from Startles

 

My eye met the mongoose’s eye; the animal appeared to be paralyzed, though one front leg shook. A leaf-like object fluttered in its mouth, from which an electric pulse seemed to emanate. The mongoose’s odd stillness met our own. I spotted a motorcyclist at the top of the hill and told him, as if to describe the mongoose might cure it. On the way down, the man stopped to tell me the mongoose had walked off the road, “struggling a bit.”

The story lacked a beginning or an end, at least for us. What it didn’t lack was analogy. Take the mongoose as an immigrant on the concrete road; take the road as a cul-de-sac, which it is, though it’s at the back of the cemetery in front of accordioned mountains. Take yourself as witness without power to aid, your dog less bloodthirsty than befuddled. This is not a story, but a situation whose emotional center is helplessness.

If I could have walked for the mongoose, I would have gotten him off the road and onto the grass. But empathy doesn’t extend to the limbs. If I could reach to remove the zip ties from a small child in Chicago, I’d need to break the screen that sits between us and history. Not like a truck window in late morning, reflecting blue sky and trees and me with my camera. Rather a screen that cannot reflect. One that only projects.

I can take photos now, but I can’t reflect. It’s not that I’ve become a surface, like a window, but that the truck cab inside my ribs is stuffed full of paper cups and straws and a Bible on the passenger seat. There’s no way to get inside. Auto-portraits come of it, my face blocked by the camera’s lens as it looks at, but not into, itself. One comfort of photography is its refusal of depth.

To say is not to explain. To have explained was a privilege, but explanations wear out like light bulbs and washers and dryers. We hope to hear the sound of the machine to know we have fixed it, but there’s no looking at its eye, an eye that stares back. There’s no talking to the small brown mongoose on the road, though it squeaks like a tiny motor. To say is to say what you see in the early light beneath mountains and the clouds they seem to spit out, but there’s nothing to listen to now, except 80s music that leaks from the earbuds of another walker.

That isn’t the sound of time passing, but of its repetitions, those that are surfaces that prevent us from feeling time boring in, reminding us of politics and loss and the fact we won’t know where the mongoose went or if it is still alive. The man on the motorcycle sees things not as they are but as they pass by. Fence post to fence post to fence post, the clicking of a shadow into place. I cannot think of what it means, but I see it as musical notation, stuck in space but marking prospective sound. Start time by singing it.