Read The Last Two Seconds Online
Authors: Mary Jo Bang
disquieting. She looked at it over and over until whatever
was was letter perfect with no corrections. This,
while outside a talking hammered hailstorm bounced up
and domed a column of men coming down the sidewalk.
It was relatively painless except for being
all she could see: a world made of dinner, very pleasant; a lunch
at something called a table in the dining room; an endless night;
a half-day; another lunch, this on Tuesday. Yesterday. Today.
Pieces propped up with supports. The therapist tapped his cigar.
He no longer accepted her general opposition to myth, marriage,
Olympic Games, and the course of decades. He said it was as if
she were engaged in an eternal war, either watching a movie
or acting in one, depending on the situation and time of day.
She sat in silence, the sky above a half-baked blue, a blank-
face dying of awkwardness. The simple explanation boiled down
to the too-easy explanation. He was smart and charming then;
and later, much less so. Behind his head, pictures were crammed
together with the top layer hung so high she had to crane her neck
to see the details. He said to please pretend she was listening.
Sandwiched between the sidewalk and an upper floor,
she was drinking in an afternoon that was making her
uneasy. The situation was further complicated
by the proximity to the dilemma
of whether to chance the unstable elevator.
How else to get back to where she’d begun?
It occurred to her that every dilemma
goes into the river of consciousness with lipstick on
a tissue, a rat in the basement, a man on the street.
Meanwhile, someone was talking to her
while first names kept flashing by in a cracked mirror
whenever she blinked. Across the room, a man
who looked like a younger form of Freud was saying,
“—consciousness-wise, the doctor is no worse
and no better than a novel
that wants you to know every chapter
once was titled ‘The Moment Is the State Suspended.’”
There had been a particularly disturbing dream
the night before. Awake, the associations led to something
she’d read about the Audubon Society in the
Times
, which led
to years ago, when she came down from the city and saw A—
in Philadelphia, A—saying she hadn’t liked her daughter
until later. The shock of that. The shock also of what someone
can become. She said she gardened now. She was surprised
she still remembered that. Blind slats let in an inch or so of sun
times the length of the window. Outside the sigh of a braking bus,
the length of the street times once upon a time. The story began,
“This is the corner where the murder took place.” Of course, corner
could be parking garage, or an off-track betting parlor. Murders
happen everywhere, even inside the brain, a moment of anger
and just like that the other is over.
She began with the premise that the world was
an unbroken overlay of dust motes
and added to that only what she could see:
a bird eats corn and becomes.
It’s true if you see a platypus in a glass case,
you remember. A layer of thinking makes ideas
go forward until the latch at the end of the day
where sleep gets attached to fading,
the loop set on auto-alert for a future waking.
She knew she was one of countless others,
any of which one might meet and soon forget.
There was no reason it should be otherwise.
The essay mentioned a man, an interview,
a train, fingerprints, photo, shoes, and
a red sweater. The future was quite irresistible,
it washed over you. Because, she said, is a way
of pointing to the apparent reason that,
in a trial in which the complaint concerns
the terms of human behavior.
She didn’t notice the year’s ending. Then
shortly after midnight, she heard noises outside
and realized it was the muffled repetitive boom
of distant fireworks. Good-bye to that, she said.
I love pictures. Scene after scene
shooting to a brain. Messages on waves.
But suddenly, in the middle of day, an arrow
like a knife through a perpetual instant.
The only gift was instinct:
a cat’s plodding, a glove of nothing.
White dawn. This idiocy. Throw of the dice
but not this red upright jar,
this violent explosion,
a dove-grey shop like a cloud, falling upon faces.
Whose? Nobody. A standstill,
the throb of a pulse,
a curious pattern. Some horror-world
blocking the pavement but for the cars
on both sides. The symbol
of a grass-grown path hurrying along,
at the top, copies of wheels.
A crowd of thighs without occupation.
High up the sound of white smoke for a moment.
Awestricken, perfectly still,
a grasshopper’s rasped spine transfixed,
shut eyes, alive but robbed of suspense.
The outlines gone, the night is full of daylight.
Midnight boundaries lost.
Animals stretched over the zoo.
The cricket voice of the suffering. Stone men,
women, spread out on the steps of society.
The traffic. The swish
of exquisite moments, while by her, trying
to calm, a weapon sliced the surface,
ripped the man and woman confessing to some
sudden revelation, an illumination.
Blood in veins had to be amazing.
The sponge of feeling. Pink evening.
A granite wall. Falling.
Exactly, thought. Here she is having a mind,
a moon ghastly light on a person. To suffer
emotion, throat stiff, child grown larger.
A whole. Summoned so one can have a look.
Summoned to husband what’s happened.
The light challenged the powers
of feeling: frightening, exhilarating, surprise,
shame. It was over. Plaster and litter alone.
Five acts that had been.
Over and over. A strange power speaking.
Some concern for the half-past. Ring after ring
like something coming. It is thought,
this bell like a bee striking.
The future lies in a patter like a wood drummed.
A sensual traffic: what, where, and why.
Three emotions. Shutters and avenues.
The red burning. A lizard’s color in her eyes.
Evening wearing the fringes in the windows.
The light wavering in the darkness streets.
Atoms turned. Thinking like the pulse—
punctually, noiselessly silk.
Ridiculous. Her mother grown big.
She, like most mothers, a swept shuffle
of traffic and dress and nothing
except the flutter of absolution.
Such are things merged. The cupboard outline
becomes soft. A table. Cigarette smoke.
A baby bright pink. Daring with being.
That dog. Lots of coldness. Yet, some power
to preside with her head, with her shoulders,
through dinner. A sort of maternal politics.
Her dress disappearing. Sweeping off for bed
with headaches. Still, the sun. The squirrels.
Pebbles to the pebble collection. She blinks
at the crack of a twig behind the bedroom walls.
The nerve fibers, a veil on red music clanging,
cannoned from columns. An anthem bubbling.
Scientifically stretching over the cheeks
at the edge of one moment. The grey suit passed,
the overcoat, impressions everywhere.
Watching a negligible dog fetch as if it were human—
his hind legs so honest, so independent—
she stood in a doorway, not beautiful, never
specially clever, remote from herself. Over and over—
twist, turn, wake up, set going. Doomed to sinking—
decorate the dungeon, be decent.
The edge of her mind turning meaning for hours
at a time. Hours and days. A sound like a sickle.
Her head a bunch of heather. Then over.
The matted and tangled message, a red square.
The thinking nerves. The door of the room.
Dante : the Inferno. The English : London.
A piston thumping mechanically behind the screen.
Mixed clouds and seagulls, grey circles interlocked.
Grey to grey nothing nervous system.
A sister adoring shrouds,
Some institutions, uneasiness. Likeness
in a type of story. A photograph,
Table
—
by the Committee of the Physically Existent.
The answer is to go beneath life:
here was the door opened,
the door ajar. And outside was history:
engraving of a sofa, a factory, violin sound.
The dwindling impulse. The gigantic clock.
The clock was her mind.
She had prepared a looking-glass: hair, dress, thought,
sofa in the glow of dogs barking.
Beautifully close up. And once, flames
eating the edge of the sofa.
Her eyelashes blurred. Chin, nose, forehead, some lips.
The cheek. The glass looking first at one thing,
then another: nose, eyes, evening.
She sat looking at the map of her hands.
The window, the clock, her pulse.
The body was busy thinking, conjuring
the museum of a moment: emotion, scenes, people,
bags of treasures. Heaps of theories.
Theories to explain feeling the here and the back of the hand.
A theory allowed one thing after another.
First, dinner, then morning.
Her hand was the world.
To get to it she had to look at herself.
To get at the truth one would have to disregard
anything false. Yet the truth was intangible.
One eye on the horizon: a long indeterminable,
mere straightness, a few plants,
that indescribable purple.
Doors being opened. Visual impressions—
as if the eye were the brain, the body entering the house.
The house stood. The cars were standing.
She was walking over to the dog
which had to be remembered.
“Shake hands,” she said. He straightened,
bent, straightened.
His manner was irreproachable,
that being with a tail.
It was extraordinary, life was.
Furs being petted, people standing upright,
panic, fear, tight skirts, ankles, thought.
The creature standing, her giving little pats.
She was enjoying standing there.
She had forgotten this feeling.
Ordinary things—curtains, biscuits, bones,
a creature raising one foreleg, the movies.
She stood looking as if she would solidify—
Darwin draped in black
remembering the flora or fauna.
Of course, she would really only
be remembering a garden, trees, wallpaper,
a sea-lion barking, a doctor of misery
on the verge of difficulty. A boy gone. Death.
Death without life. Terror. Fear. Disaster.
Punishment. Profound darkness. Evening.
She walked to the window: sky,
clouds coming into the room.
How odd, she thought, to be.
Individuate the particular
and you get a slice of totality: the car, for instance,
becomes a composite of separate parts: gears,
tank, hubcaps, paint coat, mudflaps, a clock,
a divided dash. New example: a neuron.
You could say the brain works
from knowledge and ambiguity.
Radical fundamentalism is not supportable
by appeal to the best.
Why then is fundamentalism common:
reductive explanations induce the pleasure
of misunderstanding?
A weak ego lacks distinct boundaries?
There are other ways of thinking?
Take Aristotle’s example of a rooster and the sun
and substitute a shadow and a flagpole.
The brain has elements in common with cameras
but isn’t one. A collection of biochemical cascades
over components that span the membrane
results in behavior at the fundamental level.
Sometimes one is wrong.
a seismic storm that knocked down
buildings—the buildings teetering before falling
the way ideologies might sway back and forth
if they were preserved in a glass tower
that was about to be toppled. In any storm,
one hopes he or she is bound in advance
by the story line to escape at the end. In speech,
the mouth becomes a wheelbarrow
that can assert its contents.
The tool-and-die exactitude of pre-packaged thought
is estranging because it suggests
the discrete elements can’t be teased apart.
Blind faith relies on an obedience that verges
on boredom. Any disquiet, however slight, might
define a moment like a character’s obsessive cough
might define a character by exploding
when it shouldn’t. It keeps exploding
and when it does it acts in the story
like a glass box cracked by a hammer that breaks
and becomes a broken box. In both situations,
action releases the stale air encased there.
And now the question: what do we do with the longing
for what can destroy us? You’re free to think:
logic can change even the most obstinate person; or,