ALCHEMIES OF THE HEART. David Dorian
strenuous artificial biking. I fell asleep on the faux-leather couch. Time passed unrecorded. When I woke up, my cervical vertebrae were hurting a lot. The television was still on, featuring a documentary, When Fish Attack, showing many assaults on preys by sharks, barracudas, swordfish, eels, rays, sea snakes, etc.
Two Time Zones
I showered and got dressed. I walked back to the bedroom to retrieve my watch on the night table. It ran thirty-six minutes ahead. It marked an unlived future. This Swiss watch didn’t depend on a battery. It picked up the vibrations of the hand movements which oscillates a tuning fork. It had been, till now, an accurate chronometer offered for my fortieth birthday by my wife. I pressed it to my ear. Mechanical arrhythmia was the diagnosis. It was still measuring time, but not the time I was living in. I stored it in my pocket, promising to visit a watchmaker. This Swiss watch had been crafted with aplomb by artisans who had taken precision to a standard of the highest order. Was this time monitor responding to a schism in my time continuum? Was its delicate and sensitive mechanism, the indented wheels and gears designed and cut by artful craftsmen, compromised? Had the pinions and sprockets been affected by my emotional crisis precipitated by my existence in two chronological time zones?
Our heart is a time machine, like a chronometer in music. It measures the passage of that dimension and establishes a cadence. We are all allotted a certain number of beats. And then the mechanism ceases. We call it cardiac arrest. The watch was strapped to my wrist and was picking up heartbeats and the rhythm of blood gushing through my arteries. The pulse of a subject is taken by pressing that articulation point of the metacarpus. My watch sensed my pulse on a continuous basis. It oscillated the tuning fork. Was it now reacting to my asymmetrical heartbeat? Was the beat of my watch altered by an intermittent heart?
*****
Alvard had invited me to Delilah’s, a soul food restaurant bar on First Avenue. I ordered a bourbon, and he asked for Perrier.
“She’s gifted, your masseuse,” I voiced.
“In the twelfth century she’d burn at the stake,” he said.
“You think she’s a witch?” I intoned.
“Who cares?”
“I’ve been reading about massage. They talk of a spiritual transcendence achieved by some patients during massage sessions. I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I felt after she finished with me. How did you find her?” I asked.
“I was doing a gig at Jezebel’s in Harlem. I was buddy with the owner Hadrian Vergilius, a guy from Martinique. He had a side business. He’d deliver girls to chic pubs and bars uptown. Pimp extraordinaire. I became the physician for all the girls. Maintained hygiene, you know. Hadrian’s drinking was getting worse. He tried AA. The booze was killing him. One night I drove him to an AA meeting, and there she was. He met her there. She was networking for her business. Plenty of potential customers there. He scheduled an appointment. After three massage sessions, he couldn’t touch alcohol.”
AA is a circle of Dante’s hell, a sanctuary for the damned, a holding cell. Lost souls congregated in those rooms seeking rescue and salvation, Alvard explained. Her beauty was a lure for down-and-out men whose egos were diminished by their debilitating addictions. They thought they could munch on her Asian pussy. They all became her patients. She haunted that subterranean underworld inhabited by sinners, offering glimmers of hope to helpless souls. The resurrection she peddled was accessible. She would touch their ailing skin, caress their neglected epidermis. And they wouldn’t drink anymore.
“And she doesn’t even speak English,” Alvard said.
He sipped his Perrier.
“She talks with her hands. She’s a Walkyrie,” he said.
“What’re you talking about?”
“A Walkyrie, a Chooser of the Dead. She picks wounded warriors in the battlefield and flies them to Valhalla,” he said.
“He’s still her client?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Hadrian.”
“Died in a car crash.”
“What happened?”
“Hadrian bought a beach bungalow in Ogunquit, Maine. A foreclosure deal. Very cheap. We’d hang out there, in the summer, and eat lobsters 24-7. The police report said it was highway fatigue. He’d been driving for eleven hours. He was sober when he had the accident.”
The Yanks Are Coming
We all worry to death about the circumstances of our death. It is our birth that should preoccupy us. Today is my birthday.
Forty-nine years ago, a stray shell from a twelve-inch naval gun from an American Destroyer stationed five miles from the North African Coast hit the short-stay Hotel Sevigny at Rue Lasalle and tore it to shreds. The thunder created by the nearby explosion stunned my mother. I came out of her womb ejected into the sound and the fury of Operation Torch, the American landing in Casablanca, Morocco.
“Quel jour pour naitre,” Mother moaned.
“I va etre en colere toute sa vie parce qu’il est ne pendant un bombardement,” Solange, the neighbor, commented.
My mother sent Solange to fetch the priest so I’d be baptized, in case I’d die that day. By that rite, she would secure my entrance into the next world. Solange returned empty-handed. The church had been hit by an American shell and had caved in, and the priest had given up the ghost under a mountain of beams from the collapsed roof. I was never baptized.
Dense smoke from the burning hotel choked the neighboring streets. The singed walls smoldered for days. I inhaled these exhalations, which incinerated my throat and filled my eyes with tears. Is that what caused my asthma?
After the fall of France, my father took a bus to Tangiers, crossed the straits of Gibraltar on a fishing boat, hitchhiked through Spain, and crossed the Pyrenees to Provence, where he joined the partisans. He filled the ranks of the Resistance, which attracted students and French Army deserters who refused to collaborate with the invaders. He had become a combatant, placing explosives on railroad tracks, derailing troupe transports, slaughtering garrisons. He didn’t know he had a son. I never knew I had a father.
My mother, who made a living from tips as a waitress in the bistrot Café du Soleil, a dive for a garden variety of local alcoholics and American infantrymen, found herself without employment as the eating establishment was looted by starving Arabs. Desperate to feed me and trapped for cash, she opened her apartment to American soldiers garrisoned in the city, turning her two rooms into a bed-and-breakfast for the victors. The guests didn’t come empty-handed. Their ticket to my mother’s cuisine and her bed were canisters of evaporated milk and large boxes of salted butter. I owe my strong bones to the rivers of American milk and Wisconsin butter I devoured.
My mother was an alluring woman: alabaster skin, maroon eyes, cascading hazel-colored hair. A Captain Jim Martin, from New York, was a repeat visitor. He played the banjo and laughed for no reason. He would bring chocolate, a luxury item in a time of famine, from the military PX. Jim was a superb American: jovial and generous. He married my mother before he went to kill more Germans. His unit moved across North Africa, stalking the retreating Afrika Corp. He escorted General Patton across Sicily, Italy, and the Ardennes. He returned triumphant, many dollars in his pockets. To the victor belongs the spoils. He hauled Mother and me to the New World. We moved to Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, into a two-bedroom apartment with a balcony full of pots where my mother cultivated fines herbes.
I have to thank the States of Wisconsin and Michigan for my survival. Before the Americans landed, kids in North Africa were dying of starvation. The French had requisitioned the crops for the German army fighting the Russians, leaving nothing for the local population. The GIs entered the city and with truckloads of powdered milk in tow. Thousands of babies—French, Jews, and Arabs born in the war years—are alive today because of the Yankees.
I