone else detests.
Even Adam. He died, I’m convinced, because he moved, because of whatever circumstances, here. He may’ve died in the same way, or even on the same date—the night before Christmas Eve—if he’d been someplace else. However, he came to this block: a place that couldn’t ease his, or anyone else’s, pain. It allows you only to hold it down, whether with food, alcohol or other substances, until there’s no other way out.
Of course, he might’ve lived—and died—in exactly the same way as he did in another part of this city, or some other city. Maybe no place in the world could’ve offered him an alternative, or distractions besides children who’d stop by and listen to his stories because he’d give them sodas.
One year, I managed to convince Vivian to take me down to the sea—always near, but never in, the town she showed me—every weekend until the middle of December. Then we went every night, for as long as we could stand the chill and stay awake, until that night: the twenty-third of December.
There was no escape from the wind that night. The completely clear sky and the water, rippled even at low time, reflected the moon and sky. It was all almost too bright for my eyes. Our feet shifted, sank and shoved sand the wind whirled to the backs of our necks.
“I’m tired of carrying these!” I hurled one of my sandals—strappy silver slingback stillettos stolen (no, saved) from a Salvation Army donation box around the first time I met her—with the wind, blowing along the tide toward a spot where it curved and crests of foam crept a few feet closer to the deserted board walk. The glittering shoe I hurled landed in a wave, which receded and left the sandal among shards of rocks and shells. “Damn!” I muttered.
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh, I dunno. Hey, what do you say we throw a few things out. See who can make them skip.” I’d seen someone do that on TV once.
“Yeah. But you have to throw side-arm.” I never done that before in my life. “How many times can you make it skip before it sinks”
She made a pebble skim across the tops of ripples—I didn’t count how many times—before it disappeared. Then I pulled off my other sandal—They never fit and they looked awful on my feet—sidearmed, like she demanded. But it sank.
“No, you’ve got to do it like this.” I didn’t pay attention. What could I throw next? There was nobody else on the beach, so I could’ve stripped naked and thrown myself in the water. But I kept on the long, flowing gown—really a loose, shapeless smock—and reached underneath to unhook my bra (the first one I’d bought) because it was too tight around the chest even though the cups were too big. And I’d had to pull back my panties up because I’d stretched them. I’d’ve taken the dress off, too—Vivian wouldn’t’ve minded—but I’d already begun to bristle in he chilly wind. And she wanted to get back to her place.
Neither of us spoke on the way back. I remember thinking that the few weeks that preceded that night—from the fifteenth of November, which’d been the coldest in the history of that town, though the milder yet darkening gray days that followed—had been just an interlude.
I wondered if, or when, she’d see the new clothes inside a box of mine that she wouldn’t open. Or the jars I’d stashed inside of them.
Memories And Those Who Stayed 