bridges arc gracefully over the water and planes inch slowly, slowly across the screen, some gliding high above the skyline, others vanishing into the emptiness between the tallest towers. We can't see passengers inside the planes and the passengers can't distinguish us from the bridge upon which we've stopped. Like millions of our fellow citizens we stare up anyway. The passengers believe in us, stare down at our invisible shapes immaculate within muddles of concrete, glass, and steel or racing along highways in strings of cars or lying in green parks along the riverside. Everyone certain someone, somewhere is staring back. A city, after all, isn't it. Fabricated of eye exchanges. Living and dead.
Open and shut. The feathery wake of a long, slow barge plows the glittery water, an arrow pointed at the bulk of Oz silhouetted against hazy distance.
Thomas has learned that Fanon and Malcolm X, aka Malcolm Little (coincidentally, a surname he shares with Chicken Little), share, by coincidence, the same year of birth, 1925, and that Patrice Lumumba dies, by coincidence, in 1961, the year Fanon dies. Fanon, Malcolm, Lumumba, three men of color born separated by oceans, two of whom spoke French, the other English, men who invent a new language, unheard till they begin conversing with each other.
Was Fanon a third, silent other on the Williamsburg Bridge gazing at the river, the island, with us. Was Fanon grieving, recalling the murder of his birthmate, Malcolm, the murder of his deathmate, Lumumba, Fanon's words visible on invisible pages the silence turns...
Europe now lives at such a mad reckless pace.
.
.let us try to create the whole man whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.
Fanon on the bridge that morning admonishing us, Fanon addressing us as comrades, saying, Don't jump.
PITTSBURGH—A HOSPITAL
My mother studies her Bible after her coffee and morning paper. She's sure these are the Last Days. No doubt in her mind signs of the Last Days all around and about us. Uncanny correspondences daily between what the Bible foretold about the end and what she watches on TV, she says. A shudder of pain deep in the Earth's bowels sending a skyscraper-tall, mile-wide glacier of deadly water moving fast as the speed of light to drown islands in the South Seas. Three-headed turtles, civil wars, a giant asteroid on a collision course with the Earth, boys killing boys in Homewood's streets, fires, floods,
plagues, cops handcuffing and arresting an unruly seven-year-old colored girl misbehaving in her elementary school. Topsy-turvy, pell-mell, no center holds, things falling apart—the Last Days sure enough and she nods gravely as I recite lines from a somber Yeats poem written on the eve of World War II. Meanwhile, in these last days, I'm trying to imagine with her help, her witness, Fanon's last days. Numbing waves of pain blurring his nights and days. Do I ever fall asleep, Fanon might have asked himself during a lucid instant, or am I always sleeping. Consciousness, identity experienced as degrees of pain, as drifting, the boat, the sea, the passenger merging, the island of his destination no longer separated by time or distance from the island that he departed from. Fanon a name like a beacon blinking on then off, found, lost again in a fog of pain. An endless tossing and turning passes for sleep or could be sleep roiled by constant, nagging dreams, his body, what's left of his body, a banner flapping in the wind, ripped and shredded, fragments of meat and bone, bloody waves, the body eating itself, screaming from a mouth that may be his or a mouth he dreams screaming silently, choked, gagging on the tail end of himself he swallows. His last days, ours, these, my mother's wheelchair parked beside Fanon's high-railed, high-tech hospital bed, my mother's hand on Fanon's chilly shoulder that also somehow sweats. She's squeezing it, the rhythm of her stroking fingers calming shudders and heaving of his flesh. In
Open and shut. The feathery wake of a long, slow barge plows the glittery water, an arrow pointed at the bulk of Oz silhouetted against hazy distance.
Thomas has learned that Fanon and Malcolm X, aka Malcolm Little (coincidentally, a surname he shares with Chicken Little), share, by coincidence, the same year of birth, 1925, and that Patrice Lumumba dies, by coincidence, in 1961, the year Fanon dies. Fanon, Malcolm, Lumumba, three men of color born separated by oceans, two of whom spoke French, the other English, men who invent a new language, unheard till they begin conversing with each other.
Was Fanon a third, silent other on the Williamsburg Bridge gazing at the river, the island, with us. Was Fanon grieving, recalling the murder of his birthmate, Malcolm, the murder of his deathmate, Lumumba, Fanon's words visible on invisible pages the silence turns...
Europe now lives at such a mad reckless pace.
.
.let us try to create the whole man whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.
Fanon on the bridge that morning admonishing us, Fanon addressing us as comrades, saying, Don't jump.
PITTSBURGH—A HOSPITAL
My mother studies her Bible after her coffee and morning paper. She's sure these are the Last Days. No doubt in her mind signs of the Last Days all around and about us. Uncanny correspondences daily between what the Bible foretold about the end and what she watches on TV, she says. A shudder of pain deep in the Earth's bowels sending a skyscraper-tall, mile-wide glacier of deadly water moving fast as the speed of light to drown islands in the South Seas. Three-headed turtles, civil wars, a giant asteroid on a collision course with the Earth, boys killing boys in Homewood's streets, fires, floods,
plagues, cops handcuffing and arresting an unruly seven-year-old colored girl misbehaving in her elementary school. Topsy-turvy, pell-mell, no center holds, things falling apart—the Last Days sure enough and she nods gravely as I recite lines from a somber Yeats poem written on the eve of World War II. Meanwhile, in these last days, I'm trying to imagine with her help, her witness, Fanon's last days. Numbing waves of pain blurring his nights and days. Do I ever fall asleep, Fanon might have asked himself during a lucid instant, or am I always sleeping. Consciousness, identity experienced as degrees of pain, as drifting, the boat, the sea, the passenger merging, the island of his destination no longer separated by time or distance from the island that he departed from. Fanon a name like a beacon blinking on then off, found, lost again in a fog of pain. An endless tossing and turning passes for sleep or could be sleep roiled by constant, nagging dreams, his body, what's left of his body, a banner flapping in the wind, ripped and shredded, fragments of meat and bone, bloody waves, the body eating itself, screaming from a mouth that may be his or a mouth he dreams screaming silently, choked, gagging on the tail end of himself he swallows. His last days, ours, these, my mother's wheelchair parked beside Fanon's high-railed, high-tech hospital bed, my mother's hand on Fanon's chilly shoulder that also somehow sweats. She's squeezing it, the rhythm of her stroking fingers calming shudders and heaving of his flesh. In
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