Perpetuum Mobile & Blues

Short fiction. See Ravel's Sonata No.2 in G Major, M.77

Close your eyes and we are riding north the train to New Haven, cutting thick Barbizon country on the way to your father’s. I am leaning on the windowpane. what makes up your body is unraveled at languid angles across our seats: you are supine in my lap with your neck stretching heavenward, looking for me with shut eyes. so that I am cradling your head in my posture’s crevice. we are, for the most part, unmoving.

my head is leaning on the window, one eye flush to the glass. America passes by in pieces. eager trees flit across like stick-pixies ahead of slow-rolling hills, and each element is joined in a streaky polyphonic parallax behind the screen; pastoral cows, eddies, abruptly panoramic views of the Long Island Sound. I am watching a solitary drop, as of water, glissade across the pane’s farside.

you are West, skiing, and you’ve taken brightness with you. I’m sitting in Rawlins with my pastels when you call, and the park is dull and gray. a homogenous mess of green and shape. compared of course to the environments you must be in. there exists a stark gravitas, a certainty, to those mountains. I imagine by now you are poised atop a glinting precipice of sun-freckled snow, primed for descent in elaborate crescents. I imagine the purity of the light. you call because of an accident.

the effect of your waking up, though unceremonious and announced only by a small hiccup in your breath, flutter of eyelids, and coiling of arms and shoulders deeper around me, is that I notice your shifting reflection in the window. the Amtrak pane is blemished, and through blurry swathes and stutters you appear to me in it, an oily pastiche of yourself, soft and uncertain at the edges.

a saccharine autumnal sunlight is through the glass projecting oblong rectangles of orange which lean and are striated by shadows of rushing canopy. behind the pane: the drop slaloms down from your ear to your chin, then settles over the worn spot on your neck where your violin sits, usually. it moves jerk and staccato—it belongs to the fast-passing world of trees and countryside. Not within the vessel, not with our warm unmoving limbs.

at the moment when ski meets slope, your father Maude, who awoke at six, who felt in attendance all droopy-eyed ambling morning while you and Hélène took turns stretching and showering and pulling on rayon tights and stocky-sandpapery polyester pants and, god, the boots his own layers of rayon and polyester sweating his patience out of him, who stared straight ahead, skis dangling, the whole frigid lift ascent, the bright snowy precipice expanding below, at the moment when particulate snow rises to meet ski, can no longer contain himself. the biting wind is a sun of its own, it enlivens him, it begs to run through his fingers and hair. he flies down the mountain spiccato.

nested in a birch thicket but for on one unforested side the wire fence of a flat and dusty row of tennis courts, the ceramic lagoon of Maude’s Derby-Shelton country club will be my favorite pool, by hue. corralled sun fractures and spills particulate across the aquamarine surface, glistening and winking at every angle. I am float in a honey-thick expanse, gently breast-stroking its breadth, glissading through the Blues like the second movement of your sonata. pretending I am a drop of water. the figures of Maude and Ms. Calloway idle nearby, pocking balls back and forth in straight lines.

when you catch up to him he is crumpled, not flying.the whole mountain’s gravity seems to converge upon you.this looks garish, skis, poles and veined limbs bent and shocked into angles, a fulminating floridity against a white expanse as sanguinate fluid seeps into snow.he resembles a Schiele, sinewy and violently articulate, trapped in bent borders.there was a snowmobile-stretcher.he would be fine, they say, but his leg dances angular in your mind and you aren’t sure.your voice wobbles like patterns of sun on water.a brilliant blanched landscape keeps expanding downwards, without regard for fractures and whiplash.

I lay sunwashed, watching you swim, trying to capture those dancing oxbow arcs you dive into. the closest I can get is with endless sundry dots, each drop of color ceding to the next. thwock. the awry motion of a ball Maude couldn’t reach curtly arrested by the tennis-court fence. briefly, he stares oblique past the ball, embedded in crossed segments of wire, to the aqueous curves. movement III, allegro: Perpetuum mobile. perpetual motion. Calloway ensures the next ball is well inside his wheelchair-truncated wingspan.

behind the fluid edge you’re purling through the blue a collage of tan and shimmering muscle, cleaving aether like a drop, a star, a ski on a glassy expanse. dots do not capture you, turquoise underwater illumination.

what you’re learning is a Ravel sonata, you’re telling me from my lap, your mouth alight in a patch of umber. you say it is spindling and angular, tapping calloused fingerpads on my palm. you say the third movement is flickering dots yielding détaché in succession like novas burning out, but I, eyes against a symphonic tapestry of the emerging Sound, am hearing that the past dies as we live it, that there is no such thing as standing still.

I am facing a glass threshold. wind hurls across it a drop. uncountable stellar axes of cedar and birch are born and lost to the frame. beyond, the world sweeps by in immense cadenzas. and further, in the milky silica Acela window, I see our still shapes pressed to one another, bathed in an oily autumn aurora, flush with unnameable color.