We were once a thievery corporation; we were midnight marauders, kicking back cocktails into the gloaming. We practiced trembling, repeated the phrase, do you think we can get in? like mantra, like prayer, until we passed the identification check — our collective shuddering!!! — and made our way inside. We practiced ambivalence, cast our first votes, fretted, vivisected our first loves as if they were the complete and utter beginning and end, and who knew what our major was anyway because we had endured the recession of ‘91, saw a president swigging sax, and believed a man when he told us that greed was good. We were hopeful, arrogant, and terribly naive. We were wet behind the ears and earnest and brave, and felt that the world was big enough to fit all of us in it.
I remember my first interview wearing that navy blue suit, those sensible shoes, and carrying that resume on bond paper. How we sent thank-you letters, typewritten, via post. How we waited for the phone to ring. How there was silence, plenty of it, because we hadn’t yet possessed all the homing devices that kept beating.
This internet was suspect. Who wanted a black screen when there was a pink, unfurling sky? We were once our own postcards.
Today, a small boy clutches my hand. Frightened, he points to the unknown and whispers, there’s a monster. I’m good at that, I think, snuffing out monsters. It’s been my life’s work. So I stomp and hiss and growl until he’s satisfied; he returns to his apple juice, and I still stare out into the patches of dark between the buildings. Because I’m an adult and I know that monsters are still there.
There is white in my hair that keeps returning like sermon, like song, no matter how many hours I sit in front of a mirror, patient, yanking them all out. There is a silence when I say the word Jonestown, because although everyone’s heard of the phrase, drinking the koolaid, they’re not quite sure from where it’s come.
Now, we get in. Easily. We sometimes thank the gentlemen at the door who indulge us our egos, ask for our identification. Tell us we don’t look a day over legal.
We watch the fresh-faced emerge from college, grammar-less and entitled. Back then we filed folders and earned our way into the deal room. Now we’re twenty-three, thinking that six figures is not quite enough.
The boy tells me that the monsters are still there.
Time. Tic, tic, tic. I’m fearful of the things that time brings, so I watch clocks. I hawk the heartbeat tick, keeping time, witnessing it pass me by. Bear witness to the circles under my eyes darken like solemn moons. The birthdays that pass, uncelebrated. Lines simmering beneath the surface of skin, threatening to break through and spider. Our whole face will soon become a map of what has been traveled, what has been endured.
Sometimes I think we are geography, but I’ve never been good at sorting out continents.
Lately we spit out miniature alarm clocks. Cut me open and you’ll find… There are children here, not my children, which puts me to thinking that this body that is a dark house — is it all lights out? This heart, all cobwebbed and victrola, churning out old movies — is it last call? There were once drive-ins. A thunderous, tremulous body wracked with a word that smothered us. That word being love.
There will be a time when I’m a tickertape of skin against molten rock. When I’m all bones and we knew her when. And this frightens me. It scares me not to feel my hands and my two feet. I pace thinking that there will come a time when I simply will not be here. And what is there then? The memory of what is discarded? A few photographs, a memoir, a mother who called back, a half-sister with blonde, easy hair, a father in the ether, friends who shield their young with wings, the food that disappears off plates, the clothes that threadbare, the skin that pales down to parchment. Turns to dust?
Tick, tick, tic…
