shamelessly stolen from lydia davis’s “marie curie, so honorable woman” (2000)

preface

pierre and me: 3pm martinis at devano’s. caught leaving in a summer downpour. two trench-coated bodies stood beneath the awning of the boucheron bed and breakfast, gin warm through the throats. suddenly an afternoon opens into the park. rain hisses off the sidewalk. a tea kettle rings from the upstairs window.

character

people come up to our table, to thank pierre for his music, to say they are big fans, to languish in his presence. they wait until i clear my throat before making their escape.

in the chalet of zakopane

the trails criss-crossing the high tatras are crowded in early june. i wanted to spend the day bumming through the sidewalk cafes of the krupówki, sipping mint italian sodas and making notes in my journal. now we are climbing a mountain, saddled behind a young man and his wife from painswick, belaboring her improper use of the word ‘muscose.’

poverty

a little voice tells me i enjoy getting older. i remember plastic champagne flutes on winter sundays, filled with brut and store-bought oj; the smell of star children in their early twenties pullulating among the festival trees, limbs akimbo, faces upward; the sense that things were different, had been different, but believing somehow that everything once coalesced would stay the same. i am alone in the relief that nothing lasts, that everything must one day be surrendered. i did not take shape. the shape took me, and the shape demands new forms.

studies in paris

stole away an afternoon in the bibliotheque national. the mother of modern chemistry, marie curie, died at sixty-six from aplastic anemia, a rare condition linked to high levels of exposure to her most famous discoveries, the radioactive elements polonium and radium. her laboratory notebooks are kept in lead-lined boxes in the basement of the library. they are contaminated by high levels of radium 226 which has a half-life of 1600 years. madame curie’s life conveys an invaluable lesson: if you love it enough to touch it, you must prepare for it to kill you.

austerity

i packed my bags and left your key on the mattress. you gave everything to the label, to your fans, to the producers, to the backup singers, to the lead guitarists, to the publicity agents, to the makeup artists, to the light designers: your bounty, your beneficence, your generosity. to everyone else you were a cornucopia of plenty. and yet we lived in a rundown cold water flat in some bedstuy slum. we’d no sheets and no heat, no drapes for the curtains, no chairs to sit on, no food in the fridge. i didn’t understand why we had to live like that. as a young man, i was much confused.

language

i sat down to write the letter that would end us. end you. end the illusion and the lies and the hurt. end your career, my career, everybody’s careers. i sat down to write it, but the words didn’t come. it would all have to go on in silence.

license

i let that bulgarian fuck me in the back of the tour bus. i tell you only to say i regret none of it, and am likely to do it again at the next opportunity.

courtship

not two forms smashing

into violent shapes, you see,

but rasped into dust.

previous loves

old loves like old books,

spines cracked, dog-eared pages worn,

never once reread.

pierre

i had his name tattooed on my arm in bright blue letters. but no, i didn’t love him. i simply loved the idea of me in love with him. so i suppose it was the idea of me in love with pierre that ultimately got away. and truth be told, i’d rather have that idea of myself back than pierre who was manipulative and controlling and young. but me-in-love-with-pierre was also young and eager and just wanted someone to love him back. we say we wouldn’t ever wish to be young again, to have to carry around that desperate kind of love. we trade it away for security and money, recording contracts and life on perpetual tour. but the truth is, there’s not a man alive who wouldn’t trade it all away to be them-in-love-for-the-first-time again.

bolt of lightning

i remember the last day i saw pierre. we were picnicking in parc monceau, in the english style. the french parks dominate nature, pulverize it really. overlaying their clean geometric lines is always the smudgy thumbprint of a french horticulturist. the english gardens wind breathlessly around corners. there pierre and i ate dabs of spinach dip off stale rye bread and kissed disinterestedly beneath the egyptian pyramid. it was a misty spring afternoon, warm and piqued. the colors ran together like in a scene from caillebotte, yellows rained across a sea of green spliced through with passing currents of blue. a man’s voice cried out loudly from across the way. we both looked up. lightning had struck a small child. we packed up our lunch and fled. but we never saw the storm at all.

domestic life

back in brooklyn, i took a job at mrs niazi’s halal shop. mrs niazi’s family left pakistan after their home was swallowed by the great quetta earthquake of ‘35. they’d settled in jackson heights, a mere three years before papa moved our family to long island once and for all. papa and mr niazi stayed in touch over the years, so when i came home from paris, a job was found for me running the register in their shop over on 74th. once mrs niazi’s son mateen—handsome and achingly earnest—took me to the stockyards out of town where they slaughtered the lambs. grabbing an especially small one by the legs, mateen laid it flat on its backside. he prayed over it in a soft voice until the bleatings subsided. soft and subdued, he folded the lamb’s ears in over its eyes until it was still and perfectly silent, submitted fully to the will of god.

research

i consumed the news with a frenzy i’d not experienced before. i don’t know why. i was not politically activated nor had i any particular areas of impassioned concern. but i read newspapers and magazines, trade journals and academic presses, i read contemporary novellas and all the late night tweets, i read the marginalia of famous composers and love letters of the geishas. i read as if set adrift in the north arctic seas, face down on a raft of ice. to eat i would plunge a naked hand straight through the text and hold my hand beneath the icy waters. either it would freeze off and i would lose my sense of touch, or else a fish would swim into the palm. i did not know what to expect: only that nothing would be received were i not first to give everything.

working with radium

i fell asleep on a bench in washington square park last saturday. woke up to the smell of hot salt and ash. the sidewalks steamed, so the rains must have just passed, only i wasn't wet and the tree leaves providing their shade didn't drip—not once. i folded shut the tawdry novel i'd been reading, splayed across my chest like some sleeping prehistoric butterfly. i put the book in my bag and sat up, still half asleep. something in my head told me to take a mental picture of the moment—the old chinese woman with a box of shun knives, two queens of the house of garcon sashaying west to washington place, puerto rican children splashing in the fountain—i closed my eyes to take it in. tomorrow it would all be gone.

children

i took the G train to bergen. my friend emily had moved to cobble hill with her husband, an attorney in the DA’s office. they bought a brownstone and just had their first child. i hadn’t seen emily since i’d returned from abroad, and she was eager to hear all about what happened with pierre. i snuck two pre-rolled spliffs in my pencil pouch. when i arrived, emily threw her arms around me. it was the first familiar thing i’d found since landing back in the city. she escorted me back into their kitchen which was the like the kitchens i’d seen in the michelin restaurants in paris. new steel appliances glistened, copper pots from williams sonoma dangled from the tigerwood pot rack above their island like the heads of vanquished brunch foes. emily spoke something in german i didn’t understand, almost to the air, and a small girl with a withering set of black bangs came into the kitchen and snatched the baby away. it had been sitting in its carrier on the dining room table the whole time, but i had mistaken it for a honey baked ham. emily poured us two glasses of krug private cuvée which fizzled and spilled out over the flute. i licked the sides of the glass to catch the spillover and thought to myself: there are diamonds worth less than what I’m lapping up here, and for a moment i pictured my tongue caked with glittering diamonds. emily and i got stoned and talked about the good years. she asked about pierre. i deferred. i asked about motherhood. i love her more than anything, she said: though to be honest, we’re still having children for the same reasons my sicilian grandmother did. one day we’ll be old, and they’ll be the only ones who care.

relationship

one day mateen did not show up at the shop. i called mrs naizi to see if she’d heard from her son. she was confused and said he’d come by just that morning to pick up the deposit. he should’ve been to the storefront by now. she called back an hour later, breathless and panicky, to see if he was there. she asked the same questions as last time and hung up abruptly. orders were getting backed up. the new hires didn’t know what to do. mr naizi had to come out from the back office—which he never did—to get us through the backlog. at six in the evening, once the doors were closed, the phone rang. mr naizi picked up the phone. he’d barely said hello before his wife screamed into the receiver. from six feet away i could hear her screaming: they killed him, bacha! they killed our baby boy.

fellow workers

from what could be reconstructed—a patchwork narrative cobbled together from partial witnesses, evasive police reports and the unreliable testimony of those involved—local officers on staten island asphyxiated mateen. he was visiting the home of a local supplier when he stumbled on half a dozen officers attempting to subdue someone, allegedly for selling cigarettes without a tax stamp. the officers had the suspect’s body pinned to the ground. it lay there and kicked its legs frantically like a fish flopping about on dry land, his black skin turning shades of blue, his eyes bulging and shifting about for help. when air could be managed, he made a helpless bleat. mateen rushed to the scene, unaware and unthinking. three officers broke away, throwing matteen against a brick wall. the force to his head alone knocked him unconscious. he was only half awake when they strangled the life from a stranger, wrested the life from them both.

genius: radioactivity

it is said that at least a dozen people each year risk death by radiation for the privilege of touching marie curie’s notebooks. love exposes us.

fame

at the wave of demonstrations that followed, the weeping mr naizi made only a single appearance. in times square, surrounded by broadway performers and queer radical poets, he ascended the dais, unfolded a single sheet of paper and read aloud in arabic:

وَلَمَّا رَجَعَ مُوسَى إِلَى قَوْمِهِ غَضْبَانَ أَسِفًا قَالَ بِئْسَمَا َلَفْتُمُونِي مِن بَعْدِيَ أَعَجِلْتُمْ أَمْرَ رَبِّكُمْ وَأَلْقَى الألْوَاحَ وَأَ َذَ بِرَأْسِ أَ ِيهِ يَجُرُّهُ إِلَيْهِ قَالَ ابْنَ أُمَّ إِنَّ الْقَوْمَ اسْتَضْعَفُونِي وَكَادُواْ يَقْتُلُونَنِي فَلاَ تُشْمِتْ بِيَ الأعْدَاء وَلاَ تَجْعَلْنِي مَعَ الْقَوْمِ الظَّالِمِينَ

“And when Musa returned to his people, wrathful and in violent grief, he said: Evil is it that you have done after me; did you turn away from the bidding of your Lord? And he threw down the tablets and seized his brother by the head, dragging him towards him. 

He said: Son of my mother! surely the people reckoned me weak and had well-nigh slain me, therefore make not the enemies to rejoice over me and count me not among the unjust people.” (Quran 7:150)

the death of pierre

the halal shop closed. mr and mrs naizi moved to new jersey to start over. in memoriam, i had mateen’s name tattooed on my other arm. mateen and pierre, one across from the next. separated by time, by continents, by race, by money. 

and me? a mere dilapidated bridge between them, nothing special, less than sturdy. we are perhaps all bridges connecting loss. at any rate, i was growing tired of new york with its massive skylines and its throngs of faces. eager for a change, i allowed myself to dream of a life beneath the lights of shanghai, of seoul, perhaps tokyo.

the shape, you see. it demands new forms.