staying clear of my intersections with my secrets and waiting for my collision with the biggest secret of all. I see them scurry from shadow to shadow, avoiding any conversation in which the Big News could manifest itself at any moment. Suddenly, in retrospect, a thousand unfinished sentences make sense, a thousand abrupt questions that I have been asked—“Uh, heard from Sally lately?”—suddenly have a reason for having been asked. Revealed in a new light are a thousand awkward pirouettes and nimble dodges that struck me at the time as a little odd. The sap in me, of course, wants to take them off the hook as usual, wants to relieve them of their anxiety, call them all up and assure them: It’s OK, I know now. You can come out of hiding. But I’m going to resist that impulse for a while. I’m going to let them stew awhile, the longer the better. The fact that it’s no t a secret anymore is now my secret. I’m not so angry they didn’t tell me, but it does seem they ought to pay a price for it. If it were me, I would expect to pay such a price.
I wonder whether Viv knows, and if not, whether I should tell her. For such a long time she has felt herself in the shadow not so much of Sally but my love for Sally, the two of which become more distinctly different as time passes. Maybe she’s thinking, How will he feel when he finds out? How do I tell him without sounding gleeful …? Or, if she doesn’t know and I tell her, will she then wonder what it means , imagining meanings that don’t even exist? To tell Viv interjects Sally into our lives in a way that does us no good—or ejects Sally from our lives in a way that frees us forever … but right now I don’t know which. So for a while I will leave Sally in the soundless shadows, and spare Viv the one last entrance Sally must make before she makes one last exit.
Goodbye. It’s one thing to have gotten over you. It’s another thing to get over having loved you. Now I say goodbye to our past that I could never quite say goodbye to before, and to whatever dubious future might have once been attached to it. I put it with all my other dubious futures; I have a vast collection of them, lined up on my shelves in empty silver balls. I pick them up, shake them and they don’t make a sound, and that makes me smile. Every once in a while someone tries to slip one in that rattles with a false promise, like a petrified dead bug trapped inside; and I just open the window and heave it to the Hollywood Hills, where by now there must be a junkyard of such futures that rattle with one false promise after another. I’m back to the present, the one true living moment in a continuum of death—dead pasts, dead futures, dead memories, dead expectations. In an ironic world, you will think I’m being ironic when I say it’s good to be alive. But there’s nothing ironic about it. I would like to think I haven’t become so bankrupt as to replace a dead innocence with a dead irony, the first of which distinguishes children, but the second of which distinguishes monsters.
It was in Berlin when I first came across the American Tarot. The cards were tacked up on the wall of a German punk’s flat. A year or so ago, driving home one afternoon from my acupuncture session in Little Tokyo, my body buzzing with the bedlam of toxins pricked loose by all the little pins I’d had stuck in me, I stopped in Hollywood and stumbled into a tattoo joint on Ivar. I wandered from one wall to the next staring at the hallucinatory designs. The young woman who ran the tattoo shop had jet black hair and eyes that lit up like the sun through the dirtiest pane of a stained glass window; in the fashion of the neighborhood all her teeth had been filed to points. Talking with her about the designs on the walls, I asked her about the American Tarot. She had never heard of it. There and then I made it up for her, the major arcana and the suites, the Snakecharmer and the Boatman and the Moll and the Slave,
I wonder whether Viv knows, and if not, whether I should tell her. For such a long time she has felt herself in the shadow not so much of Sally but my love for Sally, the two of which become more distinctly different as time passes. Maybe she’s thinking, How will he feel when he finds out? How do I tell him without sounding gleeful …? Or, if she doesn’t know and I tell her, will she then wonder what it means , imagining meanings that don’t even exist? To tell Viv interjects Sally into our lives in a way that does us no good—or ejects Sally from our lives in a way that frees us forever … but right now I don’t know which. So for a while I will leave Sally in the soundless shadows, and spare Viv the one last entrance Sally must make before she makes one last exit.
Goodbye. It’s one thing to have gotten over you. It’s another thing to get over having loved you. Now I say goodbye to our past that I could never quite say goodbye to before, and to whatever dubious future might have once been attached to it. I put it with all my other dubious futures; I have a vast collection of them, lined up on my shelves in empty silver balls. I pick them up, shake them and they don’t make a sound, and that makes me smile. Every once in a while someone tries to slip one in that rattles with a false promise, like a petrified dead bug trapped inside; and I just open the window and heave it to the Hollywood Hills, where by now there must be a junkyard of such futures that rattle with one false promise after another. I’m back to the present, the one true living moment in a continuum of death—dead pasts, dead futures, dead memories, dead expectations. In an ironic world, you will think I’m being ironic when I say it’s good to be alive. But there’s nothing ironic about it. I would like to think I haven’t become so bankrupt as to replace a dead innocence with a dead irony, the first of which distinguishes children, but the second of which distinguishes monsters.
It was in Berlin when I first came across the American Tarot. The cards were tacked up on the wall of a German punk’s flat. A year or so ago, driving home one afternoon from my acupuncture session in Little Tokyo, my body buzzing with the bedlam of toxins pricked loose by all the little pins I’d had stuck in me, I stopped in Hollywood and stumbled into a tattoo joint on Ivar. I wandered from one wall to the next staring at the hallucinatory designs. The young woman who ran the tattoo shop had jet black hair and eyes that lit up like the sun through the dirtiest pane of a stained glass window; in the fashion of the neighborhood all her teeth had been filed to points. Talking with her about the designs on the walls, I asked her about the American Tarot. She had never heard of it. There and then I made it up for her, the major arcana and the suites, the Snakecharmer and the Boatman and the Moll and the Slave,
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