Sense of Speech

It’s hard for me to explain what I was feeling at the house party. My thoughts and senses became one. Everything seemed merged in pairs. The music became one with the light and together they hazed the room in red. The cigarette smoke entangled itself with the scent of lipstick warmed from the pull of her mouth. Someone’s dark hair became the shadow of the Bougainvillea he sat behind. A freshly laundered shirt was tinted with after-dinner coffee and burnt steak.
I was in another one of my states and I was having difficulty getting words out and in. So I mostly kept the wine glass to my lips and pretended my mouth was too full to talk, pretended to hear the words that bounced off me like hail on a windshield.

My ability to speak was definitely impaired but my sense of speech was not. I could feel words without actually hearing them. I looked around the room. A woman lost in possibility, put her long fingers to her lips. A man’s face paused in fear before bursting into laughter. The hairs all over your body are there to hear those moments. Of this I am certain.

Nothing would go unnoticed by me tonight.

There was something soft in her voice and excited in her blood. It was like this, I heard the words through the movements of her body and expressions of her eyes. They ended a sentence by glancing to the side and underlined words by shooting a direct look into my pupils. I was deaf to everything but that. Her place of work was something that lit up her face and engorged a vein near her temple. Talk of family squared her shoulders and opened her chest so I noticed the opal that hung on her neck. The topic of her last love showed me the place where her hair, like a dark ocean ended and the shore of her neck began. I wanted to become stranded there.
Just so you know, I didn’t hear myself either. My words were merely notes to bring her closer and thus know her better. I noticed how a certain subject would make her breasts rise towards me, another would make her eyes glisten; another would make her hands finger the sugar packets on the dinner table. A breath became deeper and in this way, something new would be learned. I wondered what else I could discover when I got close enough to touch her.

14th St.Station

It sounded like storm clouds were caught in the dark tunnel. You see nothing, pitch black. Steel ground to dust now in your nose. Dirt turned to light absorbing darkness.
A small wind began to blow the smell of uptown, through the dusty tube. Like the inside of a syringe the subway pushed billions of piss atoms from 42nd Street which began to push billions of donut atoms from 34th Street. Standing on the 14th street platform I began to smell the steel donuts. “Turn your head, the piss is coming next.”
I said this to Aparna who faced the strengthening breeze with her eyes closed as though she was spraying her face with a sweet mist or acquiring some blissful knowledge from above. “I would hold my breath right about now.” I repeated. It made me laugh but I managed to breath out sharply as the wind and subway car arrived. The large caged fans above us shook. The rumble became a crashing, squealing, screeching agony of metal on metal.

The only ones who can stand it are the deaf teenagers that hang out in the open passageways after school. Dressed in baggy clothes, overstuffed book bags between their legs, they sign to each other animatedly, focusing on each other’s hands and lips. The cacophony vibrating through their bodies add sounds to their signs louder than any human voice.

Guitar Painted Lions

Federico de la Selva sanded his guitars in silence. Well, not exactly silence. There was the rasping sound of soft toothed paper against wood. With even strokes, like a metronome, he would listen closely for the rasp to lessen. But only he could hear it. Maybe he was listening with his hands. I think that’s what he told me. That he would listen with his hands. Yes, I remember now, this is how he knew the wood was ready. I don’t know what kind of wood. It was brought by a small boy who lived in a town with a name that was known only by locals. To find it on a map, you must put your finger on the red star of the city. Now move your finger in a North Easterly direction, over the mountains and stop at the first black dot of the known town. Now follow the thin black line and continue on the thinner line that branches to the south, past the monument, past the overlook, keep sliding, past the dotted green area, past the triangles and arrows. The sound your finger makes is the same sound as the finished rasp. It’s a quiet sound. You can hardly hear it unless you listen with your hands.

The boy who brought the wood came once a month with his father and grandmother. At the bus stop, they would split up, each to sell their wares in different locations of the red starred city. Once, during a particularly rainy season the boy’s harvested wood had tiny holes in it. Federico told the boy that he could not buy the wood because the sound, he explained, would spill out of every little hole... ”Instead of the big one I make in the center, see?” He pointed to his other guitars. As I said, sometimes we can hear things by feeling them and Federico heard the boy’s heart break. This meant he would have no money to bring back to bus stop. Federico bought the wood anyway and made three guitars. They were beautiful, darker somehow, than the rest with a randomness of holes that told a story of worms or insects or something. Something had changed the wood.

The day Federico was ready to string the first guitar, the boy walked in with more wood, this time, pristine and dry. “The guitars! Is the sound spilling out?”
Federico finished stringing. “I don’t know, lets see.” Federico tuned the guitar, turning a peg and flicking a string with his thumb. The sound was a hoarse, introverted cough that started but dampened and instead of flying outward, it ran back inside splitting itself out amongst the little holes. Federico looked up at the boy. This is the part where I walk in. The boy saw me looking at them and said knowingly “The sound is spilling from the little holes instead of the big one.”
“Its beautiful.” I said to the boy, and then I said to the guitar maker, “Hold it closer, try to make your body cover the holes.”

Federico embraced it. First like a baby, then like a lover, then like a long lost friend. And like this he held it tighter and closer covering as many holes as he could with his body. The boy and I helped, a hand here, an arm there. Finally, the guitar could be heard, its vibrations of sound reflecting from our bodies, resonating outward and mingling with our laughter.

Imaginings of the Moon

Among the rooftops we waited. The sky was clear and only the full moon was strong enough to make its presence in the night sky. The stars that dotted the darkness were actually red bulbs from buildings announcing their height or yellow and white windows radiating various intensities of warmth from far away.

We held each other not saying a word, close enough to hear each other's breathing and nothing else so that the city below could have been an ocean ebbing and flowing with our breaths which were slow and smelled sweet. The sky above was a carpet of blue-black silk threads. The moon shone proud and serene as though it had invented this scene. I remember wondering if it was the moon that thought us up.

Stone Quilt

The stone quilt led us to a green door. Matt had told us it was here that we would find the carpets of San Limor. There would be something special about them, he promised.
“Look at the ground, there must be a million different kinds of cement!” Aparna moved ahead like a bloodhound pointing to a blue-gray square, a silver-gray rectangle. All the various shades a gray could take, made up our path like a stone quilt.
In front of the green door, there sat a black man in a white sweatshirt with a tan dog. The dog lunged at us, teeth behind a black leather muzzle.
“We’re here to see Otto.” I said in a hopeful tone.
The man said Otto never said nothing about nobody comin’ to see him. He was polite but stern and I wondered how the hell we were going to get inside.
“What’s your dog’s name?” Aparna asked stepping backwards in exaggerated steps like a mime might do. She smiled that smile of hers and I pulled out my camera. The man smiled too.
“The Business!” He answered and his chin lifted a bit.
“I would love to take a picture of you and The Business.” I said solemnly, raising my camera with two hands like an offering.
The man let me take pictures. He started talking to the air, to the concrete, to us.
“I named him after my ex-wife. She was the business, man! Sweet face, but a mouth like a pit-bull…Mean.‘N stupid too Left me for some fat white man who ran a circus. Fuckin’ bitch ran away, with the circus, can you believe it? Hope she havin’ three-headed babies for the sideshow right about now. That’s what I hope.”
“May she give birth to a 10 pound eggplant!” I added. We all laughed and finally he said he would take us to see Otto inside.

I’ll tell you about Otto and what happened later, but right now I need to leave you with the knowledge that the carpets of San Limor are astounding. Their patterns symmetrical and complex close up, simple and chaotic from afar, viewing them was like breathing in the mathematics of beauty. I wanted to rest on one, to pray on one, to make love on one. Aparna felt the same. It was an urgent feeling and we plotted our secret return that very night.