Prayers for the Living (59 page)

And here near the bare sidewalks of Jersey, and at the far rocky points where the country ends and oceans begin on both coasts, and the flat steps leading down into the blue-true gulf.

And you say, this is his mother? This is what she's thinking? This is how she pictures it as he's about to—but it's happened so many times before, I've seen it and said it to myself so many times before, I've watched him, off with the suit coat now, and picking up the satchel, going to the window wall, and out there, threading his vision like a needle between the buildings he remembers the pier where we all first arrived, and the ocean waves we rode upon, I've watched him, in my blindness, his story light upon my dark.

And I have thought, sometimes, that it
was
his fault, all of it, his flaw, so what if the death of the father, so what of the confusion of choices, so what if the woman bewitched him, so what if, what if, so what!

He wanted the power, he wanted the world, he got it, that's what I think sometimes.

And at other times I think that some great god of a bird or bird of a god, whichever, who knows, they never never let me pray, never gave me a place in the temple, so what do I know except what I imagine, this bird or godbird or birdgod sucks up into the path of
its flight all such puny notions as human will and feeds on desire and sends it back, blows it back with the great powerful force of its wings as it flies past worlds and words.

And this bird fixed its eye upon my son, my only son, my Manny, and he could have turned, he could have not turned, but no matter which way he turned it would have ended all the same.

And lo the bird swoops back now into my vision. Lights, lights!

Bursts of lights of suns!

My blighted vision returning.

And I can see Manny standing at the window of the great city, standing tall, powerful in his decision, looking out at the bird.

And I am with the bird too, I am in the bird's eye, thus the light, the returning after these years of loss of the light I once knew, and I am seeing with the eye of the bird.

And here it comes soaring out of nowhere—the place where all things are born, to which all things go, an America of the ether, all poles no poles, equator noquator, city country mountain ocean desert plain all one, up and down the same, sideways eastwest north-south the same, I glance away and it becomes the bird.

And I'm riding in its eye, and next to me
my Jacob,
and I clasp his hand and he touches the place where my shoulder meets my neck, and we each say with our eyes I am with you again my love, my lovely, in the eye, on the wings of this bird of day, of night, and the sound of its wings fluttering makes the air tremble, and we swoop past the window and see our Manny standing, staring out, and we know it is time, time made of the years gone by, and my Jacob says to me, Mama, Minnie, my love, how are you? how have you been? and I say, don't you know? you haven't been watching? and he says, of course, I've been watching but I wanted to hear from you in your own words, and he touches me again at the breast, and I say in my own words, I have been happy and I have been lonely, I have been happy, I have been sad, I have raised our boy for the world to take, though he took a little of the world from itself himself, and he says, do you think it would have been different if I had stayed here with you, with you and him? and I say to him, I say, Jacob, my darling
Jacob, one way or another we weave a world, we make a pattern, and if it is not one design it is another, and in the end the light goes, and we ride here in the eye of this flying beast, and yes, he says, it's all crazy, it's all sane, it's all up and down and the way to the past is the way to the future and to the future we . . .

No, I say, no, my darling, please don't give me speeches, here we are, and we are soaring, and there he is, the boy we made, and see him staring out into the blank air where the sunlight streaks up now, spears of light slicing the early morning sky? I see him, Jacob says, he's about to meet us, and I say, so who wants him? I want that he should live, but Jacob, he says, but we all want what we want, and what he wants this time he gets, because he has discovered how to get it, and I am about to ask him what this means when the bird soars into a steep turn and my throat locks up, and we're skimming now past the windows so close that I can see deep into my Manny's eyes, and what do I see? I see wheat fields, ocean, river, city, skullcap, velvet-covered Torahs, the inside of an office, handshake, daughter, jungle, Maby, forest, I see eyes, dishes, a closet full of dark suits, pieces of a guitar. I see purple and darkness and gold and metal, I smell onions and flowers, fruit, and feel the stone, the scrape of metal, the slick of blood on fingers as glass slits skin.

Tell him no, Jacob, I say, as we swoop past in our perch within the skull of the soaring bird and see our Manny who lifts the satchel back past his shoulder and prepares to lay into the window as if with a frontier axe. Tell him no, I urge him, he is our only son, and he's not only a son but a father and not only a father but a husband and a lover, and if he goes he'll take these people with him, in their grief their lives will come undone, and in that moment that seems like ice it is so frozen my Jacob says, listen to you, you never were a liar, but listen, you don't care about the others, all you care about is what you'll feel if he does it?
nu?
and I shake my head, I'm shaking all over, it's not easy to ride within this throbbing bird in flight even when it's hovering quite still, and I say, no, if he dies, I'll die with him, and my Jacob says, no, no, that's not the worst part, the worst part is that you'll live.

Call him please.

All right, so I'll call him. But I'm warning you.

Me, you're warning? You never warned me before. So go 'head.

So here goes.

And he opens his mouth to speak, and the bird lets out a cry as terrifying as any I've ever heard, a voice of caves and murder and turds and tar, bones melted by radiation, wild and monstrous, devouring mutant cells, a people turned against their god, a god turned against a people.

This is how you call him, Jacob? My own body trembles yet with the noise of it.

Look, he heard me, Jacob says, and we notice that even as Manny stands poised, a man frozen for an instant, time-bound but timeless—and in that instant all his life passes before
my
eyes, baby, boy, student, father, pride-bound man with shock-white hair and white shirt, the trousers dark, dark—he opens his own mouth and moves his lips and through the as-yet-tranquil glass we see the words appear.

Pa-pa?

And I say to Jacob, or to the bird, whatever, I say, tell him I'm here, too, that I'm with you, he didn't call me this morning, he said good-bye this morning but he didn't call when he got to the office. Tell him.

And the bird gives another of those fear-making shrieks, and I am sorry that I have asked, my skin is crawling, and even the old dried-up parts of me inside they suddenly twitch and shrivel, and my fists are balled up into tinier fists, and those fists into even smaller balls of flesh.

Ma-ma, too?

We can read his lips.

Yes, Mama, too, I shout at him soundlessly. Both of us.

I'm coming,
he makes with his lips.

And around and down he swings the satchel and makes a large bulge, then a crack, in the glass.

OOOsssh!

At this height the wind even on this seemingly calm morning comes whistling in around him, a stream of air he wades into deeper
as he raises the satchel and makes another mighty smack. My Manny, my woodsman! Up and whack! once more, and the window gives outward, no star-shaped pattern now, because that design was another kind of accident, and it could have been a cross as well as a star or a half-moon, crescent and star, or in another life and time the anaconda and the star of David, or who knows but in some other world where birds are kings and gods are human beings, or so they imagine, where a feather and wing might be a sign of prayer, of devotion, or in the comical chance of a universe some crazy person could make up, in the book of a writer in Alaska or someone sitting in a madhouse rest home hospital dayroom, the sun streaming in like wine, and the wind a crescent-shaped fruit wearing an officer's cap, or in the daydream of a lover just returned from a run, a man with a broad young face beneath an ancient's shock of colorless hair, an emblem of someone no more than what he was, like the rest of us, lucky and an error, flesh and bones and mostly chance, the regard for a survivor, and now gone up or about to disappear like wind, smoke, water.

He was himself and all these things, or could have been or should have been, and all the while he was my Manny, I gave him birth but never knew him, and who can know except but we make up the motives and they are like feathers in the wind, twigs on a stream near the park near our house, this way that, falling leaves making erratic descent in an autumn thunderstorm—only the fanatic makes a pattern he believes in, and the mother is a fanatic of a kind we never see, except thank God, or bird, not like the killers in Europe, those who gave you your numbers, they were like lovers and mothers to a dream of murder, nursing it at all cost, or the dancers in the saffron robes where for a while you, my Sadie, made your life, you, thin, hair shorn, incense in your nose, bells on your toes.

Oh, to be a fanatic, oh to give yourself over to the force of another, to a pattern made by another! And that way to know what you mean!

Is this what he's thinking now as he stands with the wind on his face, the fear flowing out of him like blood from the wounds on his face and neck from the flash and splinter of the glass he's smashed?
He could be thinking, I have made my own way, skimming, skipping through traditions and professions and families and lovers like a stone spit out of a hard man's swift-wristed fist, a stone he's spun upon the flashing, dancing waters. He could be thinking, there is still room behind me—even as he hears the sound of the watchman approaching, because the breaking window has set off a fire alarm, a small blinking red light on a board many floors below, and he knows this—then changing again, thinking, I do not have much more time or any room at all, and I can't go back, make it up, go before a judge, seek a daughter, find shelter elsewhere, live my life, but there is this wind, and he cannot think anymore, all his life it has been go forward, go forward, a disease of motion, this is America, onward, upward, and he stares into the wind and into the light from the rising blood-gut ball of the new morning sun. So.

His white hair streaming, his white shirt streaked with his own blood, he lets the satchel fall to the glass-littered carpet and steps forward one foot more and turning sideways inserts himself like a letter to his father into the jagged-edged opening.

Pushes against the wind, and looks up as he does so, searching for one split second the sky for the bird of passage.

And he pushes once more against the wind, this time as though he wants to climb back up into me . . . his mother.

Prayer for the Living

A
LL THESE YEARS A MILLION TIMES
I
MUST HAVE HEARD
the words. But a woman doesn't say. I run my fingers around the jagged outline of this shattered star. On my lips, water. Ashes on my tongue. In my nostrils flecks of incense. In my ears, the tinkling of bells, the rustling of cloth. Could it be saffron? I see nothing dark or light so cannot say. What, anyway, is the feeling of saffron? Old woman, blind, sick with a swollen heart, bowels now clogged with growths like tubers of a tree, old woman shaking off a dream lying in bed in the green west hills of Jersey, in America, Western Hemisphere—so she doesn't know these things? so she hasn't been alive, a student of life for what feels like a million years?—on the planet Earth. She moves her lips in prayer, though a woman mustn't say it, and no one may be listening, a prayer for him, for me, for them, for you, for all of us poor creatures bound by stupid gravity to the mercies of a traveling sun.