Читать книгу WASH ME ON HOME, MAMA - Pete Najarian - Страница 8

DOMINIC

We inherit space and fill it with our lives and our furniture, a long printer’s table scavenged from a bankruptcy, a bumpy sofa leftover from a grandma, flea-market lamps, garage-sale refrigerator, and scrapwood benches worn smooth and polished by everyone’s sweaty buttocks-things that will inherit everyone’s death. A cock roach crawls along the sink, ventures across the faucet, finds a precipice and retreats. How has this place come to be here, this labyrinth of pipes and wires, water and gas in and out from stone and macadam, telephone and electricity stretching from where, arteries and veins of what wanderers-? Follow the line all the way back and find the point, aperture of the primal cause.

By the road to the dump low-tide, semi-circle of a tire and the willets picking in the mud, coots and gulls in the inlet, and the tall solitary egret delicately white amid debris. And then more gulls, gulls, an apocalypse of cawing gulls as Dominic stopped at the booth and paid the little round man of faded flannel and a baseball cap, and then entered the hills of garbage covered with new grass. In fifty years five hundred acres of land, land from the refuse of our lives buried beneath what would become another city extending into the bay, every day more and more, the giant wheels of a dinosaur tractor crushing our history into water, the plaster of walls and broken concrete adding to mountains of tons of knick knacks, baby carriages, chairs, pencils … take an inventory: how many millennia did it take to shape metal and glass, conjure plastic and print words we now flip into the bay as easy as a booger of snot while the gulls screech over another desolation? And who will live on top of all our mistakes? Shove them all down into the pit under the crying frenzy of gulls and then bury them, bury them all like the flaming sunset, bury them and start all over again saving the screws, nails, hinges to build all over again believing another life will be better. And so Dominic dreamed of a small comer of the universe where he could start. He wandered to the side and with a scar between his eyes examined bits and pieces of metal and wood that might be useful. Waste nothing. Work hard, struggle and fight. Like a beaver, his life of work and more work. Post-scarcity gatherer who would build a future with leftovers, a vision of not anywhere he knew but had to believe in, Carbuncle, he would call his new home Carbuncle, in memory of Marx’s boils, pus and rage against the beast he had grown to hate as he hated his past and all the shitheads wallowing in money. Like a beaver he never stopped moving, munching twigs and bark and building dams as if he could hold back just for a moment the flow of pain. All the fights, all the marches, all the cheap wine and coffee and cigarettes and nights after nights of endless strategy, and still it was not enough. But it was done, and now he would be quiet and work in silence, step by step like Lenin retreating to a library to figure things out. His library would be a little garrison in the middle of the city. A fort. One fort leading to another until thousands of forts lay across the wilderness. Soon there would be a bee-hive, a printing press, a kiln, a studio, crocks of beer, tools, wood, clothes, furniture, food, food for everyone, always. In mounds of wattle where the nibbling beavers would settle cozily into each other and get drunk by a warm hearth. And all the bits and pieces of our lives would fill a city of man like a vast alchemy of dream-stuff and play.

But Naomi has another passion. Each of my people has a different passion. She met Dominic in People’s Park when the park first began and they dug and planted, she for the plants and he for the park. That seemed like a long time ago. Their romance. And when they first moved in here they shared the same room. But she sleeps alone now. ‘She’s been sleeping alone since he returned from the mountains. But then again she’s slept alone most of her life. And in the morning she hurries to the garden. She’s in the garden most of the time.