union

At all times gaze into the heights and keep on mounting. If you aim at what is low, you will sink down into the netherworld. Accustomed to take the even, easy road, you have almost lost the ability to aspire after the sublime...courage is required in whatever one does: courage itself is power."-----Sri Sri Anandamayi Ma

Union
Union square, wet from the november showers. At approximate dawn, the sun was in an indeterminate space, behind grey curtains. Not even the homeless people were in the square, where they were, I don’t know. The lone obelisk, crowned with a copper statue of victory, glittered in the rain. I sat alone, in ripped tights like a whore, Invisible to even myself, and waited for a sign of life.

There was none.
The square was ringed in hotels. There was Tiffany’s, and Macy’s and Nike and Prada. Fake antiques threatened to plummet through second story glass walls and crash onto the slick sidewalks, the broken cable car lines. The same objects had been for sale since I was a child, visiting San Francisco, when the map of the city had been obtruse and slightly speculative in my mind. It was only the potential for a street to connect with another, and the grid of the city was constantly entangling and reassembling, attempting to form into a trap from which you might never escape. I learned quickly from my dreams--nocturnal-- that all cities will do this to you. It is their perogative, to entrap and distract from the organic decomposition that unfolds forever outside the city limits.

When you are inside the moving grid, it is like being on the escalators of Macy’s at christmas, everything shines and you know neither whether you are going up, or going down. You catch reflections of yourself in golden mirrors--but was that a mirror? or a window? Was that a Lancome poster that merely resembled the way your hair fell to your cheek? Or did you model yourself to look like her? Going up, going down, lost faces, it seems that you have seen that older woman before, maybe in the Sunset, or the avenues, and for some reason remembered the fold of her falling cheek. Gone, she is swept by into the throng and rush, until the next hapless discovery.

On the southeast corner of the square, Neiman Marcus is lit with effervescence and grandeur that is horrifying in the face of global recession. Where do they get the money to bring in a 50 year old conifer? And how in God’s name do they get it inside the building? VIsions of midnight helicopters depositing the yearly sacrifice into place, dangerously lowering the giant in four stories of ghastly pine shedding, makes one fear for the sanity of the city. Had any one actually seen the tree arrive, or did it just materialize one morning, like an inward blooming, spring in december in the greenhouse of the foyer?

People live in hotels. This thought occured to me, staring up at the heavily lidded windows of the Starlite room. The pink bulbs crested in a neverending upward plume, drawing the eye into the black skybar. How many times had I placed a greasy palm on the inside of that window and traced the arterial hemorraging of the city with my fingers, this time from above? Several. Now sitting below, chin tilted upwards, that previous self seemed innocently unaware, blissfully floating above the shivering and shuddering crowd, hiding in the relative dark of tourism and cigar smoke. Foreigners at the bar, lonely and jetlagged, lazily observing, assuming I was an eastern european escort. How else to explain standing alone, back to the room, I must be only pretending to take in the city. Return to their bitter drink and oversized california olive, flavorless but gigantic. The napkin stuck to the drink.

Eyes back down, fingers fall to lap. Still, not a soul in the square. A few cabs slice by, flicking up puddles, adding to the background static of the slumbering city. Perhaps today would not begin. There was always that possibility, never assume anything. Perhaps I would sit here as the day gradually lightened and darkened, time lapse photography, breathless.

It had been months since we lived on the floor down the street, sleeping on layers of blankets. Me rising with you to make the coffee, while you sought socks so caked with grime and sweat that they were hardened discs on the bathroom floor. Some nights we may have gotten no more than an hour of troubled frenetic oblivion, induced by military industrial grade seroquil layered on top of mafia affiliated experimental pills. I let you hold me as I had never been held, fully relaxing and stilling, like a bird trapped under a coat.


Anybody who says they have fallen in love in San francisco is lying. When in San Francisco, you can not fall in love with a person, but only the city itself. The events which transpire are merely ploys to lure you ever deeper into the city’s intricate machinations. Again, the layers of subways and sinkholes, the alleys and dead ends, wrapped like plastic bags ripped and flinging violently on barbed wire. Cities, deteriorating from the inside out, like crustaceans molting, or old men drinking.

The ever revolving young at the gates, lurching onto buses and trams and out of clubs and into bars, guided by the same currents which catch the schizophrenics and leave them treading water on the corners, an eddy behind the bank, floating in an oil spill of rogue hedge funds, lapping at the bases of the highrises. Wayward speculative economies marooned like red tide around the ankles of the shining giants. In the timeless first light, the disaster is fully apparently, ringing the towers with nuclear foam, the tide retreated to the bay, leaving only a tragic high mark of a final lunar landing.

Those that hear the voices on the gossamer strands, the tens of thousands who never sleep, but haunt the streets, trace the spiderwebs into infinite confusion. To find yourself there, so far from minnesota, or duluth, or wherever, a sliver of the old self in the mind, now thoroughly stranded in the present, drifting refuse in the sullied ocean, plastic that can’t dissolve. Who was that old self with childlike voice, ringing in the mind? The beard matted, the urine soaked pants, the eyes moving of their own volition, faster than the sun can rise or set. Another day, another moment, the two times are women tugging on one an other, threatening to leave you standing as salt.

We no longer live there. But part of me is hidden in several places throughout the city, even from myself. I have come to collect her, but the city has shifted like sand on the beach, and the landmarks are only approximate.

I pick my way through the garbage and along the line of neon foam ringing the square, searching for whole sand dollars in the piles of shattered disks. Standing, circling in the square, catching glimpses of my previous selves passing through the grid, walking through one and other, unaware of any overlap. One, two, eleven rotations through the central clock. Time as marked by wildly swinging ellipticals, the center is nearly invisible. But I know what it is, pointed and granite.

The night Cakes got out of jail, we came here, and I refused to join your group for a photo on the low stairs. Come on Liz, you’re crazy! Get in here. I turned slowly and gave you a look over my shoulder, cutting my eyes like diamonds. It drew blood and you bled internally, in your brain, tiny lesions percolated. You tasted blood in your throat and it tasted like iron, making you salivate and inhale the wet air, a hair raising affirmation of the hunt.


Cakes could barely say anything, he soaked in the electric lights like they were final suns. And Allegra spoke nothing at all, but glided through the urban ocean sweeping her golden royal net. We all paused beneath a giant pine, it dwarfed the obelisk and sparkled with thousands of LEDS. The destination attained, but no prize in sight, you began to pace, listless. Taking pity on you, I dared you to climb the central tree, pointing at the upper most ornament, a bauble larger than my head, a perfect reflective space helmet. I wanted to see you climb to the highest level but you only made it as far as the first branch. You snagged the first available ball and snatched it under your coat.

We ran en masse, perpetual children stealing christmas.

After that night in union square, I was still married in body, but my soul was free. Leaving the square that night, I had brazenly flung a carbon copy of myself on the bricks. Now, a year later, my litter lingered, curling around my ankles. I knew I should not have joined the photo. I have never even seen it, but I know it exists, among the trillions of digital images in the abyss of data in the ever deepening straits. And if we ever found the photo online, it would only serve to remind us of what was lost, of final moments of public childhood. There we would be, dazed on the event horizon of ourselves. This digital evidence of our young faces would only reinforce the sense that we had stopped right before the end, that we had given up to the cold, and thrown up our hands. How close we had been to that secret center of the city, that left door, the final gate.