Station Zed (9 page)

out at myself through holes in the muzzle,

the ass’s painted on eyes and lips what people saw

when they saw me, Shakespeare’s words booming

back from the head’s suffocating hollows

coming straight from the ass’s mouth, not mine.

I don’t remember how, but it ended in an alcove

above the carport where it softened

on the chicken wire, the paper sagged

and began to flake away, the muzzle and the eye-holes

shriveling into a gray, ulcerous mass—

when we moved from that town it got thrown

into the trash, taken to the dump and burned:

onion eaters, garlic eaters, hard-handed men,

that’s what Bottom and the mechanicals were—

and that’s what I was, what I’ve always been,

riding along on my bike’s fat tires

while that half god half man Theseus

laughs his courteous contempt of us whose

words come out like a tangled chain—which is

why there’s no bottom, why there’s never been

a bottom if you’re just an ass who speaks prose

to the Duke’s verse—an ass who kissed the Queen

of the Shadows and never got over it, my long,

scratchy ears and hairy muzzle pressed

to the ethereal, immortal, almost-not-thereness of her skin.

In those days, so many stairways were said to lead to happiness, mainly of a sexual kind—and as I climbed those stairs, I could hear my name being called from the top, as I so often did back then—and the sight of me bolting up the stairs with my eager, cartoon tongue hanging out wasn’t as sad or silly as it might seem. Naturally, there were the avatars of sex, the ones who claimed to hate it, the others who thought it led to universal harmony—they were out in front of the rest of us, and they believed it, and so did I: but as a friend recently said to me,
Always having to lead the way, be in front of the troops, all those speeches and sermons and truths you’d have to tell: such a burden
. It went on like this, stairway branching into stairway, endless others going up or down to meetings just as I was. And after many years, there we were: to find you, to hold you, led like steps up and down … the sadness and silliness, though just as sad and silly, were somehow more in earnest. Even my doggy-dog instincts, strong as always, understood some reckoning was at hand. The two of us had decided, mutually and irrevocably, to start climbing a stair that we knew was partly ruined, unlit except by the capriciousness of moonlight. But we had a method—and until the day when one or both of us stumbled off into the nothingness below, we committed ourselves to it—when one said,
Left
, we turned left. Which meant, because I have a terrible sense of direction, that I went whichever way you went.

Back in those days, when he told me about his adventures

in sex clubs it wasn’t the whys and wherefores

but technical details, like going rafting

down the Colorado River; and when he wrote

about a gay male friend whose first sexual experience

was with his stepfather, the friend told him

it wasn’t weird, but the best possible thing

that could have happened … I saw then that God,

who I never believed in, was dwelling in my heart

as a negative: that the negative had been developed

into a picture of a man who stares up at the sky

on a day so clear he sees through the mountain’s shadows

to the divinely human-seeming form that climbs it—

a neighbor in running shoes and sunglasses

jogging up the slope with his dog, tongue panting

and slavering, an acute look of happiness in its eyes

that could turn at any moment into exhaustion or pain

as in a maze of cubicles called Asshole Alley, little pyramids

of canvas called Lust of the Pharaohs, different pricing

for what you want, depending on the equipment,

the air thick with a sour, acidic, head-fogging reek

of come. … And my pal the poet, who believed

in infernal chemistry, in the spirit as a kind

of “spooky action at a distance,” he communed

with this God, this eternally dying father of all matter

who made out of our bodies his own maze of cubicles

where he hides himself away—his sanctuary

Asshole Alley where God’s own unholy loves

bubble all around him like a cauldron in his ears—

and my poet pal heard the bubbling, he stirred

the pot, he showed me the holy city, the sexual New Jerusalem

that came prepared as a bride adorned for her husband …

—That was how it was in those days, back when my friend

hadn’t yet met the coroner who wrote down

his cause of death as “polysubstance abuse”

that brought on his heart attack while fucking …

And regardless if I believed, whenever

we were together God shone clearer—

those were the days when every morning God woke up

in a blur of ecstasy and went to bed every night

in divine rage. Whoever loved him,

he loved. Whoever hated him,

he hated back: for who can doubt the vitality

of hate or the volatility of love.

It’s like you’re looking over my shoulder

and saying, as I sway on my third drink at the party

while a woman with pink hair and pierced upper lip

tells me how she did her piercings herself, it’s like

you’re saying,
Hey man, why are you still here

instead of putting a gun to your head like I did?

Your voice is broomstraw, wispy, shattered,

sweeping away the woman’s voice who presses

on a scar dead center on her sternum and says,
This

hurts, I used to have a piercing here
—the light’s so sharp

I can see beneath her silk blouse’s sheer scalloped

edges a tiny patch of skin she rubs more raw, maybe

flirting but maybe not, both of us in our

bodies brushing up against limits that dare

us to go further, but also just doing what people

at parties do, nothing not allowed—and is that why,

my friend, you’ve come back, lonely maybe,

wanting to burst in with advice for what I

should say to her?—but neither of us is really

in this moment of this woman and me talking

but in this moment where your voice comes from rubble

on the mountain framed by the stone arch I’m

looking through, you’re saying, smiling,

Tom, I wanted to go out at the top of my game
,

with good shoes on my feet, you know how much

good shoes and a suit, you know how much

all of that costs?
And as she and I stand talking

right there at the actual Marquis de Sade’s

actual chateau that Pierre Cardin has bought to add

to his collection of four hundred chateaux, all of it

so ridiculously unlikely that I start to see your point,

I say as a way of flirting you’d applaud,

So how’s the old Marquis treating you?
and she, smiling

back at me with her pierced lip says,
Sadistically
.

But now you’re telling me how some aristocrat stood

gazing from the death cart with undistracted eyes

at the sights of Paris, the crowds gathered on the sides

of the streets no longer blocking the view so

for the first/last time he saw the buildings, windows

of houses he’d visited and got drunk in, as I’m

staring now though my stare’s nothing like your condemned

man’s blinking, infinite leisure—
So fuck it
, you said,

that’s how I decided to go out, looking

at it straight, OK?
And then I’m back talking

to her pierced lip while I watch you watch me play the fool

by staring up into the sun in its million

million years of never breaking down—

though just by shutting my eyes I can make the sun fall.

Don’t look behind you
is what I remember telling myself,

scared in the prison opening all around me,

for encircling me were tiers of cells and walkways

in a circle leading up to the skylit dome where a dozen birds

whirled among the Russian prisoners you could visit by paying

a few rubles. They dressed in black uniforms, wore flat black caps

and pushed mops and buckets in front of their black boots,

the slopping water driving a mouse down the corridor,

mops leaving a slick of soap drying on stone floors.

When the doors closed behind me, I could hear

the room I’d been in go silent and the room I was entering

grow louder—and then there weren’t any more prisoners,

no white nights, there was just me and the triage nurse

and my urine sample—black—what have I done wrong

or what has gone wrong and what more is

going wrong before it can’t be helped? And then a Mr. Mohammed,

from Queens, one foot amputated, the other an open wound

wound in bandages, began to shout, despite his diabetes,

Bring me my apple juice! I am a son of Prince Abdullah!

And the nurse brought him a little juice box

but asked him about sugar, should he be drinking sugar,

and he told her apple juice was fine, it was orange juice

that was bad as she quieted him down

by patting his arm—but then he started shouting,
Ice! Ice!
—

what kind of hospital is this that you don’t give us ice?

And so she brought him ice and quieted him

down by patting his arm, until he asked her in a voice

that already knew the answer,
Do you think my foot

stinks? Tell me what you smell
. But despite the smell,

and despite the old man groaning in the bed next

to mine, his smashed hip still unnumbed by morphine, Dilaudid,

even OxyContin, while his daughter keeps pleading

with him, saying, so gently, for what seems like hours,
Dad
,

please, you have to keep covered up
—despite the metronomic

drip of the IV in my arm, the contrapuntal

beep of the heart monitors, my panic

begs me to let it go—I’m not going to die, am I? No, not

this time, maybe another, my mind skittering off

into crevices and corners to sniff out

some crumbs left by one of the prisoners who so tames me

that I creep into his hand to eat out of his palm—and when

I finally do die, he’ll put me in a cigarette pack and lay me

under the cross in the exercise yard in the insomniac white nights,

while over the wall, littering the parking lot, lie hundreds of messages

the prisoners write on paper scraps they fold into darts

and through toilet paper rolls joined painstakingly

together into long blowguns, blow out

through the barred windows to be picked up by

what must be mothers, sisters, girlfriends since all of them

are women unfolding and reading and putting

the messages in their purses, ready to send them on

to the address written inside, until they get tired

of reading and leave the rest unread, glinting

under arc lights, each crisp fold relaxing in the summer air.

Just as in the movie about Hitler’s brain, in which Hitler

has himself decapitated and his head placed, still living,

in what looks like a fish tank, so that after

Germany’s defeat he can rise again

with the special G gas and rule the world

from South America,

and just as the the dread of watching Hitler’s skin,

clearly made of wax, begin to melt off the skull

as the movie ends and the credits roll

and flames shoot up around his head

so that everything that should have remained

secret, hidden, has become visible,

and just as Bill Freed, the actor who played Hitler,

never acted again, his dialogue consisting

of yelling,
Mach schnell! Mach schnell!

while his flesh and moustache burn,

yes, just as the name “Station Zed” in the actual camp

of Sachsenhausen a few miles beyond Berlin,

on a casual Sunday in hot July,

turns out to be an
SS
joke—you came in at Gate A

and went out by Station Zed—so the tape hiss

of the survivor’s German, digitized down

but not erased to give that feel of
This

is real
, then overlaid by the translator’s English

that becomes garbled background to the camp walls,

so that hiss turns into an echo, an echo

of an echo in the voice telling

how “Iron Gustav plunged among us

to beat us with a pipe, his slaver flying in our faces,

his hunched-over body and dark complexion

nothing like an Aryan’s,” so all these

echoes and counter-echoes drifting

and unraveling under birch and poplar trees

in the nowhere breeze in the shady cemetery

slowly entangle and blur

into the
caw caw caw caw

that rises up where clouds in Technicolor light

turn to an ancient parchment scroll, some mystical notation

summoning pure evil, though really just voices

you didn’t expect to hear, your mother’s voice

calling, calling you back home, or the dead lover

you abandoned and haven’t thought about in years,

your own brain’s canned footage,

their faces like notes that eddy and flow,

whispers and murmurings of fear and dread …

and then strings playing so softly the notes barely graze your ears