Zacatecas: A Review of Contemporary Word

-Il y a quelque chose que je deteste chez-toi.

Her finger was tapping my temple. She sat over me as I lay in the sheets of our bed and the only light came through the window from the street. Voices wandered past, echoing off the high faces of the buildings, entering the still air of our room as foreign music. And she lit a cigarette, striking a match that was loud as a drum, making her face dance. Then she was still, and smoke spun out from her mouth.

"There is something I hate about you," and she tapped me softly on the temple. "In there?" I said.

"Yes."

Behind the temple. There is the mechanism in there that makes the head rattle like a half-empty box of matches. I am walking across the bridge in the night, ticking softly along like a prostitute, as if I have an appointment with anyone who will have me. Across the bridge and along the quai where the dead leaves are a carpet. The lights of the boats make the trees shimmer and the faces of the buildings dance, and the silhouettes of the walking people shift across the walls to make families of shadows. This is where the words are, pronounced off the bootsteps-and I need all of it, the cold edge and the water traveling and the legs of the woman standing at the corner and the pieces in my pocket, held in the fist, that buy the wine. The Wine Generation, she says, isn't even a Generation, because you're the only member. That's alright, I say, just leaves more for me.

This is where the words come from, the red bottle on the table, the stained glass stark as an operating table, the words stitched into cheap pulp. She reads me sometimes, when I'm spent and too thirsty to drink anymore and I hand her a page and she stands by the light, eyes moving, and she doesn't understand where it comes from-it must be real, she thinks.even sadness when I'm fucking, God no, I didn't write that line, I ripped it off from the Master, M-hrhoff, wrote it down on the margin of a page as the tip of an idea because good storywriters can only hope to bake their bread out of the crumbs left by the Poets...but she sees these words and even if she knows I didn't invent them it is the handwriting that hurts, my hand that strikes the match, rattling behind the temple, traitor.

And the songs behind the temple, the pretty ones with some girl's name in the refrain, nothing but a name; and the survivor songs that sound soft or angry or minor and the name is in there too but it is never sung, it's underneath the melody and if you listen closely the melody peels away and there is nothing but the name, a simple word, and this is easy to do.

Listen.

There is noise behind the temple, more than just the rattling matches and the singing name. There is the noise of car engines whose only destination is the sound, going around and 'round, back and forth over the prairie and the hills, and the noise of crickets and cicadas eating out the hinge of darkness, and the earsplitting pierce of the sunrise that takes a puddle of night left over behind a pebble in Virginia and pulls it across the Continent to cast a pinpoint shadow on the face of the Rocky Mountains, the sound of this.

Now the breath of the ocean is a warm body atop the breath of the train and you watch out the window and see the tide coming in at the edge of the tracks and feel the flicker of rails and hinges under the seat and you don't know the difference between what you see through the glass and what you feel in your spine and we are all made like this.

There are photographs behind the temple. My face is blurred and there are white holes in my eyes because I'm holding the camera on myself. The horizon is tilted like a ship's.

There is a girl who stands on a bridge and she is as tall as the lamp post behind her because I am kneeled down, pointing my camera up at her face and a slice of the city unravels out of focus behind her and she stands in the center of the frame. Yes, she was the kind of girl you put in the center of the frame. Once we developed a roll of film and I saw that I was beginning to compose her in the foreground with flowers or bottles or architecture in relation, and when she saw this we knew we were finished, and these last photos are the only images I have of her, precious voodoo like a knife used to slay a lover, fingerprints on the glossy blade.

And something moves behind the temple that has no form and feels like black water trickling down the throat, drowning the heart and pressing its hands on the chest, wringing the spine and making the skin cold, and all of these sensations are as simple and slow as a giant cog that turns on a screw through the soul.

There is a mirror behind the temple where the man can watch his whiskers grow and watch his skin change color with the seasons and see the lines of his hands appear like ghosts around the eyes; and when the lover comes inside and sees the mirror she is startled. She sees nothing there, no reflection. It is oily black like the eye of a bird; there is nothing inside. She holds her head up and keeps her eyes low, watching as she taps the temple. Her cigarette is spent, and she stabs it out. She has been watching me the whole time, the whole cigarette.

"That's exactly what I'm talking about," she says.

* * *

(This story previously appeared in the Fall 1994 issue of Nexus.)