Angels and Shakespeare

"For this reason Monday burns like oil... and it howls in passing like a wounded wheel..." Pablo Neruda (Walking Around)

From "I made my boy out of poetry"

When I woke yesterday morning, I was certain that I was supposed to be dead but the fact is my eyes were open, I could smell the pale white sunlight flooding the bedroom, an overheated melody burned hard between my thighs and guitar sounds riding on ocean waves floated up from a CD player to nibble teasingly at my ears.

Maybe there's been a mistake, I thought, then closed my eyes again and waited for some holy presence to lift me out of my doubt and flesh and thinking. A number of lights did come to me and one even sang my name with a soothing seductive baritone, yet eventually my eyes opened again and stared out into a room that was both beautifully strange and harshly familiar.

Slowly, I rose up and sat on the edge of the bed, the sheets not sticky but definitely moist with the humidity of nocturnal evolutions. Is this my afterlife, I wondered, and carefully considered those words: is this MY afterlife, not THE afterlife, because I'd always had a dread of falling into other people's versions of hell or heaven. If either of these existed then I wanted them custom-designed to fit my own specific sins and good works.

I stood up to test the weight, the bounce and heat and validity of my body. Perhaps, if I walked slowly away from the bed, I might look back and discover my physical form resting stone-like on the mattress and see that the form in which I was now moving, manipulating sensation and perception, was my new body and reality, a dazzling vehicle constructed from God's good humor and my soul's aching determination to inhabit a brilliant spiritual reality.

At first I tried to will myself to float across the room, utilizing wings of pure energetic thought and nothing else. After concentrating right up to the edge of a massive headache, I walked rapidly to the doorway, the lush beige carpet licking the soles of my feet, and took a slow deep breath. What would I see when I turned around? Would my corpse resemble the physical being I'd always believed myself to be, or would I be shocked by an image of unimaginable hideousness, terrifying beauty, or deadly nondistinction?

I turned around. The bed was empty. Without question, I was probably alive, and this burning revelation made me piss like a horse where I was standing, the sudden cascade of my surprise jolting my feet with acrid warmth and humility.

The belief that I was supposed to be dead had taken root in my consciousness many years before, even before I was a teenager, when I found myself subject not only to a prophetic disposition regarding my mortality but to experiencing any number of signs or indicators supporting the prophecy. My favorite brother (of the four from whom I had to choose) the one who used to offer himself as a decoy for any malice which the world shot in my direction, had been killed when he was fourteen by a policeman who made no excuses for the murder, only citing the fact that Robert Lee, my brother, had been in a neighborhood that was neither black nor his.

My teacher --first grade or kindergarten, I'm not sure now- my teacher responded to the news of my brother's death by sitting me before the entire class and asking me to tell them what I knew about the murder, as casually as if she had asked me to count to ten, or as if she'd inquired whether or not I had remembered to wash my hands after taking a shit. I did accept my chair of blood-smeared honor in front of everyone else and muttered the only words my broken soul could manage: "He, um. .. he was, .... he was my brother..." Yes: my beautiful beautiful dead brother. And I sat before them, staring through their excited faces at honey-colored memories of him, fully aware that he was gone, completely unaware of how his vanished love would track and haunt my life for years and years into the future.

And it must have been about that time as well --the early to mid-sixties-- that American journalists and sociologists began to chronicle the decline of the black American male. We were suddenly labeled an endangered species as if the previous decades and centuries of lynchings and slavery and quasi-slavery had never resulted in the cumulative actuality of black men's destruction. In the decades to come we would see elaborate chronicles and presentations of these attempts at slow genocide; artists would draw portraits of us with tiny coffins and skulls in our eyes and hair. National magazines would, seemingly, boast headlines declaring we were nearly gone. And it was true that we were busy killing each other, and others were busy killing us all on a fairly regular basis --whether death came through the ignoble agencies of war, domestic violence, drugs, suicide or diseases that cancelled our sexual appetites, we were exiting the planet at a rate noticeably disproportionate to other groups of our fellow human beings.

Moreover, in the case of my individual being, I was prone to political militancy, both outside of my race and within it, a garrulous gadfly in the mode of a Socrates or Patrice Lumumba who loved to buzz about the glories of change and unification, whose too-loud, too discomforting voice, made me highly susceptible to various forms of target practice. Without the decoy of my brother's presence, one solid hit and my endangered ebony male self would become one more hot item for the six o'clock news.

So it was my firm belief that by the time my thirtieth birthday approached, I would be certifiably dead. When I turned thirty and found myself still breathing, I calmly accepted the fateful fact that death would come the next year, or even, possibly, the next day. At some point, I actually stopped anticipating death but unraveled any ongoing sense of connection with life. In other words, I am rarely certain which reality I occupy, or which reality occupies me, and I move about those spaces which compose my time --the places where I work, live and struggle to play-- with much much caution.

Moving with what I hoped was more grace than fear, I walked from the bedroom through the living room, into the kitchen, lightly touching the furniture and walls as if it were all new to me, which it was because my memory had yet to acknowledge that this experience was real. On the kitchen table, a large six-sided coin made of smoke-colored glass, I found seven or eight envelopes which I hoped would provide answers about who I was or wasn't, about the life I was living or not living, about the death I was entering or not entering.

At first I was surprised to notice that the envelopes were addressed to two different people: one named Jeffery J. Lloyd and another named Aberjhani. I assumed that one of these must be me and immediately became concerned that apparently someone else lived in the apartment, someone who was not presently there and whose face I could not recall. Then I saw something odd. Two of the envelopes had both of these names on them, with one name enclosed in parentheses following the other. For a moment, this confused me even more, for I took it to mean that two people, myself and someone other than I, took turns subjecting one another to some cruel masochistic parenthetical existence, each of them (us?) alternately banishing the other to a form of psychic slavery symbolized by the broken handcuffs of parentheses.

This idea, of psychic enslavement, began to stir cyclones up and down the shores of my nerves. I dug through the letters and scattered papers until I came upon a check and a note explaining very clearly --evidently for the benefit of a bank and publisher-- that the people I had thought of as two, were in fact only one. These two people, as I had thought of them, were both me.

The acquisition of the two names, this delicious double identity, forced me to further accept the likelihood that I was not a ghost experiencing spectral hallucinations but a flesh and blood silly-behind man who not only possessed these two identities but apparently several jobs as well. Exactly what my status was on any of these jobs remained unclear. But I eased away from some of my caution and went to the bathroom for a warm soothing shower. The water rushed over me like a convincing display of grace and I allowed the eager sensuality of it to take over my body until the steam turned into a chilled autumn rain.

When I got out, a telephone was ringing and I walked quickly to the bedroom. I stood near the night stand and watched the phone ring over and over again. How wise would it be to answer that thing, in light of the fact that I was clearly stumbling between the speckled dimensions of self-awareness? Surely not too wise at all. Then it stopped ringing. For a moment, the silence blossomed all around me like a garden filled with jasmine and roses and I felt drunk and sober at the same time. Which one of my names, my two or three or infinite selves, could identify best with such a feeling, such a slow-whirling agony and ecstasy?

I then thought I heard laughter or someone singing. Over in the doorway there stood an exquisite emerald-colored angel with wings that pierced the floor and ceiling. The light of it shined all over my nakedness and burned away the water remaining from my shower. I seized the opportunity presented me:

"Am I alive or dead?" I asked the angel.

"Yes."

"Uh, 'yes' what?"

"Yes you are alive, and yes you are dead."

"Oh. Wow. Ok, but um, can you tell me some definite course of action I should be taking, here and now, and who I should be taking it as? Can you restore my full memory so I'll know what to do?"

The angel stood there, or floated there, wrapped up like a radiant moth in the glowing web of a silence that seemed to occupy a dimension beyond the room where I stood.

"Why did you come here if you're not going to help me? Aren't you supposed to be all powerful unconditional love or something like that?"

"Whatever my Creator commands is the sum total of what I am. Consider me as you would a small finger upon the greater hand of divine decision."

This business about being an extension of divine will sounded familiar and although it did not solve my dilemma, standing there coccooned in my nudity and frustration, I decided not to wrestle with the angel, to simply by-pass Jacob's example and get dressed.

Before I could consider what was happening, a flurry of words, thoughts and sensations fell upon me like a blizzard of colored lights whirling rapidly into my brain, and I knew this was the angel's doing, but again, paid it no mind. Once I was fully clothed, I walked through the doorway as if the angel were not there and even though I pretended not to, I savored the exquisite tingling that leaped under my skin and shot thunder through my bones.

On my way back to the kitchen, I passed two more angels. One gave off a hypnotic aroma, like blossoms weaned on the waters of the Nile, and the other surprised me by humming a fusion of classic melodies by Duke Ellington and Mozart.

I went back to the table where the letters were and read several of them. The emotional tone and rhythm of those addressed to one name was acutely distinct from that addressed to the other; I chose to identify with the name that generated the fatter mounds of kindness.

As soon as I made this decision, the flood of lights and voices came tumbling back into my head. Entire islands and groves of memory suddenly sprung up and I found myself face to face with a deeper awareness of what I can only describe as numerous versions of my singular self and my solitary destiny, pencil sketches of possibilities in which I saw myself as a clown, a poet, a slave, an orator, a prophet and a beggar and a healer and a warrior. I wet my lips and unexpectedly tasted a sweeter deeper sense of knowledge regarding my life.

I did not dwell long upon this shadowy vision. I picked up a briefcase, left the apartment and walked out to the parking lot. I saw a stunning blue full-sized Thunderbird and started to reach for the door handle when the car spoke up and said: "Please do not touch me unless your name is Ardell and you are my owner." My hand froze in a gesture made perfect for tragedy. I realized that I did not, in fact, own a car, and that I needed to hurry if I was going to catch my regular bus at the stop two blocks away.

The bus was pulling up just as I arrived at the stop and I took a seat near the driver, a dark-skinned woman wearing Cleopatra braids. She was friendly and spoke to me as if we knew each other, as if this had been a year when we were lovers then drifted successfully, or not-so-much-so, out of each other's life. She reached back to hand me a clipped newspaper article about a minister who had robbed two motels.

"Can you believe that?!" she said, then went on without waiting for me to tell her I could. "That's the same man who preached in my church Sunday morning --Sunday morning Lord!-- then turned around and robbed Superion Motel that same night! Brother you should'a heard him preach! He had me clappin' happy hands and cryin' happy tears about the days of rapture soon to come. He put so much excitement in my soul that for a while I thought he was Jesus standin' up there in disguise. When he told me I was a chosen servant of God, I was ready to work miracles all over that man --you hear what I'm sayin' brother?-- then he go and rob somebody! A goddamned preacher!"

I looked at the newspaper article then returned it. There were tears on the bus driver's lovely face and tears in her beautiful voice, but the stout blond man sitting across from me was laughing. Loudly. I imagined that the criminal preacher, or the preaching criminal, must be like these two people, one side of him crying over his spiritual failures while the other side laughed at other people's spiritual naivete.

Fortunately, a few minutes later, the bus stopped right in front of the huge bookstore, more the size of a grocery store, where I worked, and I arrived there ten minutes prior to the start of my shift. The main reason I knew this was because someone smiled and commented on it when I entered the store.

There was a long customer service counter towards the back of the store and I stopped there when I noticed two tall stacks of William Shakespeare's complete sonnets sitting next to a computer. I asked the young woman working behind the counter what the books were for. Her eyes bulged as if she were suffering a sudden massive attack of gas in the brain and she placed both hands on her hips:

"Now you look here Mr. Aberjhani! Just cause you a manager in this store don't mean you got the right to come fuckin' with me first thing in the morning! I'm a human being just like you is and I don't have to take abuse off nobody! So if you wanna fire me then you just go right ahead cause I was lookin' for a job when I found this one goddamnit!"

Her lips trembled to a halt and at that moment I remembered who she was. I recalled as well that brutal language was sometimes her way of singing poetry and sometimes the weapon she employed to wound herself in front of witnesses. I had often wondered, as I did now, about the nature of her beauty, what it must be like when it was not gushing blood out of the rocks of her private damnation.

"Is today Monday?" I asked her.

"It sure is," she answered, her voice loaded with enough attitude to sink a battleship.

"I kind'a thought it was Monday cause it's got that difficult feeling to it. You look very lovely today."

"Thank youuuu..."

I picked up a copy of Shakespeare's complete sonnets, a slim handsome edition done in classic black leather binding, and I thought about the theory that Shakespeare may have been an angel pretending to be human. As I admired the gold lettering on the cover, a woman came walking down the side aisle, followed by a four- or five-year-old child who was screaming as if he had just fallen from her womb and experienced the most cruel awakening imaginable. I opened the sonnets and looked, foolishly I know, for something to read to the child, hoping for words that were soft and truthful to tell his tears, or perhaps for some gentle fable, about how exquisite it can be just to know that one is truly alive.