PigeonLab

Yesterday.

I spend time like dollar bills peeled, thumb and forefinger, from a bankroll.  From my bench at the aquarium, where I sit every Tuesday morning, I spend my time watching people, considering the messy lives of school children, the languid feelings of geriatrics. Inspecting people is the only thing that I feel comfortable doing.  When I’m watching people I can forget that people are also watching me.

To think fluidly, I have to surround myself with strangers.  I am normal because I cannot communicate effectively with the people that I love, even Kendall, or especially Kendall.  Their feedback paralyzes me.  To think clearly I have to be in a place where I don’t have to consider my actions.  Where my actions don’t contain meaning to strangers.

So I spend time at the aquarium.  I have a yearly membership.  It’s the only place-other than a locked closet-where I feel calm, a weightless anonymity.

*

The main tank in the San Francisco aquarium is a huge cylinder, 50 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter.  As the fish circle endlessly around it, they stir the water into blue shadows, which fold over and bend, tearing down the black walls. The momentary reflections of blue light creep up to the ceiling and expose its towering height.

In that room, bumps around, the bang and clash of a hundred children’s voices, rising into the rafters, gaining weight, until it reaches a critical mass when the body of it comes raining down, soaking the space in sonic chaos.  I spend time among that huge sound.  It’s like bounding on a trampoline in the middle of a prison riot.

I study the faces of elementary school kids, the marks they leave on the glass with their thick breathing and grubby fingers.  The marks they leave when they trace the motions of the fish.

Children’s thoughts are immediately translated into their expressions.  They have no filter.  They show surprise at the movements of the fish.  Amazed at the huge creatures that move about in the tank.  Gliding in circles above their fresh eyes, with faces defenseless against the thoughts they face, constantly changing.

I thought of Kendall before we knew each other, before she was aware.  At an age before she knew anything about the emptiness of love, with a heart free of the weight of experience.

I know that everyone is light and able to float, in the beginning of life.  It is the accumulation of the knowledge of love, which pulls the body down, until it rests, belly gently touching the sand.  The deeper the knowledge, the faster the body sinks. Each painful experience tears a piece of your heart and you sink deeper towards the muck.

There are people who traffic in those bits of torn heart.  They trade them, holding up the stolen pieces, they let the light refract through the angles of the heart, they compare size and shape.  They wait until your already bleeding body is sinking quickly towards the sand and then they dart in for their share; tearing off quick bits, then swimming away holding the prize above their heads.

I watched a girl, maybe 6 years old.  She approached the tank so cautiously.  She kept her eyes on the other kids until the second that she could actually touch the tank.  Gazed into the tank for half a minute and then retreating back towards the wall, walking backwards, keeping her eyes on the other kids, like a deer stepping between wolves.  I used the same routine all the time, I realized.  Trying to keep a watchful, maybe fearful, eye on everyone.  Mentally zooming in and out, focusing on one person, then letting my eyes blur, focusing on an entire rooms’ impression.

I focused on two children, an older girl and her younger brother-their hair and noses were similar-on the left side of the tank.  They had wedged themselves in between taller, older, less obvious people, and the looks on their faces indicated that they felt protected, calm, and unrushed.  I recalled that feeling, safe inside the perimeter of an adult’s care.  Free to linger in the sweet sensation that…to be excited is ok, and there is time to wonder.  I knew that feeling.  But it had faded.

My first semester at school was a second childhood for me, a time when everything seemed fresh.  Even eating, even sleeping.  I woke up in the mornings on weekdays and felt that even things I hadn’t thought of were possible.  Kendall would stop by.  We would eat by ourselves; watch TV, just the two of us.  Drinking, usually such a tired exercise, was a fresh new game.

Kendall and I would get a bottle of Jack Daniels through an upper classman friend of mine who went to my high school.  He charged extra for the service.  We would split the bottle between us in my room.  Drinking with Kendall was elegant.  It was old timey, like drinking on a southern plantation house porch.   The conversation went slowly enough to let it ripen.

I watched teachers treading the fine line between using up the day at a slow pace and keeping the children occupied, moving, so that they didn’t become anxious and irritable.  Field trips were invented to break up the normal classroom dynamic.

So many hours were spent just sitting in my dorm room.  Kendall’s roommate was a Korean girl who had come over to the states on an academic scholarship and had usurped Kendall’s half of the room they shared in order to hold meetings with other students who were part of the Asian Student League.  They held their meetings in English but Kendall still felt like an outsider, obviously, so she spent all of her time in my room, which I shared with a guy who spent most of his time at his parents house.

The fish did not stumble or bumble with rubber sneakers on.  They did not swim through water like we walk through air.  They used the water as a curtain, parting it slightly, squeezing gently through.  They made no abrupt movements.  They used the water, not as something to contend with, but as a lifting force.  Gliding in formation, sensing each other by the way that the water pushed against their fins.  They reacted to each other before they were in contact, a liquid indicator ruffling their scales.

I spent time observing the entire tank.  I caught the shape of schools tensing and relaxing, breathing.  They knew that they were part of something larger.  I wanted desperately to feel that.  I wanted to take comfort in the idea that all I needed, or was expected to do, was be part of a larger being; to have a place.

Kendall was a break for me, from what I had known before college.  From the reality of how the world and I got along.  I usually felt that when I spoke a few words out of every sentence never made it to anyone’s ears.  Like every conversation I’d ever had was like a bad cell phone call.  The meaning, so obviously clear to me, was lost to everyone else.  Life was a serious thing to me and I had always taken myself seriously enough for everyone else.  With Kendall I was supposed to be serious, she needed serious.  She needed me to take her, and the death of her mother, seriously enough for the both of us, and it felt so right.

I spent my time on the bench, from there I could see the entire mass of people.  I picked out certain kids and watched them through the glass of the main tank, floating in with the fish. They seemed happier that way, underwater, believing in the animals.  Belief in magic, that the fish could sprout wings and fly out of the tank, and that the only reason they didn’t was because they didn’t feel like it. The children had a faith in the animals.  For me, the reality of the animals was so affected by my experience with them.  Fish could be bought, sold, captured, filleted, put in glass cages or simply lifted out of the water and left to die, they were powerless against me.  I’ve seen them flopping in nets and gutted, killed by hands just like mine.

*

The last night that Kendall and I spent hanging out together in my dorm room we were watching an episode of Northern exposure, I was marveling at the characters’ humble sense of place and general amusement at the world that they experienced.  The episode where the uptight, over educated, New York City doctor finally realizes that there’s more important things in life than the perfect latte, Kendall of course was asleep and missed the whole thing.

*

The children and the fish were the same size.  The fish were aliens, respectable in their foreignness.  The children hadn’t tasted death yet.  They didn’t believe that the fish could die, it is not a part of their sphere of reality.

All these kids were free from the death experience, the death experience that either pushes humans toward faith or makes them recoil from it shaking their heads.  The children’s lack of knowledge of death allowed them to treat others poorly without guilt, create messes, take other children’s toys, and stomp all over them, group up to insult each other.  Their lack of death experience leaves them free to wonder, without limits.

*

My hands are so thin, they couldn’t hold anything so slippery.  Especially Kendall.  She was made to slip through fingers, it’s the core of her personality.  Just out of reach.  Her body outlined in the candle light of the dorm room, her edges reflect the light that is thrown by the candles.  It’s late and Kendall looks sleepy, her arms are draped like willow branches sipping from a pond, over the little mounds of clothes that are laying on the floor, which is covered in a thin sheet of a thick booze that someone spilled weeks ago.

Kendall’s eyes were reflecting the mixed bits of light that came off of the television set, freckles of light blue and off white.  When she was drunk she would sleep with her eyes open.  It always made me uncomfortable, she looked dead.

*

I got up and walked down a dark hallway that extended out away from the main room.  The hallways stretched out like octopus arms. It was lined with smaller tanks of exotic fish and sea life, stolen, and flown here to the middle of the city.

A giant squid carcass hung from the ceiling in the hallway that I walked down, the main part of its body pointing out towards the main room.  It had six arms, the tentacles, all tangled together and stretched out into the darkness of the hallway.  They waved and tangled until they came to an end sixty feet later in pads.

I was looking back at myself through the mirror on the ceiling of the C-Terminal at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.  The ceiling is covered with mirrors, which are glued to a rolling landscape.  Thin tubes of bright neon lights run along the ceiling, strung up with wires, they chase each other the length of the terminal.

Whenever I left school-and Kendall-to go home to the suburbs of Chicago, I slipped along on the moving walkways beneath that neon worm parade.  I would look up at myself and watch as the lights tangled around my reflected image, people in the terminal rushing past all over the place, surrounding my reflection.  It’s like having a bird’s eye view of your life, the closest you can get to having an out of body experience for real.

A boy was standing in front of the window to a small tank, filled with seahorses.  The edges were black and the glow from the tank created a silhouette of the child’s head, staring up into the rectangular space.  He was separated from his class, which had moved on to the next tank.  I listened in as the teacher explained how the feeding schedule worked.  She patently explained the times that the keepers put food in the tanks for feeding, her slender teacher arms rising up and down, index finger slightly crooked, pointing like a meteorologist.

That kid’s head, inside of that frame, made my knees fell thin, I felt nauseous.  He looked trapped there in that tank, stuck there, like he was never going to be able to move on and catch up with the rest of them.  The image of it was pressing me towards the ground.  There were so many kids screaming in the hallways, so many voices speaking at the same time.  Kids tearing back and forth down the hall, and that boy standing silently inside of his blue glass cell, hands up, palms flat against the glass.

I started unsteadily for the door, through the jolting swarm of children.  I could see the exit long before I actually got to it, a soft white rectangle at the far end of the main lobby, glowing between the dark walls of the main room.  The doorway was bleeding an opaque light that covered up, washed the color off of objects, and blinded me.  It was bleeding a light that turned people into stick figures thrashing about in thick chowder.

The closeness of those hallways squeezed me.  I was losing my sense of balance.  A sense of desperation started quietly.  The thought that if there were an emergency everyone would be pushing, shoving, screaming, people.  Repressing the thought proved impossible; instinct told me this was not a good place to be.  I began to hurry towards the exit, slowly so I didn’t look sick, or criminal.  I ended up stumbling over a group of shuffling kids, unable to move to one side of the hall or the other.  I had no choice but to be polite and wait until the group decided to wander off in another direction.  I skirted around them, squeezing by and pushing a couple kids to get past.

I needed new air, the door was still forever away and each step brought new delays.  I made it to the lobby, tripped on a piece of rug that was sticking up just in front of the door, stuck my arm out to steady myself, grabbing the handle of a stroller, which brought screeching and tugging from the women who was pushing it, and the women beside her.  I released her stroller and reached for the horizontal door handle, my hand smacked it.  I was conscious of making too much noise in public.

The breeze from outside slid across my face, the damp smell of the air in San Francisco, coming off of the ocean, and I was relieved, I sighed, and breathed.

I didn’t need to be at Stephen’s house for another hour.  It was frigid out there in the middle of the day, and outside, my ears ringing from the children, the city had a hushed quality, like it too was behind thick glass.