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“Silly Putty?”

“Yeah, when we would flatten it and press it against newspapers and pull it off and it would have the image. I thought of it and then that's what you were, everybody out back, just these images of yourselves against this flattened stuff. You were putty. Worse: meat. With your image on it, talking. Distorted. And I knew I'd made that happen because I thought it. I thought it was like Silly Putty and then it was Silly Putty and then I knew that if I thought something was like something else it would become that thing. I was trying to move and I felt like I was moving but the view wouldn't change. My vision was locked. I remember I thought, ‘Locked like a jaw.' Lockjaw. And then my jaw was locked. And then I thought like with rabies, like rabid dogs get. Like the Guzeks' dog they had to put down when I was a kid, and then I could feel it, the foam at my mouth. Or I couldn't feel it, that's wrong, I could see it. Foam pouring out of my mouth, doglike. Pink for some reason. So where was I seeing it from? And I knew before I thought it that I was going to think: It's like I'm dead, like I'm a ghost looking at my corpse, and I was trying not to think that because I would die if I did. But then I realized that trying not to think about something is like thinking about something, know what I mean? It has the same shape. The shape of the thought fills up with the thing if you think it, or it empties if you try not to think it, but either way it's the same shape. And when I thought that I just felt like there was no difference between anything. And then there was no difference. Because nothing is like nothing. And there wasn't any space.”

“The drug didn't agree with us,” I said, to say something.

“I still don't feel like I'm here.” Another sob. “Will you just talk to me?”

“You're right here,” I said, and reached up from the floor and touched his shoulder, forehead, and then, a little surprised at myself, I sat up and smoothed back his hair, remembering how my father would do that to me when I had a fever as a child. Whitman would have kissed him. Whitman would have taken the intern's fear of the loss of identity as seriously as a dying soldier's.

“Keep talking,” he said, so I lay back down and did. I began by describing my response to the Judd, but he groaned, so I fished around for a subject, and decided on the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, having watched a documentary about it on my computer a few nights before. I talked about how Hart Crane had written
The Bridge
in a Brooklyn Heights apartment he only learned after the fact had been occupied by the bridge's engineer, Washington Roebling, where he'd retreated after getting decompression sickness. (I wanted to describe the men laboring in poorly lit caissons, in danger, if they surfaced too quickly, of developing nitrogen bubbles in the blood, but I thought it might disturb the intern.) When the bridge was finished, the celebration surpassed that marking the end of the Civil War, I remembered the narrator saying over still images of crowds and fireworks. That was 1883, the year that Marx died at his desk. The year that Kafka was born. I talked about Kafka for a while, about how I had only recently learned how successful the author had been as an insurance lawyer, betting on the future. I repeated the phrase “pooled risk” a few times, said how lovely it was. Then I moved on to 1986.

When the intern was asleep, breathing regularly, I kissed him on the forehead and walked back upstairs to the living room to find that various young people were lounging there again, having presumably returned from their bike ride, no sign of Monika or Paul. I asked the redhead, whose eyes I now saw were the same green as Diane's friend's, and whom I was not ashamed to desire, how to get to 308 North Plateau, and she told me to turn right out of the driveway, then left when I couldn't go any farther.

Relieved to be in the cold air and increasingly sober, I felt stupid about the drugs and drama, but I was happy I'd helped the intern, felt a tenderness for him. As I walked I heard the whistle of a train and imagined my dad was on one of its decommissioned cars. I thought of the dimly gleaming boxes in the artillery sheds, and then I imagined a long train of them, each car a work of shimmering aluminum, reflecting the moonlit desert it was moving across.

When I turned onto what I hoped was North Plateau—I couldn't see any signs—an electric car quietly passed me going the other direction. It doubled back at the corner, the headlights now illuminating the street in front of me as I walked, and pulled up slowly beside me. Creeley was driving, his posture awkward because the seat was too far forward. He stopped and rolled down the window and said hello, that he was going to see the Marfa Lights, and he asked, in touchingly formal, accented English, if I would care to honor him with my company.

Thus the author found himself, his body still a little heavy with the traces of a veterinary dissociative anesthetic, driving nine miles out on Route 67 so as to catch a glimpse of the famous “ghost lights” with a man on whom he'd overlaid the image of a phantom. After about twenty minutes in the dark, we arrived at the viewing center, a platform faintly illuminated by red lights next to a little structure with restrooms. We shivered on the platform and looked into the westward distance.

What people report, have reported for at least a hundred years, are brightly glowing spheres, the size of a basketball, that float above the ground, or sometimes high in the air. They are usually white, yellow, orange, or red, but some people have seen green and blue. They hover around shoulder-height, or move laterally at low speeds, or sometimes break suddenly in unpredictable directions. People have ascribed the Marfa Lights to ghosts, UFOs, or ignis fatuus, but researchers have suggested they are most likely the result of atmospheric reflections of automobile headlights and campfires; apparently sharp temperature gradients between cold and warm layers of air can produce those effects.

Finally, I did see something—but it was in the other direction, and there weren't any spheres. Far in the distance to the east I saw an orange glow on the horizon and, here and there, patches of red. At first I thought it was the light of a town, but then I realized they were wildfires or preventative controlled burns. I drew the poet's attention to them and he nodded.

The poet lit one cigarette from another. Who was I to him? I wondered. I liked to think he also saw me as a ghost, a departed Polish poet. I saw no spheres, but I loved the idea of them—the idea that our worldly light could be reflected back to us and mistaken as supernatural. I fantasized that a couple of aluminum boxes were positioned in the distance to facilitate the mysterious radiance.

Some say the glowing spheres near Route 67

are paranormal, others dismiss them as

atmospheric tricks: static, swamp gas, reflections

of headlights and small fires, but why dismiss

what misapprehension can establish, our own

illumination returned to us as alien, as sign?

They've built a concrete viewing platform

lit by low red lights which must appear

mysterious when seen from what it overlooks.

Tonight I see no spheres, but project myself

and then gaze back, an important trick because

the goal is to be on both sides of the poem,

shuttling between the you and I.

I thought of Whitman looking across the East River late at night before the construction of the bridge, before the city was electrified, believing he was looking across time, emptying himself out so he could be filled by readers in the future; I took him up on his repeated invitations to correspond, however trivial a correspondent I might be. I imagined the lights I did not see weren't only the reflections of fires and headlights in the desert but also headlights from Tenth Avenue and the brilliant white magnesium of the children's sparklers in the community garden of Boerum Hill and a little shower of embers on a fire escape in the East Village, or the gaslights of Brooklyn Heights in 1912 or 1883 or the eyeshine of an animal approaching in the dark, ruby taillights disappearing on the curve of a mountain road in a novel set in Spain. I'd been hard on Whitman during my residency, hard on his impossible dream, but standing there with Creeley after my long day and ridiculous night, looking at the ghost of ghost lights, we made, if not a pact, a kind of peace. Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I'd proposed with the book you're reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures. In a few weeks, just before this book began, the poem would end:

I've been worse than unfair, although he was

asking for it, is still asking for it, I can hear

him asking for it through me when I speak,

despite myself, to a people that isn't there,

or think of art as leisure that is work

in houses the undocumented build, repair.

It's among the greatest poems and fails

because it wants to become real and can

only become prose, founding mistake

of the book from which we've been expelled.

And yet: look out from the platform, see

mysterious red lights move across the bridge

in a Brooklyn I may or may not return to,

phenomena no science can explain,

wheeled vehicles rushing through the dark

with their windows down, streaming music.

 

 

 

 

 

Permanent installation

FIVE

 

 

“The quality of the photographs is implausibly high,” I said, “and there aren't any stars.”

“The angle and shadows are inconsistent, suggesting the use of artificial light,” she quoted, eyes beginning to shine.

In college, Alex had dated a humorless astrophysics major, now the youngest full professor of something at MIT; after a few months of growing intimacy, she'd felt obliged to introduce us. The three of us met for dinner at a Cambodian restaurant not far from campus where, slamming can after can of Angkor, I insisted the Apollo moon landing had been faked. I was so persistent, he believed I was at least half serious and it drove him insane. Long after it had ceased to be funny, and after Alex had repeatedly tried to change the subject, I was still passionately identifying supposed inconsistencies in the images and astronauts' reports. (I was familiar with the arguments of disbelievers from a paper I'd written about conspiracy theories for a psychology course.) The scientist couldn't stand me, was clearly baffled by how Alex could consider me her best friend; she was furious, dodged calls from me for days.

Now we were sitting side by side on a lawn swing in the middle of an expansive, unkempt backyard in New Paltz, and, having indicated the gibbous moon visible in the daytime sky above us, I was again listing the reasons why I “believed” the landing was a hoax. Over the years this had become one of our ritual ways of affirming the priority of our relationship over other modes of coupling—half inside joke, half catechism. My arm was around her, and the cancer had spread to her mother's spine.

“There appear to be ‘hot spots' in some photos indicating that a large spotlight was used.”

“You can see the spotlight when Aldrin emerges from the lander.”

“And why would they fake it?” her emaciated mother asked, laughing. Now it was night and we were sitting in the screened-in porch, Alex's stepfather in the kitchen preparing a bland meal rich in bioflavonoids while the three of us smoked some of the marijuana I'd brought at her mom's request, her doctor's off-the-record suggestion. With what I thought of as my advance, I'd purchased from a head shop on Saint Mark's what Jon described as the “Rolls-Royce of vaporizers”; there would be no carcinogenic particulates to irritate her throat. We passed a small balloon filled with the vapor back and forth between our wicker chairs. The head scarf she wore was gold; the otherwise tasteless vapor had a note of mint.

“Are you kidding, Emma?” I asked with mock incredulity, intensity. “Cold War space race? Kennedy talking about the ‘final frontier'?”

“The ‘final frontier' is a phrase from
Star Trek
,” Alex corrected me.

“Whatever,” I said. “The moon landings stop suddenly in 1972. The same year the Soviets develop the capacity to track deep spacecraft. Or to discover we had no spacecraft deep in space.”

“That's around the end of official military involvement in Vietnam,” Alex's stepdad said, as he brought in a tray of sliced vegetables and hummus. “Televised landings could have been an attempt to distract Americans from the war.”

“That's good thinking, Rick,” Emma and Alex both laughing at my mock professorial tone. Rick sat, opened a beer, ate a slice of yellow pepper, then stood up and returned to the kitchen, forgetting the beer; he couldn't sit still for half a minute. Soon Alex followed him in.