Where A Dreamhouse Should Have Been
*
The man paces until he reaches a village,
his glance following the golden aura of
household oil wicks that gave the cottages
their eyes, and as he arrives in front of the
one with its features more aged than the
rest, he peers into the window. The man sees
a nervous, barely-teenage boy, wide awake
and terrified when the rest of the world does
the same while sleeping. The boy is crying,
but the man knows that there will be more
lost. The man is the one left to convince
manhood to be worth more than what dies.
The boy looks up, lines his gaze with the man
on the other side of the window, who is like a
mirror, but buried under a generation; A man
around whom the night immediately blackens.
A man who wraps himself with it and
runs until he is out of a continent.
*
The man is home alone in his apartment.
More wrinkles on his forehead like a scribbled
map. The room is laced with perpetual dust
and lined with furniture picked from dumpsters
of shopping mall alleys, thrown into the lended
Honda in such a manner that would only
quasi-violate traffic safety guidelines, and rolled
into the unit’s shared parking space with
the Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More still
at its guppy bridge. Neglected on the run-down
floor of the foyer is a backpack that once
carried ghosts on his shoulder. He sits at the
dinner table. A tea kettle with paisley
brushstrokes and three months worth of
paychecks tucked into the beak. A radio turned
on, broadcasting across the frontier from NYC
with the World Trade Center in shambles and
civilian terror engorging on the witchhunt against
terrorism. The man sits and chews with Bush’s
voice in the background. His Nokia chimes, to
which he flicks open as he deposits the remaining
soda crackers from his hand back into the
cardboard sleeve. He yammers into the phone
with his mouth half-empty for every sha la la la.
*
A young woman enters who, six months
later, will be determined a wife, sign a page in
a red Henley top and flared denim at a counter
of an air-freshened room, be called married, pack
back up the film, and clock back in. Share a box
of Empress chicken with a Carpenter’s boy
on the Golden Gate Bridge. Charm the court.
Be restlessly the same but a sharer of a municipal
drawl that is, after all, the monumental point.
Carry first the infant, then a green card, and
gravitate towards the gradual devoid in
exhibitionist severity. But of course, that is never
for a wannabe Yankee girl. And, like a narration,
dinner is set. But the man’s face is twisted tight,
tugging the collar of a remedial-level U.S. Polo Assn.
shirt he won’t replace until, oh let’s say, the
orchestrated final shine of the woah-oh-oh.
He clutches a Tsingtao bottle. He shouts, breaks
its neck on the dinner table so the shards and booze
both look like tears. The table pushes. Another bottle
breaks. Another voice breaks. The fluorescent
lights buzz melodically above the couple to make
a tune from injury, decorating the blankness mercied
by their screams.