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a
riverine landscape, suspended for a time over the cragged Atlantic, and then
tracking the waterways, up the Hudson River Valley as far as Albany, following
the nap of western New York along the Susquehanna, up to Buffalo with the snows
and then another slow plunge across wide waters, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, Lake
Huron, and the dash across the state of Michigan to Lake Michigan before
beginning its final descent into her city, her Chicagoland, her home, where at
any time she might wake from uneasy dreams to find another letter neatly folded
and sealed in its envelope, another missive from across the sea, from the
country of death. Under her nightstand blank paper, a sheaf
of envelopes. Tucked into an old day planner, a
ballpoint pen taken from the Grand Hyatt on Wacker Drive. In her office, squat and ugly on its stand, the inkjet. In
the basement, by the disused sewing machine, an old Selectric that makes a
droning hum when switched on. It is a strangely soothing sound. If she finds
herself in the basement among the unfinished dresses and tatty tablecloths and
cardboard boxes unpacked from law school days, she might idly switch it on and
listen for a while to the urgent whir of analog machinery, while the little
planet of the ball waits for a keystroke to call it into action, almost faster
than the eye can track. To make its mark. Eyes inward. A call or cry from upstairs so she leaves it
running, it stays on for hours, until her husband comes home that night through
the garage, stops wearily and warily for a moment at the urgent familiar hum;
then silently, without imprecation, reaches down and pulls the plug.
    Like a sightseeing bus pushing slowly through inundated streets. That’s
how he moves, deliberately, lugubriously, like someone who has rehearsed this
path a hundred times before without any appetite for the destination. Yet
there’s something or someone that he carries with him for whom it’s all new,
and so once again he patiently treads past the cathedrals and plaques and
statues and fountains and squares and shops, pausing occasionally to discharge
or take on some other passenger seeking novelty, a shade of distraction,
something to photograph for the express purpose of forgetting all about it. As though tourist and guide were one. The guide remembers
for the tourist, but if he too has forgotten all about it he has a script he
can follow in one of several languages, and if this script has been repeated
often enough he’s free to think about other things, to daydream or worry or
remember scenes from his own life, his own history, forever unnarrated except
by himself to himself: a native to this place, let’s call him Marco, thinking
there’s the flower shop where I bought her roses when they were out of those
magenta daisies she likes, and she laughed at me, with real scorn I thought,
for my unoriginality; there’s the auto shop where Hector works, who never looks
me in the face any more since I saw him one night with his trousers down in the
alley behind the bar with another bloke kneeling in front of him, and Hector’s
eyes were closed and he opened them and saw me seeing him, but all he did was
close his eyes again; there’s the school where the nuns beat me black and blue
but mostly black, black around the bone, until I thought I was becoming a nun
myself; there’s the office building where my sister was a secretary for just
one little month to that bastard she married before he knocked her up with
twins and knocked her down when he was drinking and then took her and the twins
(Luis and Ramona) away forever to some fucking Spanish island, where they’ve
never invited me to so much as visit; and all the time this secret narrative is
unfolding, or jigsawing, through his mind there’s another narrative coupled to
it: the history of the city, the layers of centuries peeling and disclosed to
the bored, avid ears of the picture-snapping listeners on the upper deck, above
it all, while all around them