Errata (7 page)

When reading this essay prompted from The Interview, I was struck by one line spoken by Castro to Padilla when the two met on the verge of the dictator permitting the writer to leave the country.  Referring to Padilla’s house, Castro said,
Neither a book nor a brick will be touched
.  His intent may have been literal, but I can’t help but think that the bearded crocodile was speaking in an unintentionally associative manner.  The common Freudian slip. 
Books, bricks, beard, buried
.  If one considers books as bricks in a threatening way, is there any difference ultimately between censoring and disallowing access to literature as compared to deftly devaluing and distracting from it, and do these two routes simply illustrate degrees of authoritarianism or multiple means to a single end?  Am I unknowingly wandering inside The Crocodile?  Are we all? 

Day 17

Hannah said, I’m the only child of a white Cancer father and a black Leo mother, and neither astrologically racial group seemed to fit, so I felt perpetually at odds and without need of sadness to stay sad.  The disharmony of being named in a way that endeared Hannah to neither group stretched the tightrope further.  Hannah was adamant that she would get out of the West End and also away from Louisville, a plain place, as soon as she was old enough.  When she was all of seven years old, her parents separated due to her father’s violent tendencies, and though Hannah wasn’t supposed to see him, she moved in with her father by the age of thirteen.  Her mother was terribly hurt, although Hannah explained that she wanted to be out of that part of the city, and her father’s apartment downtown in Old Louisville wasn’t far away.  The depositing of a child into one particular womb, much less locale, is no more than a gamble in which the child is at the mercy of odds, and Hannah knew that her dice roll came up short.  Louisville, especially the West End (the half of the city in decline after being virtually abandoned by businesses and any of the populace that could afford to move east after the devastating flood back in 1937), didn’t look like her, talk like her, or feel like her.  This was in a general sense, but it was the group she privately dubbed the psychohicks that particularly caused her to feel consternation and wanderlust.  They were rough dangerous characters, most of whom came from the country or Appalachian region to the city for jobs or action.  Hannah found it ironic that the rural areas were considered pastoral and holy, because so many of those she knew who hailed from that terrain were walking time bombs.  Due to her mother’s vacuum cleaner sales conferences, typically held in places like the Bahamas or New Orleans, Hannah grasped for the occasional view outside by accompanying her mother whenever possible, once old enough to explore on her own.  Hannah wears her hair in one long pigtail on occasion because of seeing an Asian woman doing the same on a beach in the islands and was told by a fortune teller that she, Hannah, was Oriental in another life.  New Orleans was the first city in which she felt that people were like her, they were shades like her, and they spoke their minds like her.  After returning home from these trips, the wrecking concerns returned and Hannah’s anger brimmed, so she joined an after-school boxing program at the neighborhood gym as a release.  She maintained no relationships during high school, save for the occasional long distance one, so the gym and a way out became her mutual obsessions while she was a patient of impatience until graduation.

Before ending up in Southern Louisiana, Hannah lived in Las Vegas.  Despite knowing rough neighborhoods in that Gemini city, she was taken aback by the area her as-is New Orleans apartment (no appliances, rotting floorboards, flickering electricity) was situated in, considering that it was filled with unaccountable characters (the New Orleans version of Havana’s so-called social scum), yet on a key street in the supposed showcase of the city.  The hotel operators, pre-existing and newcomers, expected a boom from the stream of World’s Fair attendees, so they’d been buying up cheap rundown buildings, evicting the tenants, and making minor cosmetic upgrades to give the appearance of justification for higher short-term rates.  Many landlords were doing the same.  A seedy and violent stretch of North Peters Street (up until a year back, so dangerous and rundown that rent for Hannah’s entire third floor loft was a pay-only-in-cash pittance), was transformed the week Hannah was out of town for a photo shoot in Los Angeles.  She returned to find relative quiet, no mayhem, and the entrance’s iron gate wrapped in a chain and padlocked.  The word on the street was that, as the river stretch of derelict metal wharf buildings, sturdy brick warehouses, and everything otherwise, were being torn down or arsoned to prepare for the fair, the street creatures were gradually shifted to the block in which Hannah lived.  This had been happening prior to her moving in and was why the influx of low-level pimps, dealers, hookers, hustlers, thieves, junkies, and the like saturated and flourished, they’d been pushed out of other areas and heard that the 200 block of North Peters was the anything goes zone.  It was very much that for the year she lived there, the chaos building up for what in actuality was no more than a ploy by the feds for a surprise large-scale bust with buses, a New Orleans Night of the Three P’s that luckily happened when Hannah was away.  In spite of all of the near-river cleansing, fair attendance was low and housing costs avaricious, so rentals and hotels in the Quarter topped out at barely above half-occupied.  Even with the ground shift of these changes and seeing the Quarter transformed into a modern cordiality machine to attract tourists, Hannah and I enjoyed a wonderful time at the fair, surrounded mostly by locals. 

Before she clammed up, Hannah said, My first New Orleans apartment and the whole as-is system of real estate seems indicative of the city at large.  You can pay pennies for a neglected room, feel like you’re in the center of the universe, but at some point it’ll disappear along with everything you own, only you don’t know when.  All you can do is live in the moment and hope for a little joy before the padlock clicks in place.  In any case, there’s always another room.  In this city nothing ever changes.  At least that used to be the case, before the smell of money came around. 

I thought that I saw a flicker of Hannah’s soul a few times that night, but I may have been confused.  My power and mystery, limited as it is, comes from unrevealing, refraining from speaking to cover myself up (although I opened up to her that night), but Hannah verbalises to do the same.  I suspect that she reinvents herself with every conversation, creates a lark of truth to prevent the appearance of a doleful life, but I’m dogged by the bald possibility that rather than having an eye for deception, Hannah is an enigma of honesty, peddling an immense innate doctrine of consistency renounced, caprice embraced, and facts disposable, this coexisting alongside a refreshingly incautious utopian philosophy of genuine openness and candor personified.  Each a perceptible reflection of the other.  It’s easier to believe that and keep distance from the mocking pain of knowledge, conceding that in her pale squinting eyes, I’m ferociously commonplace, a charitable toleration, worthy only of polite neglect.

Day 18

My dreams have fallen into a rotation rhythm lately.  The situation unspools in its usual fashion, then there are the Eve/Hannah dreams of both erotic desire and sun-drenched wistfulness (occasionally, a single head contains both of their faces, like the god Janus, similar though separate), but the most recent entry in the array involves an unfamiliar writer in a room.  I’ve yet to decipher whether or not he’s chosen isolation of his own accord or is being held captive, but his existence is limited to a small one-room structure of metal, defined only by its interior.  His name is Mutter.  He’s not written this name, in fact he writes another, but Mutter emanates from him nonetheless with resonance and constancy.  His room is doorless and contains only a desk with notepad and pen, small library, and a speaker/microphone device mounted to the wall opposite his desk.  At any point he’s asked questions about his writing and thoughts, always questions, by a dispassionate computerized voice of low quality, a cracked digital interrogation to which he’s obliged to stand and answer.  The savvy Mutter intelligently and meticulously responding is juxtaposed against his artificial inquisitor.  There are never follow-up questions to his replies, merely different questions, and when there are no more questions, there is silence.  The silence accompanies Mutter when he thinks, writes, or occasionally looks out the single window with satisfaction at the single tree, the tree always accompanied by darkness.  His room, by comparison, is always brightly lit, and although he appears healthy, rested, and generally fit, it’s unclear how he eats, sleeps, cleans, or removes his body’s waste.  This doesn’t seem to bother him, and his general tone of character is one of acceptance and duty, of settling into noble years after seasons of being warmed by several suns.  I wonder if his mind has replaced his digestive tract and intestines or if the letters he forms carry out these integral duties for him? 

This is the sole dream that I don’t understand presently.  The others are perfectly clear.  What is his puzzle?  Am I Mutter or the voice, the tree or the window?  Perhaps I’m none of these and this dream is a parable about being caught between, the endless loop of routine and literary dedication securing one to an endless present between two names, the negotiation of secret twins, as if both designations, past and future, cling to the shared head orbited by the loop.  Now then, there’s the matter of what it is that Mutter actually commits to paper day after day, beyond the name which isn’t Mutter penned at the top of each page.  The chief characteristic of his writing is its navigation with considerable musicality (pearls which are mostly elegant acquaintances but also hostile snarlers), to speak a language of migration, the wide talk of a winedark crawl.  Canny transactions with the familiar silence of a tiny room. 

Although this dream is of me (meaning it’s mine, surfacing and receding through my own layers of consciousness), the writer Mutter’s story is of him, so I’ll reveal no more other than to say that the seeming best way to satisfactorily portray both his writing and answers to the voice is to characterize it all as the letter by letter unburying of a name. 

Day 19

C, t, b, d, r.  C.  Cuba, crocodile, constellations, confidence man.  T.  Tarot, 22, two-faced, taboo, The Pelican, the place.  B.  Books, bricks, beard, buried.  D.  Death, dirt.  R.  Rub. 

They were pointing and waving at me like a scattered Greek chorus accusing, He’s Guilty!  I realized that in my panic and haste to remove the body from the house, grimace it into the trunk, and race off, I didn’t remember to remove the cab magnets, so locals along the way were hoping for a lift.  It was the 4th of November. 
Fancy Nest, Follicle Need, Flighty Neighbor, Faust Necro, Film Noir, Fickle Name, Furious Noise. 
My heartbeat a tympani roll, insistent and crescendoing to the crack of dual gunshots that continued cracking in my mind well after their initial blasts. 

The first was the one that sprung me out of the car to jump the stoop steps and fling myself inside the unlocked house on Dauphine Street.  When The Pelican initially went to the door with winking intent and was met by Hannah, she sunk noticeably but recovered and invited him in with a tender rub to the left of his jaw.  After ten minutes or so came the single shot of gunfire.  I followed his voice through the sparse careless parlor, down the short hallway, into the kitchen, and found her lying on the floor and bleeding from her right arm, a paring knife at her side, while he was crouched with his back to me, edgy and pleading repeatedly, Why’d you make me do it?  She spoke through her teeth, clamping down on the pain, explaining desperately that she was leaving New Orleans, going to Havana, and her boyfriend was going with her.  Taking this in, I was anything but emboldened by impunity.  Shoot a shooter, me?  It’s not my way.  What would I shoot or attack him with?  Instead I began to shake, and then, as if magnified by mirrors, my shake shook. 
C, t, b, d, r.

Unsurprisingly, The Pelican sensed my presence and spun, training his gun on me and glowering, Get the fuck outta here.  Back in the fucking car.  Now!  Hannah surprised both of us when she pointed at me and said, He’s my boyfriend.  We’re moving to Havana.  The Pelican’s face of aggression and mine of fright merged to a single bewildered countenance.  I was speechless, having become an instant beard for Hannah while he held me in his direct line of fire.  He smirked and lowered his gun, stared at her woodenly, then down at the gun.  She teared up, telling him she loved him, didn’t know what she’d been thinking, and the two of them should go to Cuba.  This broke his trance and the seething returned.  He snatched the knife with his left hand and roughly slashed her right cheek, hissing, You two-faced tramp.  You’re not gonna ruin any more men.  Go to your car and bring me the fucking registration, okay, boyfriend. 

His request was perplexing, but I followed directions and then became further confused when he carefully folded my auto registration down to thumbnail size, bound it in tin foil, swallowed it, and washed it down with water, grinning after the last gulp.  As her crying heaved and I remained in hands-up paralysis, he (a man who seemed most dangerous when he was deliberate) returned to his former position, leaned over and firmly grabbed her right hand, squeezed it around the gun’s trigger and held it in place, with the barrel facing her.  She called out when he yanked her arm up and spun the gun to jam it firmly against his forehead.  With a demeanor as light and calm as I had witnessed from him, his last words were, Now look who’s fucked.  You’ve got nothing but crocodile tears, crocodile lies.  You’re gonna rub me out.  I’m gonna make you do it.  The gun connects you.  The registration connects him.  Three can’t keep a secret when only one’s dead.  Especially when the dead man still talks.  It’s time for me to sleep, get my rest.  Call the burial, dirt rest.

After a few frozen moments, I stumbled over and pulled his limp body off of her as she burst with horrified staccato gasping, crying, and screaming, the shot and her immediate accompanying start continuing to replay in my mind along with
C, t, b, d, r.
When she finally sat up, composed herself and spoke, she struck as being miles beyond my still-dazed speechless shaky state.  You’ve got to get rid of the body.  Not the river.  Bury him.  In the swamps.  I’ll take care of the gun.  Then we’ll be together.  She looked at me through faded green eyes, hoping I’d comply, would do anything to be close to her and not contend that her words should be taken at other than face value.  When the firmness of realization came to her, as of course it did, I sat beside her compliantly, guilelessly moved my head to her beckoning crimson right hand which caressed the underside of my chin, caressed it like she meant it, and I bent to her touch, warming to it too easily, like I always do no matter who, while she softly purred, I’ll always remember the 4th of November.  Now, go bury him and pack.  Make sure to weight him down.  When you get back, we’ll head off to Havana together.  Do you have a shovel at home?