SPEAKING PICTURE

—I fear that old line about Vegas has finally seeped into this event, said Jack as he popped another piece of Nicorette gum in his mouth.

—What’s that? asked Ray as he watched a desultory parade of what passed for hipsters wend its way past them.

—Las Vegas is the only place where you can have a good time without actually enjoying yourself, said Jack. He smiled without mirth, his eyes doubtless rimmed in red behind his smoky-dark prescription sunglasses.

—Attributed to Jack Carter, I believe, said Ray.

­—Well, it’s Jack Samson’s now, replied Jack with a smack.

They were standing on the corner, just down the block from the Sugar Shack antique store. The sun was going down, and the light glinted off Jack’s glasses while Ray shielded his eyes and looked up the street. It was the monthly gallery crawl, which more or less functioned as the monthly see and be seen, drink free wine while ignoring the art, wander in and out of the bars, get drunk by the time the bands go on, wake with a hangover crawl as well. Vendors had set up booths of various kinds up and down the streets, but the scattered clots of crawlers didn’t stop at most of them long enough to register whatever (beaded purses, scrap-metal sculptures, self-published thrillers) was for sale. In other words, not much had changed since the last time Ray had been in town, except for new names on the galleries, new studios in place of those who’d given up the art ghost and moved on, new bands reconfigured from old ones, now playing in the same dozen bars (only the DJs seemed eternal).

Still, Ray felt obliged to check in whenever he was here, if for no other reason than to say hello to old friends (well, old acquaintances, mostly). Jack, who by now had nothing but scorn for the ‘farts district,’ would only indulge him for so long before pulling him away for drinks at the Chimera (the only bar downtown that steadfastly refused both video poker and live music, thus endearing it to Jack, who reviewed concerts for a living and didn’t need, as he put it, to watch shitheads stumble around four chords on his nights off). Then again, Jack still lived here. Ray was just a visitor these days.

—Can you believe somebody put hours and hours of their time into that?

Ray knew it was a rhetorical question, but he turned to look anyway and followed Jack’s gaze through the windows of a little storefront gallery where huge abstract canvases slathered in paint simultaneously drew the eye in and spit it out. Jack shook his head.

—At least a mediocre guitar player in a bar band might get laid for his troubles, said Jack.

—You’d be surprised how easily painters get laid, said Ray.

—That’s only because you used to sleep with one.

—True, said Ray. But it wasn’t exactly easy.

Jack looked up the avenue, where the galleries were mixed with Mexican furniture stores; a giant, plaster head of David sat out on the sidewalk, glancing back at Ray and Jack with a what looked like a look of desperate, befuddled hope and dawning resignation.

—Is that replica of David still inside Caesars? asked Ray.

—Christ, who knows. I haven’t been inside that part of Caesars in years. I wouldn’t even have been in the Forum addition yet if I hadn’t been lingerie shopping for Delia.

—One more round, Delia’s gone, one more round, sang Ray in a low voice.

—She’ll be back, said Jack with a shrug. And wearing the lingerie, too.

Ray very much doubted that Delia would be back, but if she did reappear in Jack’s life it was likely to be without a dime and on the run from somebody; she likely wouldn’t have anything left but the fancy lingerie. But that was Jack’s way of keeping himself intact—he dated crazy and used crazy as an excuse not to get too close. That much hadn’t changed.

—Listen, said Ray, we should just go over to the Bomb and see what Nadia has up on the walls and then we can go hit the Chimera.

—Ah, said Jack with a smile, I forgot to tell you: the Bomb is gone.

—What? Really? How is that possible? When did it close?

—Oh, it didn’t close—just moved. Nadia moved it to LA. Said the market had gone from soft to melted here. Jack jerked his thumb at a crowd of teenagers making noise in front of one of the booths. Can you blame her? Look at who shows up now—the same, tired, hundred art mavens and a ton of broke-ass kids who just want to have something to do.

­—Well, sure, said Ray. If this had existed when we were in high school, we would have been hanging out here. But Jack wasn’t listening; he’d launched into an air guitar version of “I Just Want to Have Something to Do,” his arms slung low like Dee Dee Ramone as he fingered imaginary bass frets.

—Toooo night... to-oo-night... well, all riiiiiiiiiiiiight....

—Hey, Ray! called a voice. In the setting sun, a t-shirted mass approached. Ray looked up into the bug eyes of The Mann. Inevitably, he saw The Mann whenever he was in town; inevitably, the conversation went like this:

­—How’s tricks, Ray?

—Well, you know, I gotta get a bigger hat.

­—Hah! Again? But that trick never works! Hah!

­­—That joke isn’t funny anymore, sang Jack under his breath.

­—You still with the station, Mann?

­—You know it, somebody has to teach the children about rock n’ roll. Hey, I want you to meet someone. Someone stepped out of the bulk that was Nicholas Mann; a tiny woman about their age, with a black pixie cut and trendy glasses.

—This is Angelica, my girl, said Mann. You won’t believe this, but she went to Western same time as me, and we didn’t know each other at all—not at all! And then we met here!

—Here? said Jack. On the corner? I thought the girls worked farther east.

—Hah hah! Hey, this is Ray Sands, the magician.

Angelica gave out a little squeal. —I used to take my kids to that afternoon show you had, years and years ago!

Ray smiled and assumed the face he was long used to assuming, but Jack gave a short little laugh. —That was almost twenty years ago. Pop out a couple with your high school sweetheart, did you?

—Hah! Angie, this is Jack Samson.

—No way! Of Samson’s Army?

Jack winced a little. —No, no. Different Samson. Completely different Samson.

—I loved Samson’s Army! burbled Angelica. I’m older than I look, hah?

—You look perfect to me! said Mann, giving her a squeeze. Jack used to be a DJ with me, back in the day.

—I was never ‘with’ you, Mann, said Jack. I only orbited you. Whenever I got to the far side, I played a few records before gravity shot me back around.

Mann laughed in the way of someone so used to being big it barely registers. But Ray remembered Mann at nineteen, crying over an empty bottle of vodka at a party, his thick legs somehow stuffed through the bars of an apartment balcony, after a good half-hour of jokes at his expense. Mann didn’t lose his virginity until years later, when his impeccable geek credentials at long last outweighed his literal weight during the improbable rise of geek chic in the 1990s. Mann found his groove and had worked it, Ray thought to himself, into a nice, deep, comfortable trench from which he could laugh off anything.

­—Hey, you guys should come to the show, said Mann, completing the encounter in the only way an encounter with him could end, with a flier in your hand. These guys are from Portland, and they’re really awesome, like Yo La Tengo meets Animal Collective.

—Sorry, Mann, said Jack, but we’re going to have a really awesome evening where bourbon meets my tongue.

They exchanged good-byes, nice to meet you’s, nothing up my sleeve, prestos. As they disappeared into the milling crowd, Jack cackled.

—There goes a Mann, he said. How does he manage to push forty and still be like that?

­—He’s happy, said Ray, simply, staring after Mann’s bulk, his girlfriend like a toy poodle under his arm. Jack snorted.

—Everything changes, nothing changes. Two steps forward, five steps back. All these artsy bars and attempts at galleries, and the Shangri-La Telegraph Office is still an empty lot, a bulldozed fucking lot. And Mann’s happy as a big, loud, clueless clam.

Ray smiled without looking at Jack. —And you’re still here, he said.

Jack didn’t look at him either. —And you still keep coming back, even though you’ll never work this town again.

—Well, said Ray, as he turned and began walking down the sidewalk, toward David’s empty, bewildered eyes (bewildered at their emptiness? Or empty because bewildered?) You can only disappear so many times.

­—Or just the once, said Jack, spitting out his gum.

Cross wondered, often, if his heart was black because it was charred or black because the poison had done its slow, relentless work. He didn't like to think it was only black from all the ink, but in the moments of honesty that piled up, week to week, like newspapers on the porch of a haunted house, he had to admit the possibility.

Why was he so reluctant, so resistant? Because that would mean it was all still a state of being mediated by words and nothing more, Cross replied to the mirror that refused to show him anything but his own reflection. Cross didn't want to feel literary (isn't that why nothing would come of late, no work, no matter how insistent its tapping at his--ah, can't resist--chamber door?). But Cross didn't want to feel literal, either: as if something really had been altered, fundamentally, and wasn't just a hostage to the time that healed all wounds... except the wound made by time itself.

Cross kicked himself now and then, like Dr. Johnson kicking that stone, and refuted his own sense of abstraction. He didn't want to only be alive in words, but he didn't want to be dead to them... Thinking of Johnson made him think of Beckett, of course. Language was indeed a veil, and he was tired of veils, tired of the perfect logic and reasonableness of veils, the Grand Unified Theory that was a veil upon a veil upon a veil...

One must speak through a mask, through a persona. Was that Yeats? Cross could have looked it up, typing the words into the magic window that seemed to bring all of existence to him while simultaneously holding it at bay. Instead, Cross looked out again through the mundane window, the one that gathered darkening blue in the still bare branches of the tree outside, and the sounds of cars hissing by the reservoir that was now too black to admit any light. Language seems a poor revenge, thought Cross, but he'd had that thought before. Thousands had that thought before; hadn't done them a bit of good either.

Cross looked at the scattered thoughts in his notebook, trying to move forward while something within (surely not his heart, whatever it's real color) just as insistently held him back. Seriousness is often mistaken for pretentiousness, the way you mistake the face of a distant figure for a mask when it is indeed their face, their only face. Cross looked out the window again, and sat still for a while. He had only to switch on the light to see his own face, strange and comforting, peering back at him from the oncoming night.

Whenever Cross took the A train out to JFK, he couldn’t help but look out the window at Aqueduct and think, I should come out here some time during the season. The thought had the character of something that would never be acted on, but it also had the urgency of something that sooner or later would happen. But why, Cross wondered. He hadn’t been at a race track since the age of twelve. That’s why, a voice answered back.

When Cross was around eight or so, his father bought several thoroughbreds. These horses existed at some remove from East Lansing, housed at tracks in the suburbs of Detroit, and maintained by a series of trainers who loomed in Cross’ imagination like archetypes of desperation and failure: Denny, in his John Deere cap, who radiated haplessness in his eyes and speech; Larry, dark-haired, tanned as his stylish leather coat, who seemed ready to hustle you even if all you were talking about was the weather; Butch, bullet-headed and bearded, who seemed to live for the moment when the day’s work was done and the neck of a Southern Comfort bottle would widen to swallow him whole; Spider, with his cowboy hat and Kung-Fu mustache, his snowy white husky and his guitar, who seemed as kindly and gentle as a philosopher, right up to the day he loaded his pick-up with hundreds of dollars worth of tack and disappeared without so much as a note.

After this roll call of incompetence and drama, which unfolded alongside the expansion of the stable until over thirty thoroughbreds now patiently munched their hay awaiting their chance to come in fourth or fifth at Hazel Park or Detroit Race Course, Cross’ father decided that he was overdue for a mid-life crisis, and dispensed with the services of trainers altogether, along with his twenty years as a real estate broker. His father would become an owner/trainer, and make his living on the purses. Cross’ mother looked askance at this, naturally, but it was the price she paid to finally leave Michigan and its winters behind; six months after the decision, Cross looked up from his comics or Micronauts, spread out on a table in the club house, and saw the decrepitude that was Jefferson Downs, just outside of New Orleans.

The rest unfolded more or less according to the script for this sort of thing: near bankruptcy, separation, reconciliation, the move west, the return to real estate. But even by the time Cross was in high school, his father insisted on retaining horses, and bought a ranch house off of Las Vegas Boulevard South, in the days before housing developments swallowed up such ranches. For several more years, as his father tried to raise thoroughbreds that would never race (the desert not being conducive to breeding), Cross looked across the lawn into the eyes of a half-dozen doleful mares, each of them twitching their ears as if they could hear his mother’s litany of complaints as the cost for what was now a ruinously expensive hobby mounted.

Eventually it did stop, as all things do. The horses were sold, and then the ranch. By then his father would no longer have recognized the fact that he had ever owned horses—he might not have been able to tell you what the word horse signified. For Cross, horse signified nothing so much as familial unhappiness and strife. For a long time. Cross cultivated a studied dislike of horses.

This hadn’t been the case when he was a child. Though he was mostly ambivalent about them, there was a certain excitement when horses first appeared in his life. He’d had his own horse, a tame Arabian that he would occasionally ride around the stables when he wasn’t helping muck out stalls, a task that taught him how to breathe through his mouth for hours on end (there was nothing as sinus-opening as fresh horse piss, thought Cross). He was fascinated by the oddball names that thoroughbreds acquired, and often listed them in his mind or spoke them aloud like a chant: Royal Perfecto, Canadian Jeff, Wee-Ette, Hairbreadth Harry, Queen’s Hand (a mean one, that last, always ready to bite if you walked to close to her stall). Cross remembered trying to sketch them—he was always drawing in those days, how he wished he hadn’t stopped—remembered studying Wee-Ette for what seemed like hours...

Even during the races, Cross would set his fantasy world aside long enough to study the racing form. He remembered his mother patiently teaching him how to handicap, and the joy when the $2 bet his mother had put down on his recommendation came through... that was a chant, too: trifecta, perfecta, exatca... (How many times could that have happened? It seemed to Cross he’d won more than once, but that couldn’t be right, could it? Would he recall any of that if he looked at a racing form?) He remembered, too, those times in the winner’s circle, the breathless run down from the club house, the smell of sweat, the jockey’s grimy face above his silks, the quick arrangement of people and horse just before the photographer’s flash... He wasn’t there for it, but he remembered too when Hairbreadth Harry dropped dead of a heart attack after winning a race, the halter twisting in his father’s hand, the jockey giving out a startled yelp as the animal sank suddenly to its knees... Cross always wished it had happened as the photographer released the shutter, so there would be proof to correspond to his mind’s-eye memory.

Poor Harry. Cross always thought of that when he thought of his father’s passion. But that was what most rankled Cross, what made him feel most ambivalent about these memories: was it his father’s passion? It was something Cross had never been able to figure out: did his father really love horses? Of was it all of a piece with his father’s persistent, pathetic ambition: to be a big shot? Didn’t his father ultimately care more about being the sort of man who owned and raced thoroughbreds (and was known to do so), then he did about the horses themselves? Who cared more about purses and stud fees than a love for animals?

Cross wanted to give his father the benefit of the doubt. He pictured his father brushing one of them after a workout, remembered the way the horse’s flesh would shudder and twitch a little, the way the horse’s eyes would take on that sleepy, patient, satisfied look of a dreamer. Horses always seemed a little dreamy to Cross, and the rituals they would endure in order for a little feed and peace always gave him a twinge. Cross readily understood that deep connection, forged over centuries, between humans and horses—that strange intimacy born of mutual need and respect—even if he didn’t feel the pull much. But wasn’t the reason he didn’t feel the pull was the image of his father’s face: impatient, full of the concentration on the task at hand but little else. Surely his father felt some sort of connection. Surely the only time he smiled couldn’t have been in the winner’s circle.

Well, what if it was. They were all dead, his father and those horses, all run off over distant hills. The last time Cross had felt anything while in the presence of a horse was during a hike near Lake Mead, when they’d come across three wild horses that didn’t run off, but shadowed them as they walked, always keeping a hundred yards between Cross and his friends whenever they moved toward them. That was a little magical. But to spend a day at Aqueduct wouldn’t be about horses, and it certainly wouldn’t be about gambling—it would be an attempt to reconnect with an atmosphere that said father . You might as well crack open a bottle of Old Spice, reflected Cross, for a sense memory that at once meant so much and really meant nothing at all.

Besides, who among his friends could he convince to go to the track anyway? He certainly couldn’t go alone... Cross turned away from the window and thought he could always present it as a lark: a retro, boozy, Runyonesque day at the races... His father would have been 75 yesterday, thought Cross as the train lurched and swayed. Cross was now the same age as his father had been when he heard the Call to Post, but Cross had long ago given up on being a big shot... What did it matter, the nature of his father’s pleasure? What did it matter what horses had meant to his father? It had meant something, after all. When, Cross wondered, would he stop sitting in judgment of the dead?

Ah, but when does anyone stop sitting in judgment of the dead. What was paternity but the long, arduous fitting for robes of those who will ascend the bench in the court of memory and love?

Perhaps Cross would go the track alone after all, one day in the spring, if for nothing more than the pleasure of making a bet, and tearing up the losing ticket as the rumble of hoofs faded, and scattering its pieces to the wind with a deep and knowing sigh.

Cross had crossed over. He wasn’t sure what the Brooklyn initiation rite consisted of—a slice of overpriced cheesecake at Junior’s? But he was content with the move. He was more content that he had crossed over from a year of sorrow and confusion to a year full of promise and... well, confusion, he supposed. Cross sought to maintain a sanguine attitude, but it was difficult, especially as the Great Recession seemed to deepen with every passing day, like white cotton infused with a dark, purpling dye.

But there will always be woe and worry of woe, thought Cross. The new year was a fresh page—or, to be current, a blank screen; a blank screen that wasn’t an arbitrary division of seasons and revolutions around the sun. It was waiting, in the hum of light from his laptop, waiting to be inscribed with whatever light managed to slip through the cracks of his mundane concerns (though how to survive the spiraling downturn didn’t seem so mundane to Cross). Cross also had the suspicion that precisely those concerns would soon eclipse what really mattered, and that he was going to have to fight for the light.

And here it was, Twelfth Night, the Feast of Epiphany (how Cross loved those words, even though he wouldn’t have known the proper Christian rituals that went with them even if the epiphany itself had smacked his leaden brow), the new year nearly a week gone, and Cross was on some level exhausted. He felt exhausted by all he needed to do, all he planned to do, all he wanted. He might chalk it up to winter ennui, but he knew it was more than that, though how much more he didn’t want to guess.

It was the enormity of the task—the enormity of analyzing, revisiting, investigating what had happened to him during his long spell in limbo. Thoughts of it consumed him, especially while he explored his new neighborhood’s cold, trash-strewn streets—consumed him, that is, until he felt his chest tighten and he filed them away. Save it for when you’re at your desk, he told himself. But at his desk he only stared numbly at his memories.

There were new and marvelous diversions, of course, and Cross was very grateful for them. But he wondered how and when he would get down to work before his paying work began and drained some of his energies. Perhaps he was being too hard on himself; after all, he thought, you don’t fully recover on any timetable but Time’s. But so much of it had already been lost...

When Cross was eight or so, he’d gone away not to summer camp but to a winter camp, somewhere in Michigan. It was a collection of musty cabins in snowy clearing, high up in the hills. His father had volunteered to be one of the camp counselors, but Cross had dodged the bullet of being assigned to his father’s cabin. There were hikes and winter sports, and a memorable afternoon spent in a dry lake called the Devil’s Bowl, whose sides were smooth with packed snow, and no sled was needed to slide right to the bottom, dodging stray, straggly trees all the way down.

There was also a day allotted to cross-country skiing. Cross was unathletic, and hopelessly uncoordinated, but there was no way out of it. He strapped on the skis and grabbed hold of each pole as if they were levers to some invisible machine that needed constant stoking. But Cross’ movements were so ungainly that he moved like a long distance runner going all out at the bottom of a pool. Within minutes, he had fallen far behind the others; soon, he couldn’t see them at all. Breathing hard, frustrated, Cross might as well have been Sisyphus, rolling his rock endlessly up the mountain—except that Cross himself, his body that was not trained to respond like this, that never failed to betray him in physical exertion, was the rock.

By the time he’d reached the camp, the jokes were waiting: Cross can’t cross, Cross can’t cross. His anger at having to participate in something he cared nothing for and had no talent in was acute.

That’s how Cross sometimes felt these days—not angry, no... But he felt as if his limbs were encased in a snowsuit, his feet strapped to devices that made it hard to move, his arms working grimly and futilely at trying to move himself forward, to steer himself through the white expanse of bare trees that was the winter of his mind.

A dear friend of his had recently asked him what was it he wished for, what was it he wanted... Cross was at a loss. His wish list ran to several heavy volumes, each without an index. As for what he wanted... well, he wanted what he always wanted: to step upon the stage and play the part that he had been born (and so long understudied) to play... whatever that part was. And he wanted to come to the last act and find Viola, her disguise cast aside. But no one ever sees the day to day of the happy marriages that Shakespeare contrives to resolve each comedy. Like an old-fashioned movie, there is always a fade-out after the kiss... Cross suspected that he needed to play his part, now that the pandemonium shadow show of his long limbo had closed, and just let the kisses and the fade-outs sort themselves out.

Cross wanted to be one of those people who had no use for nostalgia, but he was more or less born nostalgic. It was somehow part of his genetic make-up, and thus he wasn’t so disgusted with himself whenever he indulged. Besides, memory was so important to Cross—so utterly crucial to who he was, what he did, how he saw the world—that he always expected nostalgia’s warm, syrupy glow to creep into the acts of remembrance that made up the texture of the present. He had long ago given in to nostalgia for a past that was vanishing before he was born; not a small step to give in, at least a little, to nostalgia for the past he moved through, helpless as a shark in deep blue waters.

Incipient middle-age didn’t help. Lately, voices out of his past, voices twenty or fifteen years removed, had come to echo around the chambers of Cyberia. The World Wide Web was a perfect trap for the ephemera of the past, if anyone cared to throw it out there (and many did). The ability to digitize and post old photos now meant that everyone could sit on a vast virtual couch on a melancholy evening, perhaps a little tipsy, and turn the leaves of a rarely visited album, and hear the running commentary of their friends and comrades, as if everyone you’d ever known was somehow home for the holiday and looking over your shoulder...

Not everyone. Many resisted the online life—they were the wise ones, and often Cross wished that back around 1995 or so he’d made some different choices. But having crossed that Rubicon, giddy, thoughtless, amazed, Cross felt the virtual life was something to be managed now, not dispensed with entirely. He’d briefly tried, and only felt like a hermit with the benefit of spiritual enlightenment. You’d need to go off the grid completely, and that wasn’t Cross anymore than the sort of person for whom only the future is real.

But more than the refuseniks, Cross now felt the pull of absent friends keenly. More so, now that they rose, just as luminous and unreal as any spectral presence, from Flickr accounts and Facebook albums. The dead came to you in your dreams—Cross often thought of the afterlife, of the idea of Heaven itself, as basically an explanation for dreams—but now they popped up in your inbox as well, part of daily routine. Even if you limited your time online to a sensible hour or so, they would come at you, daily.

Cross wasn’t so disturbed by this. He was pleased to see that, while death had indeed undone so many (and only add to the legions as he and everyone ages), their images made them more present than ever, especially as they multiplied beyond whatever collection of photos Cross had and now came from every direction of acquaintance. He was simply, purely happy to see these absent friends, even if every memory was suffused with... well, with what? Not regret. Well, sometimes regret. Not pain, for a decade will do its work, leaving pain’s memory where pain once glowered like a spreading bruise.

No, more like an Alas, that poetic anachronism now supplanted by Oh, Well or (if you weren’t feeling warm or fuzzy) Whatever. Living with ghosts, even happily, even in dreams or reminisces, was an Alas to the infinite power, a thumbing of one’s nose at eternity.

Which—alas—is the only thing you can do to eternity, mused Cross.