There is a keen emptiness in Shaw’s
Gardens and a hollow and a lonely kind of feeling that seems to say to me that
I should have stayed at home if I wanted some company (Venus, she’s a good cat ,
though with a fondness for biting and clawing I can’t always forgive), but I don’t
want company, just the solitude I feel I earned by being the first one through
the great glass doors and up to the semicircle desk. And now I’m a satellite of
the lake, and I keep the rock waves on my right and don’t get very far before I
step in a giant rain footprint. (I need to watch where I’m going.)
It’s Monday morning, and at this
time I’m always swigging coffee, fighting traffic (never get to work on time), counting
the hours and minutes and seconds and dream-ages of sleep I got the night
before. And running from the parking garage to the Famous Barr corporate office
(May Dept. Stores on Olive St.), I
can see the Arch and Busch Stadium and the fountain dyed red or blue and the
people in the fountain and around the fountain and around the street and the
falling-down bricks and so many blank-eyed cars. But I’m not going to work
today (no, it’s a holiday, I just decided), so instead of turning my car back
around home, I drive fifteen minutes out of my way, off the highway, past the
shop with the twisted, metal garden statue jumble like the beanstalk giant
played Jacks and got bored. And now I’m here in the Gardens and this is my
holiday because I need it and I think I shouldn’t have to pay the four dollar
admission fee just to take a walk when I need a walk, this walk.
And I’m circling the lake and too
busy watching the winding, serpentine trail of white gravel raked with
wave-smooth patterns (like waves in pictures, but maybe those aren’t really
smooth and I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never seen the ocean), and as I walk,
my foot has splashed in a puddle, and I maybe shouldn’t have worn my suit
today, because I knew when I was leaving I didn’t want to go to work today. I
knew (or guessed) I was going to take vacation time just for today, but what
kind of vacation do you walk around in a suit that’s just going to get spattered
with cloud-spit?
I see the togetsukyo bridge, the flat bridge that rolls across the water and
makes a tiny island of water to the left (that’s still connected to the
mainwater under the bridge, so really isn’t an island, just wants to think of
itself that way). There are koi under the bridge—bloated, bubbling koi that
haven’t been gold or orange or white since I was a little child, they’re just
overgrown, dingy carp. (I think they think they’re mermaids, though—they keep
their lips puckered above the surface, or maybe they think they’re frogs and maybe
they’re frustrated that all we do is stare at their open, gaping mouths and
too-big, too-round eyes.) At one end of the bridge is a gumball machine (50-cent fish pellets) that was always “a
superfluous expense,” so I always knelt on scabbed knees and stuck my clumsy
fingers through wood slats to find the brown, crumbly spheres the other kids
dropped from their two-handful mountain stashes. And like when I was young, the
carp burble and pile themselves now in a submarine volcano of fish-flesh and scales
and stomachs, capped at the summit with a gaggle of geese who filter all the
food (so they are really bird pellets, not fish pellets).
There’s an old man standing on the bridge with fish-bird pellets in his hands and his elbows resting on the wood rail and his eyes looking glassy out on the lake. (Did he forget where he is? Ah, but he drops a morsel now and then for the geese—maybe for the carp, but they never get any, so how are they so fat anyway?) His face sags a little and there’s a gravity that pulls at his mouth and his shoulders, the same gravity that pulls the fish pellets down and turns them into bird pellets and keeps fish in their pen and birds on the water. And I take a clacking step on the bridge and reverse that gravity (had to pull my feet up from their roots somehow) and start across and stop when I lean over the railing and make a silly little nothing observation, a one-sided conversation starter-ender, maybe about the fish, maybe about the geese, and the old man on the bridge, of the bridge, gives me something like a friendly upside-down-gravity expression.
Our mouths are moving for some length
of time I forget, because our circumlocutions are not important until one of us
says (or the other one says or both of us admit) a tragically permanent
commonality of experience. (Except our recent experiences aren’t the same, but
close enough that we both know it doesn’t matter.)
The old man says this is the place
he liked to take his son when he was little, to watch the fish watch them. I say
this was the only place my father (with no one else around) said in his way: “I
love you.” And now no more fish-watching and no more words between any of us
anymore. And the old man is a father and I am a son without a father and he
without a son, and we watch the grains drop from his hands and into the beaks
of the vultures.
And the koi, they look up at me, and
I swear in the midst of their gaping and gasping one of them burps water at me and they have eyes...
And I say, “Maybe we are on a bridge
and in an in-between place and this is where we say goodbye.”
We don’t shake hands, cold clammy hands, warm beating hands, just nod and turn around in silence and cross the bridge over a sedentary Styx or Lethe back to our own sides (and know we will never meet again), and when I look back and down the depths past the bamboo fence, I see the carp and smile at the one I think might be my father. (He’s the one that’s watching me.)
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