Foreign Son

These people who jumped, we all should love. Man, they flew didn’t they? Awkward silhouettes against all that autumn blue. They rhymed like Muddy’s piano keys. Cartwheels going nowhere but down.

You were horrified watching it on TV, making allusions to big movie screens. You thought you were clever. You thought you had insight. You probably did except that you were already taking it all in on a screen. Not much of a leap to make, for you. They did. They leaped out, away from excruciating heat, blinding waves muffled by smoke collecting from the ceilings. This we know. This we’ve been told.

We were also told of the horror, briefly, momentarily, and then the heroism of people risking their lives for all those others. We had plenty of images of their grieving families and the pictures they posted on the makeshift walls around the rubble. Whitewashed sides. They stopped showing the footage of bodies falling from the skies, except, in China where these images were the ones repeated most often. We shuddered to think—no we stopped to think. That was our mistake.

Those people who flew, who jumped to fly, are heroes. More. They were flying for us. They were proving to us. Stop to think. If you were about to die on the 85th floor, how would you want to go? Engulfed in heat and fumes or by taking that leap, flying for once in your life, flying without cause, flying for nothing else but the hard brush of air against your face.

* * *

He wasn’t born American. He became one. Now he was becoming something else.

There was a man who came off a big boat, with brown suitcases and swatches of dirty cloth hanging between steel clasps. He had saved his jacket for the arrival to America’s shores. It was the jacket he wore when his son was baptized. It was the jacket he wore to his daughter’s wedding. It was a fine jacket made by the old tailor who lived up the road in his mountain home. He hadn’t gotten along with the other Italians that had come over with him. They were criminals and misfits. He had a brother who already lived in New York. He had a place to stay. He even had paperwork that he dutifully completed in the American embassy in Rome. He wasn’t coming to America to escape mistakes or hardships. He was coming to America to do business. He was Sammy’s grandfather.

But he wasn’t. all those immigrant stories told so many times and in so many different ways, especially the Italian ones. “I believe in America,” or so said the mortician who stood before the Don in Coppola’s Godfather. Sammy believed in America too. He believed even more in California where he had lived since he was nine years old. It was home. He grew up skateboarding and listening to punk. He had computers and video games and watched the Simpsons and understood all the humor. He voted although his vote was cast for the losing party. He still believed in America but it was getting harder.

* * *

Blazing spectrums of light were the offshoots of the armies in which he’d fought, living the life of a soldier who wore no uniform but who always had a piece of chocolate in his pocket. There were sweet conditions associated with killing someone. You could dig a knife into the flesh and, when you did, you were amazed ho easily it slipped in.

The magnitude of magnetism, he said as he poked his cigarette into the empty ashtray that lay on the room’s back table. He’d sit there for hours. He’d doodle in his notebooks. He’d drink his beer. He’d watch the other people come and go. He’d light a match and let it burn all the way down spellbound by the changing colors and wondering about the chemistry of flame and sulphur. Hell was a place he’d known and he was confident he’d know it well again. You’d have to be a rocket scientist to explain the way out of a hundred deals gone bad, you’d have to be a magician to conjure the images that would give him a blessing. He could sit in a church and he often did. He liked the smell of the places. He liked the way people kept quit in there, kept to themselves, just them and their God. He’d sit in the biggest ones he could find, even making the walk across the bridge to go inside ole’ St. Peter’s whose cavernous marble, whose splendid figurines whose gold and bronze and wealth, just filling the fucking place. He’d go in there and he’d find a pew in one of the side chapels and he’d sit there and pray. He’d pray for hours. He’d pray for all the fucking souls he delivered. He’d pray for all the desperation that he had caused. He’d pray for everything and anything except himself.

Blighted whispers, that’s what he thought when he conceived of his place in the world. He’d been wiped clean. There was an image, one from his childhood, where he stood on the stage of a small church recreation room and sang a solo for the Christmas crowd. His mother was there, with her boyfriend, a college student ten years short of herself. He can’t recall the sounds but the images are clear. He can see that the boyfriend kneeled while his mother sat. Can’t remain in the widest images of the self when there are rainbows that cross the nighttime sky, glistening colors that have nothing against the nighttime sky who see not black but blue, the silent reflections of the water, the earthen womb, rocking back and forth, the tides silent peace, slipping up a deserted beach. That’s where he’d like to be. He’d like to be in the break, pushing his surfboard under the foam, letting the buoyancy of his body and the fiberglass make their way into a new set, into a new dream. Sammy couldn’t remember. He couldn’t no matter how many times he tried. He couldn’t remember what songs he sang in that church so long ago. They were just images. No sound. The sounds were erased. There was only silence. Only silence.

There had been all kinds of waking moments, when he’d set his head askew, when he’d wipe his forehead and notice that his hair was receding, that he wasn’t a boy but a man—someone who made things, who provided things, countless things, things, things, things. He had no recipients. There were none around him that could weather his charms. The only blessing he had was that damn silence. Silence.

He used to skate as well as surf. That he remembered. He remembered riding his plank along the concrete and glass mortuaries that housed computers and codes. That was Silicon Valley. He grew up there. He use to break into the Montague mansion and once fell three stories to the soggy grass, looked to his right and saw a sprinkler head inches away. He survived the fall.

* * *

That pigeon just wouldn’t fly again. Broken wings, crushed beak. Nothing anyone could do to make that bird fly again. He’d keep the feathers in his pocket until noon and then place them beside his sandwich while he ate, sometimes pushing them across plastic table top with his fingers while he picked through his chips or took a swallow from his drink. He’d put them back in his pocket when he finished. It wasn’t like they were a treasure. He didn’t really treat them carefully and he wasn’t upset when some of the vanes broke free from the quill. He thought sometimes he was much the same and there wasn’t much to do for him either, with his broken wings and his crushed beak. Yet, for a man, there are always things to do. There are always just a few more sunrises to let light up even if your own are as blank and hollow as a winter moon.

But that thing in his throat, that ragged little stone. Shit, it wouldn’t leave him alone. It was as if they just hadn’t smashed his beak in far enough. They just hadn’t torn apart his face with enough rage to get at the root of the problem. Or, that’s at least how he felt from time to time.

He’d be making time now. He’d be building a bridge to that far off place where he could dream all he liked and where the music would deliver melodies that always kept his foot pounding against the floorboards. He wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t It was a good place to be. There’d e the people he knew and a few others he’d meet. There’d be piles of food, the pastas his grandmother makes and the barbeque his brother would keep running hot. There’s be a good supply of wine and beer and people would smoke and rink and eat far too much. Yeah, it would be a party. That’s what he needed. One pf those parties. One of those festivities around the crystal and calm blue of a backyard swimming pool. People wearing their blue jeans and t-shirts, their new runners. Nah. It wouldn’t be that casual. People will have spent time getting ready, picking out the right dress, frilly pink things with Italian cuts to show that best curve, or thick white canvas sailing trunks with docksides and machine-made tans. The glasses would be heavy and clear, with perfect squares of ice and expensive scotch and gin. There’d be caterers dressed in black and white and a man who he’d pay at the end of the night. But he looks down and he sees the cigarette stains in his hotel room, and he knows it will be nothing like that.

The memory game. Next stop. Rolling green hills and knee-deep pastures, turds the size of televisions and mosses dressed like satin. His mother is there, pulling cookies from the top shelf of a brand-new oven that’s precariously sitting out in the front yard. He scans its base for electricity and gas but only sees the tails of wires and pipes, empty and square.

Dorian LaGuardia