Sea of Glass 

ByPaul Scallan

 “I who know only the one city And by touch in my sleep I could find it…                 

…Whose secret chorus swirls around my head And possibly one day will stifle me I know the beginnings and the ends of things And life after the end”    

Anna Akhmatova 

For Finn, Flannery & Gillian

Till time means Nothing -

I will love you 

All the way downriver, toward the abandoned estuaries, where the bleached wood towers spread their arms out waiting, there in these driftwood fields was the first time we heard the call, Zadee and Moti and me. We could hear it above the misfits, killdeers, the thunder of the city, and it sounded all up and down from Couteau Plate to Paincourtville. It was a tangible urgency like when you were caught between steel barge walls on a log, …Ka kaa Ka kaa Ka kaa kaa kaa kaaaaaa… over and over, echoing, definite, demanding a response, or you know you will live forever as a coward. At first just the consonant sounds, the kind you hear when you are lonely and the sound of a voice, any voice, means all, even if it is just the jab of a T and the fizz of an F or the shock of a C or the sweet seldom S. Then, I heard one word at a time. It was as if I had drunk the wax from candles, I was warm with new words, it was infused in the city, buried deep in the private sanctuary of beating chests and sweating faces, it was present in the statues painted gold once and now only stood with upheld arms, covered in ash, hoping for a new beginning.

Me, Gripper Ouber, a white Niger with a bowed back, who lived most days in the pigeonnier, I learned to fly crooked after shabby wings grew from the roses that bloomed from the bullwhip marks on my back. Now on the ferry of mimes, the marks congealed and grew wings, and thank God, I flew out blind over all of the lands, with the oil-feathered ducks, colored in tones locked tight in museums telling stories of German painters worn down from might, hiding in attics recovering from war. A gate was crashed and the glass holding out life from us was crashed by fools who laughed as they landed sideways. We did not care, our necks stretching outward for another sphere, we flew desperately in confident thunder through Cocteau Parish over the Felicianas, high above the blinds filled with camouflaged men waiting with guns. Splitting the waters of Lake Maurepas, then skimming the Manchac for a while before going to Triumph, Pass Manchac Reserve, then we rested awhile on the edges of the arms of St. John the Baptist Parish, as he held his head in his hands. I saw at the edges of the park a group of retarded men with nice two-toned shoes climbing into a van parked on the white-shelled lot. Color of pools of phosphorescent vermilion, swollen bitten lips, burnt carmine, the pastel of thin circumferences of unslept eyes and unkempt promises. You can see the tint if you look. Some days, and in some parts of the world you do not see it at all but you can hear the same timbre of laughter, the echoing and jeering of the mocking Sky Jester.

But I could still hear whispers of saints, poets and the elastic bleating of the homeless trumpet players’ protests against the ways of the world, I heard them, faintly tonight, still like when I heard them in the very beginning when I thought I was dead from sadness right at the start of the falling apart, when I heard one word at a time. It was something to follow in hopeless times, the ancient call to be a citizen of the universe, but in the intervening years, I felt that it was just heart-breaking machine of the world, the tearing apart of lives and that very ripping was the glue, the force that held the very world together. I had drunk the wax from candles, the imprint of hope in my chest, and I was warm with new words. I could hear new. It was tearing across the whole world in a quiet scream that I heard at first in the crescent driftwood fields. The net that I had cast had a dyslexic pull. But the constant casting of it has made me weary and ground me down to nothing and in this nothing the universe has entered into me. All I wanted had slipped through the holes in the net, like migrating eels gone wild without sonar, and I have harvested only the invisible, the fragile, and frail potentialities, the hidden, and those who toss the other net cannot harvest in, they only pay out, it out till they become part of the Kingdom of Worms. I learned the words of hope in hopeless times. We found traces of the tracks of troubadours to follow, the fragments of something to hold on to, so we could find reasons to continue living. I am witness to mercy’s infinitudes and ineptitudes. Back then I thought it was the echo of greatness, ……Still I knew it was something that never died, and was even laid out in all of the lands as far as I could see, from Cocteau Plate to the city, it was in the cotton fields framed by green levees that were speckled with shotgun shells of brass. Something you could see even in statues now painted gold after the molasses fires swept through towns, leaving men and the statues still standing, but stunned and never the same both with uplifted arms, covered in ash. Moti looked like one of those statues covered in gold leaf paint. Moti was a high yellow; he called himself a neon nigger from back Vacherie. I was a nigger too, that’s what he said. It was true not in the regular way, but in way that I wasn’t full of shit… That’s what he tol’ me. I knew he it good. … So I accepted his definition of me. He was my friend, and when I did not see him, it was that same feeling as like when you take the last sip of the cold Chocolate Soldier drink I’d buy from the machine on the ferry. I collected the bottle caps and gave them to the dancers and they would give me the money to burn them. I worked at the Crowville center down river, right past the driftwood fields. The ferry was empty most days when I came back from singing the Star Spangled Banner at the leprosarium, except for a few old cars filled with people staring out with exhaustion and puzzlement at their own worn-down-ness. Sometimes, tractors pulling a tilted flatbed with piles of wood or cane were allowed to drive on, as long as they swept up the fallen pieces because they were in a slant so sharp they could puncture a tire, or a man, cut at angles, if your hands grabbed them on a regular basis and you are too young, it may fell your spirit. Usually, on the way home I just lay on the steel life-preserver box of the Ascensionville-ferry, smelling the water, cooling my skin, rubbing my back on the steel because it was hot and itchy from my brace made of whalebones wrapped in white cloth, yet looking with deliberateness, attempting angles of seeing, a constant geometrizing of forgetting.

At that time, the chemical plants and grain elevators were rising and spreading and it caused a fear in us, so I became a master at seeing in angles. Just before the man put down the magazine in the black tower, and I could tell it because the red bead of his cigarette would disappear, right as the first bounce boomed off the tires right before the chains were locked round the steel jutting, right before the wailing of the ferryman’s horn, and just as he yelled, “Gripper Ouber don’t you dare”! I was in the air and off. I had the edge on him. I had learned to time it perfect, I watched Moti’s right arm and as soon as the tattoo on his bicep of a lady in a martini glass blowing bubbles bulged, just as her face went from celebration to a warped deformity from the massing of his huge muscle, right as Moti prepared to lasso the ferry to the dock to keep it from slipping back into downstream rush, I was in the air… and off through the park. I ran through the streets and glued leaves on the crotches of the statues of saints; I just thought that they were tired, very tired of standing still, a leaf on the crotch would help them. Most days the park was empty except for a tall terracotta Buddha stolen from across the world during some civil wars, always sitting with a blank stare, mute and quiet his gaze tumbling onto the understanding eyes of another statue on the other side of the shelled lot which was painted in gold leaf of a woman on a horse holding a lance to the sky, her face looking back over her left shoulder back to the glass house covered in moss where Buddha held court. The space between them, people were living themselves out in slow motion, as if these people were boiled down to a thick honey, fighting some force that was around here, something that sounded in the air, the feeling of slow sticky stuckness of yellow molasses light. I fought it by running fast, zig-zagging across the white-shelled parking lot. But the day I found the man in the reeds was different; it was the Blue Point Festival and the park on the salt dome was filled with people. There were duck callers on one knee, taking turns at wildness, who were watched by groups of Morganza spillway girls with beehive hair and painted eyelids who sat smoking in lawn chairs, swinging one leg over the other, sucking lemon drops with a certain color of red lips that I had never seen anywhere in the world of man nor in nature. As they batted their eyes at strangers walking by, sniffing out their private zephyr of fortune, or personal war. Still others, the ones who seemed to be trying to decide something, looked at the duck callers, taking long disgusted drags and shaking their heads. While a few occasionally turned back in wonder at one of the statues on either side of the park. The older women with see-through moustaches spoke sadly of the expense of saffron strings from Spain and why now they had no choice, shamefully but to use tomatoes instead. Wifeless, raccoon-eyed men with sparkling eyes, taking a break from casting their Trojan-horsed traps in the water, leaned on cars in unfitting clothes, drinking beer, hoping one or the other might take them soon, a statue or a woman, and some whispered to fluorescent high-yellows (who were descendants of a large whorehouse inviting the lonely that traveled the reconstruction road not far from here; its night-windows once spread squares on liquid fields,) or children that heaven is like morning in boats without noise.

The echo still fell in all of the lands; it still descends invisibly, falling hard, like the Day of Pentecost. Then something happened, I saw his eyes: these eyes had turned into a color not found anywhere in nature, faded sapphires set for dying. The quality turned into a different thing it was something horrible, it which moved down the long hall, (follow the red tape on the floor to the end, said the nurse) had finally forced his face in frozen questioning, pressed flat against hospital lights that burned the soft tissue of his puzzled eyes. The sockets now were performing a different kind of looking, the same as a bull-eyed doe out of season, the stare of why. He was looking in a different kind of light invented to rearrange cells gone wild outside of the will, cells multiplying desperately, themselves confused. Your limbs are now fading to sticks and a fluid, a poison then, this liquid was poured down your spinal cord with a funnel and left you who refused to be helpless, left you as such. True light can force cells to turn; false light lifts the milk out of the bowl slowly and cannot undo cells running wild. But never, never could the hum of the sonar-chamber measure what made fingers grip hard on wet wooden plow handles at dawn.

Under the spinning umbrellas and a frozen Ferris wheel being fixed, during all of this right during a midpoint of a jump across a mud puddle that I saw him. He lay by the side of a canal. Red-eared turtles bobbed up and down at his twisted feet and he, seeming helpless, lay dreaming in the tall-uninterrupted grass. He stuttered when he spoke, but I understood all he said, and his foul-breathed words reached me more than anything I had ever heard. I sat, looking at him before we spoke. I asked him “What is it you are living hobo man?” Or something like that, and then, I felt seen, looked at in way I never had which allowed me to begin. I still do not know how it all started; it could have begun a number of ways, the journey, but this day, was the day that I always think about. From out of nowhere, from under his coat, he pulled out a cup made of a stone; it was see-through yet was the color of tearing apart, of crushed cherries, blood-bitten lips, the tint of the circumferences of eyes after nights of crying, the tint mistaken animals at night in the light of the bull eye, the color of the ripping apart of lives, of breaking up of families, the color of the cry of people thrown away who believe that they are nothing because they have nothing. This color would be the cup, made of one stone and he would pull it out of an invisible place and he would give it to me to drink. When I finished a long delirious pull, the tissue of my outline would fold inward, the reverse volcano, I would turn into nothing, I would now be transparent and the sun and night would filter through me, for I would be empty. Then he reached deep to the bottom of his pocket, and found under bits of paper, under instructions for things never used, under all of the useless things, he would reach deep into the very bottom of his pocket, and pull out a dirty rag to wipe my forehead. He then told me that I was my brother’s keeper. He said I would now be used to separate coffee from water, and then, be tossed aside. I knew it is what I have wanted and feared all of my life. I ran, I was but I would not look back, I was now branded, yet in a different color and I would belong to an ancient pull. I ran far from the shelterless sun of his eyes, and no shadow would come on my blistering face except his eyes, and they now seemed to have turned into a color not found anywhere in nature, faded sapphires set for dying, once they flashed on and off with hope like a neon bible by an exit of a whorehouse.

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