I fell asleep reading Flaubert. My head plopped on the desk and the book fell on the floor. It’s still there. When my head went down, I was too tired to feel the pile on the desk: loose change, paper clips, watch, pencils. Now, half awake, my eyes won’t focus. I get up, go into the bathroom, look in the mirror and shudder at how the damn scar on my cheek still looks raw, months later. But it’s more – I feel queasy, like the cheese I ate for lunch was bad, that in-a-minute-you-could-toss-em feeling. And then I have this I’m-not-supposed-to-be-here-I’m-supposed-to-be-somewhere-else gnaw in my gut. Nothing on my calendar. And the sun is glaring through the windows and Leonard Cohen is singing “Suzanne.” Where is this all going? I don’t know. I can’t swallow, like something back there is blocking the swallow, back where the tongue attaches. I think I’m not supposed to be here.
I call Dick; he doesn’t know, has no clue and insists on being chipper as a jay bird.
Then my eye fell on the ceramic penguin my sister-in-law made with its ratty black stubby wing feathers. It’s sitting there on the floor about ten feet from me. The wings look like they’ve been molding in an attic for twenty years. The tail feathers are worse; they were plucked from a baby black bird; I’m sure. The thing has white high-top sneakers with untied yellow laces. If it could walk, it would surely trip. The bird’s eyes are egg yolk slits. Its head and open orange beak are arched at an angle, cawing about some indefinable un-sated injustice, though it’s probably just my sister-in-law. I avoid touching it, though sometimes I have to move it to vacuum the rug. The surface is pebbly, like the kiln was fired too high or the color applied unevenly. I put on garden gloves.
Cohen is now singing “The Sisters of Mercy.” We weren’t lovers like that and besides it would still be all right.I’ve always wondered: like that? like what? but have been comforted by the thought that it would still be all right. One year, at the end of the season, I was sitting with Renee on a swing at the Kingsleigh Inn in Maine, looking at the sailboats in the harbor. The boat we sailed yesterday, sails now furled, was where we’d left it, left with our promise undisturbed. I remember the porch was glassed in, large unnatural-sized panes fastened between the porch columns; even so, the glass buckled when a gust of wind kicked it. We were holding hands the way we did, laced, thumbs playing on palms. We were warm from bed, and I know I started to think about what-do-we-do-from-here-that’s-not-a-comedown. The dreamy glaze that settled over her half-closed eyes made me believe she was thinking the same thing. I think she was the first to notice the gulls over the water. We counted ten of them chasing a large black raven. It was faster than the muddy brown gulls, and could break mid-flight, soar high, and dive. The gulls were clumsy, but relentless. The birds kept moving inland, closer to the porch. They dipped low, to eye level. Suddenly a sick crunching noise: the raven had smashed the window and itself. The red and black carcass slid slowly down the window to the grass. The chasing gulls wheeled and headed back out to sea.
She doesn’t know this, but years later, I was looking through a shop near Tikal in Guatemala and found a piece of sand-casted glass. Some of the local pink sand was embedded in it. The glass was about three inches square and warm in the hand; the surface, rough and pebbly. And the design was a Mayan hieroglyphic of a quetzal bird flying over waves. I remember my first thoughts: her, the raven, the water, death. I asked the shopkeeper what the hieroglyphic meant.
“Bigin ha yetel kaan hun ut om. When sky and sea are one, it will happen.”
I bought the piece of glass and slipped it into its leather pouch. When I got back to my hotel, I put it in my suitcase and went to the bar. It was a long night. After that she disappeared from my memories, crowded out by two tours in Baghdad. I forgot about that piece of glass.
A year or so after my last tour, in a bar in San Antonio, I thought about the quetzal. When I got home, I rummaged through my closet, found the suitcase, found the leather pouch, found the glass with the quetzal and waves. I was looking at it when something hit me. Emptied me out, my muscles no longer held me. I slumped to the floor and cried. I don’t know how long I was there. When I finally raised my head, I crawled out of the closet and down the hall. I spent the next two months trying to find her.
The ceramic penguin, its angled head and squawking beak, feels like an echo. The bottom half of the penguin, except for the feet, is circled by a plaster body cast that cracks open as the bird lurches forward. Birds, the memories of birds. I get up from my chair and hurl the glass quetzal against the ceramic penguin. Both shatter. Black feathers float over glass glinting red in the sunlight.
The Battered Suitcase