Secret Vespers

When I finally found my camera it was back at my table at the café, exactly where I had left it to pay. How did you know I would come back? Perhaps you returned every day, set the camera down and watched. It is such a crowded café. I suppose the owner must have been in on it, too. I can only guess.

I can tell you took all the photos on the same day. The first ones were of me, looking under the table, asking other customers who didn’t understand me. You must have been close enough I should have seen you. How do I miss the things that are most obvious?

You gave me hints: your body wrapped in a scarf, your face covered by the camera, your lips close with one finger touching, your footprints in wet sand.

A palm frond, a seagull picking at a crab shell, five customers examining a tomato, the ice cube you melted onto the ridge of your pelvis. Finally, a cliff with a hand glider diving. I had a dream like that. I have the photos now, and I only wish I knew how to see like you.

I have found the notes you hide. The first—not of your notes but of the ones I found—was stuffed in the window of a city bus. I saw it was a page from a larger work, numbered 27 and beginning in the middle of a conversation. I liked that message. Don’t we all meet in the middle of a conversation?

I know the work is at least 391 pages long. Judging by page 391 it is much, much longer. I know it has a preface, I have page xiv. I know it is divided into chapters, I can see their titles: Thunderstorm, Tokyo at Night, Broken Chair, and others that appear to be the names of characters. I do not have any consecutive pages. One name has come up twice, but so common it could mean two people. The writing is divergent, a different voice to every page, topics that leap from paragraph to paragraph: the ink of an octopus, a brother and sister racing cars, the stairwell of a downtown mall, the conversation a young woman overhears. I do not know if the pages are meant to be read consecutively or in the order that I am finding them.

Maybe I am imagining this, in fact I must be, in fact it fails more often than it succeeds, but tell me, do you work hints into each page, are they a treasure hunt? Page 72 described a pavilion in a park. I spent an afternoon searching parks and found page 219 in the second one I searched. But then, I was so sure Sunken Ship meant the naval memorial, and though I worked my fingernails into every crack of the thing, the warden thought I was crazy and there was nothing there.

No, I must be imagining it. I can’t be the only one finding these pages. I can’t be the only one they are meant for. I wonder how many people are gathering up these broken pieces of you. I wonder if we have more in common with each other than we do with you.

For just this night, I want us to forget the facts we know. I want the clock to stretch twelve midnight to thirteen, the wind to blow from a direction our compass and our plumb line cannot find.

Halloween was delivered to us, a relic in a box of ash. We burned the witches to fill it.

There is smoke on the wind. It may be chimneys, it may be sacrificial pyres, it may be the forest burning. There is a smell we call fresh but comes from the decay of leaves. There is a smell like mercury, like amnesia, the wind has blown over a lake that is cursed and it has brought a mist into our nostrils. I am happy to forget everything I can.

The world is bereft of understanding or of expectations that are sane. There is a rainbow around the moon. There are songs that summon ghosts, and songs that send them away. Your flute is made of bone. Your perfume has the bottom tone of rot and the top of apricots and sage. It does not matter what happens in an hour that does not exist. It matters more than anything what happens in an hour that does not exist.

I want us to take laurel and peyote, to touch and see each other just enough to share the hallucination. I want us to look back at the world from the other side and to kiss like it is a ceremony the spirits invented in order to feel mortal.

And if the night is over and my memory has not come back, that hour is all I want to keep.

Your window faced mine that summer, and every night we passed each other notes across the narrow alley. We were four stories above what used to be a canal. The buildings still lean in, as if they would crash together without the buttresses. The first time I saw you, you were tossing origami flowers, doves, cranes and boats from your bedroom. Once, the tides and winds would have taken them away. Instead, the tourists did.

Your first letter was a drawing of our alley raised so high it vanished in the clouds. There were zip lines between many of the ledges, flying paper birds, and the architecture of a medieval post-modern collision. My letters to you were straight-forward. I talked about the day, about ideas, plans, and my hopes. You might write for seven unpunctuated pages about what a needle wasn’t, or in technical and archeological detail about how an obscure civilization might have made bricks differently, had they just tried this or that.

I asked you questions you refused to answer. What was your name? You told me to make names up. What was your school? You told me the question was too boring. When I asked you to come out and meet, you agreed but refused to set a time. The next day, and on many others, I was sure I saw you waiting at the end of the alley, but by the time I could run down, you were gone. I was sure I saw you all around the city, your face disappearing behind a corner, a flicker of your coat, your eyes behind a mask in a water taxi I could not approach. Our spaces wove together but did not connect.

I suspect you used my letters to make those paper cranes. I wonder what a tourist would make of that, a visit to my world, and like their visit to the city, a voyeur’s dip into a stream, a vision that is honest but incomplete, or perhaps merely a reflection.

I came back to the alley. It is the same. I came to a canal and on the ledge there was a book. It can only be by you. The ISBN and the publisher are fake. So are the reviews and the names you acknowledge, the diligent editor, the spouse who stood by you all those years. I looked it up. I’m glad I have this now.