Coming to Reward Them

To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

Through the freak we derive an image of the normal; to know an age’s typical freak is, in fact, to know its points of standardization. — Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? — Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

There are places a man carries with him long after he has left them, not places in the ordinary sense of roads and houses and fields with names nailed to their fences, but places made of weather and voices and the particular colour of evening when something happened which could not be undone, and I have carried mine so long that sometimes I wonder whether I ever truly lived anywhere else, whether the town with its courthouse square and shuttered stores and the river lying brown and indifferent beyond the cornfields was ever a town at all, or merely the first chamber of a house whose other rooms I have spent my life entering one by one, each darker than the last.

They told me I had time.

That was the punishment, though they called it something else, called it correction and discipline and the necessary arithmetic by which a troublesome man is made harmless, and for years I believed them because a man can believe almost anything if he is told it often enough in a room where the windows do not open, and so I watched the seasons come down across the glass — the red dust of summer, the black rain of autumn, the pale winter mornings when the world looked unfinished — and I learned that fathomless, bottomless ennui is not the absence of violence but violence stretched thin enough to become respectable.

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom

I had thought, in those days, that I could change the house by living inside it, that if I sat at the table long enough, spoke carefully enough, signed the right papers and learned the names of the men who had inherited the keys, I might persuade them that the walls were unnecessary, that the locked doors were only habits handed down from fathers who had themselves forgotten why they locked them; but the house has a memory, and houses like that do not forgive the man who begins asking where the foundation came from.

For trying to change the system from within

So I waited.

I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them

And waiting changed me.

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

There came a morning when I woke before dawn and knew, without knowing how I knew it, that the waiting had ended, and I lay there listening to the house breathe around me, the pipes knocking in the walls, a truck changing gears somewhere beyond the fields, a dog in the distance barking once and then deciding against pursuing the matter further, and beneath all those ordinary sounds there was another sound, too distant to hear and too intimate to ignore, like a train passing beneath the earth, and I understood that whatever had been gathering inside me had finally found its direction.

I'm guided by a signal in the heavens

I have never trusted men who claim to be guided by certainty, but I have trusted omens all my life.

I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin

A blackbird striking the kitchen window.

I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons

The face of a woman looking at me across a crowded room and seeming, for one instant, not to recognize me at all.

You, for instance.

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

These things have guided me more faithfully than doctrine ever did, because doctrine requires obedience while a sign merely asks that you notice it, and I have spent too many years among men who noticed nothing except what could be entered into a ledger.

Sometimes I think it was beauty that ruined me.

Not violence.

Beauty.

The terrible beauty of engines turning beneath factory lights, of steel bridges black against a winter sky, of a rifle laid cleanly across a table, of a city at midnight seen from the highway when every window is burning and every human sorrow has been reduced, from that distance, to a handful of yellow squares; because there is a kind of beauty in power which can make a fool of the conscience, and I have been foolish enough to look upon it and call it destiny.

And yet, God help me, there was always you.

I'd really like to live beside you, baby

I wanted nothing from you except everything: your body asleep beside mine, your clothes thrown carelessly over the chair, the smell of your hair when you came in from the rain, the particular silence between two people who have lived together long enough that silence no longer means anger, and perhaps if I had been permitted to choose my life without witnesses or history or the long accusing shadow of the past, I would have chosen that small kingdom and remained there until death came quietly to the door.

I love your body and your spirit and your clothes

You loved me most when I was losing.

But you see that line there moving through the station?

That is the thing neither of us said as I pushed on that door inside my head and it quietly gave way.

I told you, I told you, told you I was one of those

You loved the broken man because the broken man could not leave you, could not become larger than the room, could not wake one morning and discover that the horizon had moved farther away than either of you had expected.

Ah, you loved me as a loser

And now you watch me as though victory itself were a disease.

I understand.

But now you're worried that I just might win

There are worse things than being loved by someone who fears what you may become.

You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline

There were nights when I prayed to be allowed to begin, not to win, not even to be remembered, but simply to begin the work that had followed me like a debt through all those empty years, and I prayed until prayer became repetition and repetition became rhythm and rhythm became something almost indistinguishable from music, songs from a room, and when at last the answer came it did not descend from heaven with trumpets or fire and the walls of Jericho falling after the army had marched around them for seven days, but arrived instead as exhaustion, as the sudden knowledge that there was nothing left to wait for.

How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin

The world outside had continued without me.

That was its insult.

I don't like your fashion business, mister

The shops had changed their names. The women had changed their faces. The men who had once spoken confidently now spoke softly because age had begun taking its payment. My sister was gone, and nobody could tell me precisely when she had disappeared, because disappearance is seldom an event; it is a process, a little retreat each day until one morning the chair is empty and everyone agrees to behave as though the chair had always been empty.

And I don't like these drugs that keep you thin

I hated the people who sold appearances and called it commerce.

I don't like what happened to my sister

I had come to distrust the bright industries of appearance, the people who sell youth while pretending not to fear age, the remedies that make a body smaller while leaving the sorrow inside it untouched, the respectable arrangements by which families disappear one wound at a time and everybody agrees to call the silence peace.

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

And still I remember the ridiculous gifts, the little objects sent across the distance as though they might bridge it, and I remember teaching myself to make music from inadequate materials, night after night, because sometimes a man must practice his future before the world has agreed to recognize it.

And I thank you for those items that you sent me

I remember when music was enough, when I could carry a bag through the rain and feel that usefulness itself was a kind of grace, when I believed that bringing something home — fresh bread, a bottle, a song, some small proof that the day had not entirely defeated us — was sufficient reason to keep going.

The monkey and the plywood violin

But now the old calendar has returned with its ceremonies and its wounds, and everyone seems wounded though each insists upon a different name for the wound. And I stand among them remembering the man I was, the man I meant to become, and the man who has finally stepped out of the long waiting place between those two lives, carrying nothing that can be surrendered, nothing except the memory of having once been patient and the terrible knowledge that patience, too, has an ending.

I practiced every night, now I'm ready

Ah, remember me, I used to live for music. Remember me, I brought your groceries in. Well, it’s Father’s Day and everybody’s wounded.

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin