Talking To Ghosts

Missing

My friend and her boyfriend are on the front page of the Daily News. I’m used to seeing friends there, but only when getting arrested at demonstrations, and before the News started printing in color. This guy sitting across from me on the train just pulled the paper out to read the sports section, to prove to me that he’s straight. They’ve been gone for over a week now—11 days. I think that they’re dead. Their landlord disappeared after the cops got in contact with him in order to access my friends’ apartment. Did he kill them because they wanted more heat? In March, after eating lunch, we had to put our gloves back on because our coats and hats weren’t keeping us warm enough, even though we were indoors.

Pearl Street Mystery1

I’m relieved that the guy reading the sports pages has the paper folded and isn’t flashing me the news and the front cover. I wish I had a T.V. so I could see them. I don’t want to see them, to see their absence—the Mystery. I want to know that they are dead, to have their bodies fished out of the Hudson River. I want it to be over. Last night I took photos of myself. I haven’t used my camera in years. I needed to record—to document while I can. Their disappearance reminds me of how fragile life is, how unpredictable. I can’t deal with so much loss at one time.

My recent ex-spouse and I hardly ever posed for pictures together. If we did, I had suggested it. I hated that. Before I moved out of the apartment we shared, I went to Little Ricky and took some photos of myself in their photo booth. They came out overexposed, washing out my skin’s tonal highlights and darkening the bags underneath my eyes so that I looked like a ghost. But they were real. My ex was so morbid in ensuring his own invisibility. I don’t want to be invisible like that anymore. My friend’s disappearance and presumable death tells me to get going—to make, create—live more. When some of my ex’s friends died, he said that their deaths helped him to let go, to loosen up. He could have used a little more motivation with the charge from that kind of loss.

I always identified with my missing friend’s latent artistic development. She was so talented in many ways, but worked too long and too hard at jobs she hated. I never thought that she would enact her own art, transforming herself into her subject matter. Above the stove in her kitchen hung a large painting of pastel pinks and oranges and reds and yellows. Colors of fires formed smoke spirits that surrounded an Indian woman with her head in the oven. The woman in the painting was one of many who chose to give her life to death rather than a husband who had bought her from her father. Sometimes, suicide is the only self-determined destiny that has any dignity. And this is 1997. My friend is still suffering after suffrage in the land of the free, free to conform or choose death.

My cubicle at work is arranged so that I sit in and face a corner, a little piece of privacy. When I started the job, I sat outside of the group I worked with. A female co-worker trained me on my first day. Half of her desk was shared by another worker and his enormous computer monitor. In between showing me the ropes, ripping through terribly complicated documents with lightning speed, I diligently took notes while she fielded calls from her borderline psychotic husband whom she was divorcing.

She’d dismiss him angrily and diplomatically, and slam down the phone. He’d redial her and they’d be at it again. Afterwards, she calmly returned to the work, and was still civil and kind to me, able to dissociate and separate the hell of her life for long enough, little enough to pay attention to her work. I don’t know how she managed. This was my first day. I wasn’t sure if this was the place for me.

A large light box was removed from the catacomb of cubicles to make an additional work space, accommodating my presence. But the woman who trained me took it. It was the only cubicle with three walls. Her walls were higher than anyone else’s. Sometimes, during someone’s lunch, she made phone calls in that person’s office with the door closed. In her new cubicle, she argued with her husband on speaker phone, demanding that the apartment he was planning to buy her not be within ten blocks of his place, which he’d argued was the most necessary condition of his buying her a place to go to.

I took her old seat with the shared desk, and a year later, when she moved downstairs into another department and finally got her divorce, I followed her into her second cubicle—the three walls now my own.

When I left my lover of five-and-a-half years, I was so angry. No one could see the anger on my face with my back turned to them. Now that my friend has disappeared, no one can see my tears. I don’t always need to hide in a stall in the bathroom to cry. My body starts to tremble, heat rising in my legs and my lungs trapped with strong cold. The words and letters on the screen begin blurring before me as my eyes get wet. They are more lubricated these days. I wonder what will happen if I move downstairs.

I was anxious all last week. Camden Sylvia and Michael Sullivan have been gone for over three weeks. Update: I was anxious all last year. Camden Sylvia and Michael Sullivan have been gone for over fifty weeks. Update: I have been anxious for over three years. Camden Sylvia and Michael Sullivan are gone. I wanted to know for sure that they were dead, anything to free me from the uncertainty. On Friday night, a friend called, telling me of an article she read about Camden’s landlord. He was profiled as a short-tempered, automatic assault weapon-carrying motherfucker who burned down his old home to get insurance money to buy the building that Camden and Michael lived in.

The courts knew that it was arson, but no one was convicted; the insurance company had to fork over the money. That piece of shit shot them because they withheld the rent, because they wanted enough heat to not freeze, wanted new windows that held in what little heat there was in the building, wanted a ceiling that wasn’t falling down on them. And he still hasn’t been considered a suspect in this case either; only a missing person because he too has disappeared. Where did he go? No one is saying. Where are my friends? Aliens could be the only thing keeping them alive outside of my heart.

Today, I opened a drawer in my desk at work and I found a red baseball cap that I bought for Camden but had yet to deliver. It says DIVA on it in small type. I thought about getting myself one. I can keep it now, with no one to give it to. At this point, it is much more meaningful to me, but I wish I could have seen her face when she removed the tattered, home-made Yankees hat she wore and put this on in its place.

Just seeing her face anywhere besides on that Missing Persons flyer on the Avenue A lamppost would make me feel better. If I only I had the chance. If only she weren’t dead. If only I could stop crying long enough to see the keys on the keyboard to see what the fuck it is that I am trying to say. I know how I feel and I wish it will end. I want to stop feeling all of this loss. This is too much pain for one fucking month, one holiday, one lifetime...but I know it’s not over; it never is. Never.

I listen to MDC and Black Flag really fucking loud. The torturous guitars and singers’ raking voices are so angry, so strong. I can feel the passion, the rage, the hatred, the betrayal, and their disbelief—their refusal to continue to believe in and accept the lies. I don’t want to get depressed this time. I want to stay angry, stay focused, stay with my tears and the fever of the pain shuddering my body until it’s over, until it passes—until the next tragedy comes along—until I can move on. I’m gonna keep going even though there is little else to balance me these days.

Memory of A Nightmare

I am alone in a darkness. I can’t see anything. I know that I am in a corner because I can feel the two sides against my back. I can’t follow the walls to the next corner—maybe find a door—because the room extends infinitely, walls disintegrating. I’m trying to hold the wall, to pull myself to it, screaming and crying for my mother my father my sister my brother my cousin my friend my lover my mentor my self. I can’t find any of them. There is no hand to hold, to pull me out, to guide me. The darkness has me captured. I can’t move. I’ve been standing here for over 25 years.

The weakest part hurts the most. The most primordial of all helplessness—being alone and being invisible. I feel like I’ve fallen off of the face of the earth and that is where I live. I am no where. I am no thing. I am alive.

The light lets me know that people are awake, that I cannot sleep forever, that I must get up and deal—put on my armor and go to work so I can pay for the apartment I come home to cry in. The daylight lasts longer now. I’m not prepared for this—to live.

Darkness come and take me into hiding. I’ll stay awake longer to feel more of this protection. Can’t do much during the day. I don’t want to be seen, but I don’t want to be invisible anymore. Take my hand. Feel me living. I am afraid to be alive.

Whispering

T he pain has worsened lately. I feel like I’m catapulting forward at a furious speed, faster than I can keep up with, decompensating along the way. I can’t smile all day at work. I can’t cry all day at work. I can barely go to work. I want the world to stop. Been moving too fast. Too fast. No time to even catch up. Eyes red from crying. Hot red, like my hat—diva—supposed to go to Camden, she not supposed to go the way she did either. I’m still here, and my tea bag’s wisdom today was: A falling leaf is a whisper to the living. I hung it on my lamp shade at work. I want it to illuminate, show me my day the right way. So much I want to get away from.

I see my beauty and love only when it is reflected at me. Mirrors don’t seem to help. Having some boyfriend or lover who doesn’t support me or help me to challenge myself—or worse—who is beneath me or hates that I can be an artist makes my indulgence in self destruction so easy. Breaking up, death: neither are as devastating as my own love questioning me about why I let it go, why I ignore it and abuse it, never give it its own self—my self. I want my self back.

On some level, I know that I am fabulous. I can feel my creative forces with a hint of how powerful they are, but not when there is no reflection of this in my surroundings. When I can’t see in the dark, it is because I have not let the light exist, remind myself that a falling leaf is a whisper to the living. Deaf from denial of the pain screaming in my ears. Some sensations are here, and I am aware of them. But others are too vague to judge origin or cure; only symptoms can be detected.

I am angry. I am anxious. I am alone. Sex helps. Shopping helps. Seeing friends helps. Therapy helps. Dancing until 4 a.m. on a Thursday night helps, but only for a while. I’m alone with my self when all of the coping activities have passed. I’m often unsure of what to do next, of how long I can stand the pain.

The magic carpet ride of romance isn’t real; the pain is. I don’t know if I need to divest in my pain in order to grow. My energy is all trapped in hate. I need some love for me, within me. My life could be so much more fulfilling if I could enjoy it. I make that so difficult sometimes: when the money runs out, when the men don’t call or fall for me, when I can’t get out of my head anymore. And what’s left is the anger; so consuming, especially when I know it’s not right. Some of me is ready to see it all, but that’s the part that only gets to see a little.

Camden Sylvia—Shooting Star

I will never see you again. Even your mother thinks that you are dead. The Village Voice printed the same photograph of you and your beau that they ran eight months ago. I’m saving both of them. During all of the years that I knew you, I never took a photo of you, even as we surrounded ourselves in the darkroom with contact sheets and test strips and rolls of developed film and processed slides and final prints of best friends and boyfriends who would betray us.

I try to reanimate you from memory. I see you on the street and I can’t believe that you’re alive. Then you turn around and you are someone else, ignoring me as I am gasping. I tell myself that Camden, New Jersey, has been named after you. And how appropriate a town it is for which an unsolved murder victim is the namesake.

I keep meaning to ask the guy who buys CDs at Academy Books if his last name is Sullivan. He looks and sounds like Michael, with the addition of a slightly irritated look on his face. I predict that he will lift his head from examining the CDs I am selling, and slowly nod, his face wrinkled by defeat. I didn’t know that your lover had a brother.

While Michael danced and acted, made movement in moments, you made things—objects and images that couldn’t be forgotten because they occupied space permanently. You made art that stared back at its viewers, art whose questioning couldn’t be ignored; there was no way to forget it.

Your old apartment on Amsterdam Avenue was cramped and couldn’t house all of your paintings, photographs, and sculptures. When I first visited, for an alternative Thanksgiving dinner, I couldn’t believe how many large canvases you had stuffed behind the sofa, sandwiched between dressers and walls—any place they’d fit. And you let me pull them out. You painted brightly-colored women’s bodies detached from time and space, rearticulated in the isolation of their pain. When you moved in with Michael—into his loft—you finally had the space envied by all artists. You started to paint again. You were afraid to go back after all of the time you took off, but you did it anyway. You were so busy then. Most of the stuff you produced never saw the light of day after completion.

The work I watched you make was fantastic, despite what you were told. Those big name artists picking up slush fund checks at their university jobs played us for suckers desiring to work with them because of their notoriety. Yeah, they were notorious—notorious for treating us like shit and trashing our work.

African-American photography guru, Roy DeCarava, drew students from all over the world to Hunter College to study with him. He preached love and hope, and then attacked our work because we explored beyond tradition and dared to introduce assertive substance and commentary to our work. Even in our photos that didn’t contain text or disturbing imagery, we could never fit into his vision. Questioning his cynical rhetoric only branded us trouble-makers, too dense to comprehend his wisdom. We used our energy “in the wrong way.” “There is a right way to do things,” and we ignored it.

Never mind that he was totally homophobic, and at seventy years old, wasn’t about to open his mind for contemplating the existence and ideas of the generations that followed his. The only woman among his “Roy’s Boys” was alarmed to hear about my less-than pleasant experiences with him. One day over lunch, she asked him if he had a problem with gays, to which he replied “they can do what they want, just not in my classes.”

A professor I trusted told me that I should show a sculpture that I had made to Andrea Blum. It was a full body cast (less arms) that I molded of a friend and covered with red oil stick which I then carved text into; the text described a time when I was anorexic. I hung it from the ceiling with fake black-colored hair running through the arm sockets.

In addition to writing my own passages, I referenced a few facts from the WAC Stats book that Woman’s Action Coalition published as “an attempt to expose the realities and inequities confronting women within this culture.”2 Andrea Blum was one of the editors of the book. You told me all about her—Miss Big-Time “Feminist Artist.”

You told me how she loved all of the men in the class and hated all of her female students and their work; about the dirty looks she gave you when she talked about your art; how she dismissed you and your sculptures in front of the whole class. The installation you made for the final project of that class was amazing.

Camden suspended curved shower curtain rods from the ceiling, and sewed together curtains out of those old purple-inked onion skin dress patterns that were sold at Five And Dime stores. They formed an L-shaped area which the viewer entered. Once inside, a second curtain was drawn to reveal a small steel stove top, balanced on a chipboard bathroom sink cabinet. In place of the stove’s oddly-shaped burners were photographs of large animal bones arranged atop slightly visible human faces. The photos were covered by plexiglass and lit from beneath. Also in the area was an ironing board with an old lead iron on it, crushing a pile of delicate vintage dresses that spanned many decades; the garments replete with ruffles, lace-up corsets, and long trains spilling onto the floor. A stool was positioned in between the stove and the ironing board. All Andrea said was “We’ve seen this before. It’s just domestic.”

Yeah, talk about domestication. Act out your unresolved self hatred and misogyny. Suck them pricks. Yeah, baby, tastes good, right? It’s so domestic. Oh, Andrea, you’ve come a long way, bitch. And whenever you complained to the white boy club supervisors about Andrea Dumb, they reminded you that she was having a rough time that semester because her mother was dying of cancer. They quickly changed the subject, encouraging you to take their painting and drawing classes to satisfy “requirements:” “a lot of the gyrls like my classes.”

They didn’t want to hear about how drunk their officemate-instructors were that morning, or that the WASPy history instructors who lectured about modern art never mentioned anything about women artists or artists of color and thought that Picasso and Pollack were the best fixtures found in bars, second only to light beer, sliced pizza, and ESPN. No one wanted to hear how the European-descended men in the classes never shut up, despite the fact that there were more women in the same classes, most of them being looked down upon because their art wasn’t shot out of the imperial phallic cannons of the great white west.

But that doesn’t matter, because you’re dead now, gyrl; one less stumbling block in their patriarchal career paths. It’s what they always wanted. No longer will your art be a source of agitation since you’re not coming back to create anything aside from your absence.

Live free or die!

That was the headline of the first phone zap flyer we made at Hunter College, when the Art department closed the darkroom before the end of the semester and then reopened it a week later for only half of the regular hours, all of which were during the day, when we worked. We had to sneak in after the last class and print all night. I don’t know how many calls the provosts got, but the department junta was not happy to hear from the deans that we were “giving them a hard time.”

The ventilation in the darkroom was intermittently working, and it scared the shit out of us whenever it kicked in, its whirring and clanging fans and motors echoing in the metal shafts. Cumulative psychotropic effects of the vanilla and vinegar-scented formaldehyde photochemistry only made us more paranoid. We were so scared that a killer was going to jump out of one of the unlit film loading rooms and slash our throats with the torn metal of spent 35 mm. film canisters.

Today is your birthday; you didn’t make it to 37. You’re dead now, gyrl. Today is your birthday; you didn’t make it to 37 because you’re dead now, gyrl. You’re dead, and I am talking to ghosts.

I was driving in Vermont last week. It was beautiful. Winding dirt roads bounced rocks up underneath the metal of the car’s bottom, clanking harder when tearing up dust on sudden declines and skidding out of ditches after moving to the side to allow for the infrequent oncoming car to pass. Enormous mountains blanketed by velvet and corduroy green trees surrounded the valleys of tall grasses and wild tiger lilies. The air was so cold and ozone rich. Why had I been deprived of this until then?

The night was 100% black darkness. No skyscrapers and traffic lights and light-reflective asphalt and street lamps invading the privacy of sleep through the shaftway window, the only one not painted shut or covered with dust and unable to slide up and down without the bottom piece of wood loosening from the pane and avalanching down the side of the building. And no fog trapping all of the dirty light less than a hundred feet above the sidewalk, sidewalk covered with forever-wandering homeless. No 24-hour, bullet-proof plexi-glassed bodegas and Chinese take-outs with oil so thick on the window you talk through to place your order you can’t even see the person getting you your food.

The forces of nature were uncorrupted by and oblivious to the contrivances of men. The land and its non-human inhabitants ruled. The crickets and frogs carried on, humming and belching as though I weren’t there. They knew their place, and they put me in mine. Swallows performed acrobatic zig-zags around my head. The water of the brook raced over centuries of granite rock and through handfuls of grass and leaves caught on branches and on corners at sharp turns. And in this rush of Mesopotamia, I remembered why these places were so frightening. I wasn’t scared from watching too many Friday The Thirteenth movies. I was scared because I was so free. This darkness is the same darkness whose secrecy is exploited for lynchings and for burning crosses and burning houses to the ground and sneak attacks on land and people not outside of this country’s grasp. And I feared for my life because I was so free, and so was anybody else who might suddenly appear out of nowhere and kill me. I forgot that I was in progressive Vermont and not Nazi Hampshire. Nature continued to ignore me and kept on flowing.

I looked up at the sky, its depth punctuated by all of the silver constellations. The stars and planets were visible with a clarity not ever available or imaginable in the city. Feeling like the luckiest telescope at Arecibo [Space Center], I saw a shooting star.

Was it you, crossing the Milky Way to Sagittarius, onward to celestial baptisms in the afterlife that you didn’t believe in? What did you want to tell me? Are you okay? How much did they hurt you before they killed you? Did your killers rape you? How long did they torture you? Were you separated from Michael? How many pieces did they chop your body into? Or were you melted to death with acid? Even your lover couldn’t help you.

Was it your landlord who killed you? Is that why he disappeared after you went missing—to dispose of your remains? We all know that he killed you, and that he’s done it before, and that he’s good at what he does, and that he won’t get found out; not any time soon.

Nine years ago, along with David King, an employee at his locksmith store, located in the same building as Camden’s apartment, landlord Bob Rodriguez conspired to open a fire alarm servicing business with an entire client database stolen from a company that King worked for. They were busted, and after a falling out with Rodriguez, David King “disappeared” during the proceedings of their trial, and has not turned up since. Last year, cops had inmates dig up bodies at Potter’s Field in an attempt to search for an unidentified male drowning victim who washed ashore not long after King disappeared, and who, even years later, strikingly resembled him.

A convicted drunken driver, your landlord always had a clear vision of an escape route from his crooked plans. While neighbors thought him to be incapable of a crime, as was the typical comment made to reporters, he was accused in many lawsuits for failing to pay debts, loans on equipment, back rent, taxes, and was the subject of a $13 million lawsuit that charged him with industrial espionage.

In your building, the cops found what they thought was a blood stain, but it failed laboratory analysis. I was at home listening to the radio on Thanksgiving morning and heard that a handless, headless female body was discovered in a New Jersey lake by a duck hunter. Preliminary speculations were made, but no conclusions were drawn. I left my house to meet a friend for tea in the neighborhood. I came back to find that the body wasn’t yours.

That same day, your landlord resurfaced. This time, he had a new lawyer—a high-profile criminal defense attorney whose clients have included members of the Gambino crime family. He still wouldn’t talk with the police and refused to cooperate in any way unless an arrest warrant was issued. The cops say that they don’t have enough evidence on which to base an arrest, and the District Attorney refused to sign a search warrant for Rodriguez’s home in New Jersey. But the pigs never need an excuse to justify themselves when they shoot an unarmed African-American teenager 16 times in his back, or pull him over in his car on the New Jersey Turnpike and jail him and his friends for no reason, after a strip search, or rape street walkers in poor neighborhoods and get away with it, as though it were part of their jobs. Your landlord also refused to accept rent for the apartment from anyone other than you and Michael. Your mother had offered him the rent for December and January, but those money orders were never cashed.

Law enforcement has not suddenly become more humanitarian and less racist or reckless. If you and your landlord had switched ethnicities, you may have never made the news. But you are all over television, and people are watching, including Rodriguez’ mafia mouthpiece. Even the police know your landlord is crazy enough to try and alter fate, tempt conviction, kill his way out of it if he thinks he needs to.

In February, a foot was found bobbing between boats in Battery Park City. Your mother had to drive in from Hyannis to provide a DNA sample to see if it matched. It wasn’t yours; although, you did walk among the rich, renting apartments to diplomats and debutantes. But you were not as well off as the press portrayed you to be. Your apartment was by no means “posh,” with all of the buckets and bowls in the house catching the dripping rain and melted snow from the roof. The most bizarre irony is that you were a real estate agent; over 12 years at the same rotten job. It was the first one you took when you came to New York—same pay from back then too.

You bought your first computer in the spring. That machine was supposed to be your way out of real estate, to liberate you so you could work at home, get the fuck out of that horrendous job. You would have been a fierce graphic designer if you lived. And I thought that my unanswered emails to you were the result of your modem not working. The messages I sent to Buena914@aol.com bounced back to me as “undeliverable,” with “permanent fatal errors.” Buena was the name of a street Michael lived on in Chicago before he moved to New York. Ultimately, the buena [“good”] was left behind, because you’re dead now, gyrl, and it is raining as I write, as I write and cry. Are you crying with me?

Our tears release the pressure. The heat and humidity have been relentless and unbearable, keeping me up too late. Now, I can go to bed. But I don’t know how. I don’t get decent sleep anymore. When it rains, the whole world is crying. All of the crimes against humanity and nature are recognized and recounted in the downpour of tears. But thunder deafens and lightning blinds. Dysfunction is volcanic. The wooden doors in my apartment swell in their jambs and refuse to open, trapping me inside. I can’t walk on the wooden floor without it creaking under the weight of my steps. I can’t tune in the radio without being bombarded by static. This hurricane is labelled “disaster” by meteorological officials. They are wrong. This is a message from the universe.

The President finally came forward to testify that his private life of adultery is none of our business. Car bombs in Kenya and Tanzania and Northern Ireland are effective distractions from his pathetic request to be left alone with his lies. And they are perfect representations of the hidden unrest and coming global economic collapse. Maybe it’s convenient that you are dead; you wouldn’t be laid off and in need of highly polished job skills for a new career.

Marines in Nairobi refused Kenyans use of their equipment to help rescue non-Americans from the rubble at the U.S. Embassy after it blew up. That was after the armed soldiers denied them access to the exploded building. After a while, the screams for help from within the ruins died down. Pale-skinned American bodies were whisked away to private morgues for proper burial preparation. Kenyans were piled high at the government meat locker, along with a few African-Americans, whom the U.S. discounted as Kenyans. Oops.

A friend of a neighbor of mine went missing in June. His body was pulled out of the lake in Prospect Park, late in July. His name was Lindsey “Umel” Cross, but I didn’t see it anywhere in the news. He was a gay African-American man who probably got bumped off while cruising for sex in the park after the 1 a.m. curfew. The police called it a suicide, and the Gay And Lesbian Anti-Violence Project hasn’t been able to convince them to consider any other possibilities. Not being able to score any trade is no reason to suicide oneself. And where were the cops to help him out of it, had that been his decision?

The police drive around the park after dark, giving out tickets and harassing and arresting and scaring the life out of you by gunning their cars up on you with no lights on until they are three feet away. That’s when they throw on their search lights full blast. It’s hard to see who the fuck they are, but the sting of their clubs and fists is familiar. I’ve seen them bust many an outreach worker from local HIV-prevention organizations as they distribute safer sex literature and condoms to the men on the stroll. It’s about to rain tonight, so attendance in the park is probably low.

The wind is blowing through the trees. The rustle of the leaves drowns the sounds of the city, with the exception of the occasional ambulance siren zooming past my window, or the engine roar a cop car from the precinct down the block that’s shooting in the wrong direction on this one-way street. The humidity has finally exploded into wet, but even as I write, the rain has not alleviated the tension or the thick heat. I am still sticky and bloated, and I’ll be up all night, resisting the melt, crying and writing, breaking my promise to not bite my nails, making art for us, going to work tomorrow wasted on just a few hours of sleep, wishing that I could take off for a few months.

I should go on maternity leave. I have been carrying your disappeared spirit in my womb for nine months without rest. My stomach keeps getting bigger; so big I can hardly walk without its pain pulling at my bending back, begging me to lay down for a moment—only a second—a short rest.

So I do, and I discover that the tissue box is empty, and Mary Magdalene isn’t here to wipe my face. When the phone rings at 5 a.m., it isn’t you; just some crazy gyrl in Thailand stalking the star of Pretty In Pink. She keeps calling so I unplug the phone.

And there is no comfort in my refrigerator. I’ve eaten all of the carob chip cookies and the fat-free pretzels. I haven’t turned on the oven to cook since it got hot. I have no take-out left-overs since I can’t afford restaurants, and the salads that I made for the next several days’ lunches can’t be eaten, because there is nothing to replace them with.

I’m supposed to be at work in four hours and I know that I should have bought more Valerian and Melatonin when I got paid last week, and Damn!: There is no soy milk to wash the pills down if I did have them, or to have for breakfast in the morning.

I spent all of my money on therapy and I’m not even going two times a week anymore. I stopped that last year, when my insurance cut me off—the same month that I broke up with my lover and moved, and when you disappeared. All of this calculating of my desolation only holds my attention for a short while.

I want to hear you, so I call your phone number. 1-212-825-8876. A gruff police voice answers and wants to know if I have any information. No, I don’t think that you’ll ever find them, but could I just hear their voices on the outgoing message of their answering machine one more time?

But you’re dead now, gyrl, and they took that away from me too. Your number gets disconnected. No one acknowledges that you were alive. There is no memorial message for you and Michael, to be heard by friends or family calling, for as long as we need to hear it.

I haven’t seen you on Milk cartons yet, but I don’t drink milk and haven’t been looking either. Oh! Its’ been so long that I forgot: only missing children wind up there. Where does your photo get posted? I went online and did a search for you. The police have you and Michael on their web site. This doesn’t seem like a safe place.

You are now an unperson, and I need to let go of the notion that I can undo all of this by writing about you and making collages with pictures of you from the newspapers and postcards—the ones you sent me from when you vacationed in Cape Cod or from home in New York when you thought I needed a good laugh.

One card is a photograph of a multi-level serving tray used in the kitchen of some convent. All of the trays have pictures accompanying the names of the nuns on tags, so that the server can identify them easily. They look really old. To us, this is such high camp.

Sister Luciana
Sister Alfonsa
Sister Hedwig Marie
Sister Mary Cecelia
Sister Mary Blanche
Sister Mary Patrick.

On the back, you wrote:

Hey—thought I’d send this to you, as I thought you might have some clue as to what this is all about, especially since I have no damn idea! I’ll leave it to you! Hope you are enjoying this great weather. XO, Camden

I got it in the mail six months before you disappeared—the eighth of May. Was I supposed to take this as a sign? Should I have shown it to a psychic? Could that have prevented you from vanishing?

The hand-made Japanese mug that you gave me to drink out of at my job kept winding up with coins in it whenever I momentarily left it in the kitchen. I never found out which coworker was leaving them in my mug. Was this a hint, telling me to get my tea read, or should I have gone to a numerologist with this information? What did the amounts mean—5¢, 3¢, 12¢?

[Three-and-a-half years after your disappearance, you made the news again as the cops searched the Hudson River for you. They received an anonymous tip that lead them nowhere. At the time, I was cautiously picking up pieces of my Japanese mug from the wet carpet that lines the floor at my job. The mug slipped from my hand and was lost to chance before I could catch it. Before I found out that divers were looking for you, I found you, Camden, your spirit embodied in shattered ceramic, still restless with the understanding that all of the love in the world could not save you. And all of the tears in the world will not bring you back. But I still love you. I still cry for you.]

Everything becomes more significant these days. I look for imbedded semiological meanings in public signage and in strangers’ conversations that I eavesdrop on while riding the crowded subway. I listen to men mumbling while sleeping in my bed. One spoke in Japanese and traced a few characters on the wall with his finger. I knew for sure that this meant something beyond the fact that he lived in Japan for ten years. He was a radical activist and legal historian; there was no way he was talking nonsense. But he wasn’t channelling you that night; just the Japanese Imperial University where he once studied.

I mapped out your telephone number to the letters on the numbered buttons of my phone and created anagrams. They told me to Turn back and Talk to MS. MS—Michael Sullivan—your lover, or the look-alike at the CD store? Your name became Diva calms yen. You lived in yam cans. You are to be calm, and deny the visa. Deny the visa to your grave. Don’t die—I’m not ready to lose you. No mamma, don’t go. Don’t leave us, even if you aren’t coming back.

I don’t know what to do. I’m gonna keep crying—that comes naturally; crying, heaving, breathing, heaving, breathing this wet mantra after the rain, joining in with the crickets. I can hear them in the front and back yards. There is always one soloing, singing louder than the rest, sounding a battle cry. But they don’t move; they just smolder in all of that darkness. And when the sun comes up and lights the sky lavender, my apartment turns into a small observation tower in the middle of a bird sanctuary. Sometimes the birds are so loud that I have to close the windows.

At my old apartment, I had to close the windows to keep out my neighbors’ cigarette smoke, their guitar playing after midnight, the screams of a woman having her bi-monthly nervous breakdown, getting raped by her boyfriend, and the cries of her children the next morning as she beat them to get up for school. The wilderness surrounding my apartment is by no means as overwhelming as it is in Vermont, or anywhere far outside the city or this country. And the birds keep chirping all morning until the cicadas start sounding their air raid in the early afternoon. The crickets pick up again at dusk.

These insects don’t go on vacation during the summer. They stay and guard my house—my own security and alarm system, unable to be debugged by any locksmith.

The temperature will cool down in the coming weeks and the insects will leave their vigil, marching into the wars that they have been warming up for all summer. Their anagram chants, decoded, become clearer as they press on:

Don’t deny the diva,
eating yams,
living in zen
living in zen
living in zen
living in zen
living its end
living its end
You’re dead now, gyrl, and I am talking to ghosts.

 

1. Claffey, Mike, Michele McPhee, and Alice McQuillan. “Pearl St. Mystery.” Daily News [New York]. 18 Nov. 1997, final ed.: 4-5, 60.

2. The Women’s Action Coalition, WAC Stats. (New York: WAC, 1992) III.