from Startles

 

If you’re certain of something, there’s the indicative verb in Italian. If you’re uncertain, there’s the subjunctive. No longer a signal, now simply a verb form, like word sculptures erupting. If space and time are only thoughts, then what is this sentence that fills both with ambient noise (try listen your native tongue from odda side da wall) and dark pixels? Fairy tales hover like dragonflies, their shoji screen wings slapping the air .

I can’t remember their sound, simply that there was one, or several sounds, gathered beside the parkway where my friend and I had gotten lost. No one to pick us up, despite our thumbs. I remember only images of images, which is lucky, considering what images there are on our phones. Beware the lion, but welcome the dragonfly, I remember Weil writing, I don’t know why. “That was unintended!” the sangha member said, after she rhymed “air” with her “hair,” which might or might not conceal ukus. Can’t be scared of what you happen upon.

Once upon a time, we remembered very little of this, because we lacked phones. I’ve farmed out names to mine, but not their effect on me. Quick hesitation denotes surprise, but not what that surprise is or might be. I think leads to the subjunctive, but I know does not. Do I know what I think?

Or do you? You’re my reader, after all, even if I can’t locate your name or face. I think you’re subjunctive, or at least a figment of my subjective mind, the one that prattles on at night. Continuity’s a remnant nostalgia; images arise and cut the power. A picture startles, but so does its sudden absence.

One image is not disturbing: we see a man’s ankle, his shoe, someone pointing. Use the ordinary verb for that. The second image cuts like Brutus’s knife; a man falling to the ground. He wasn’t stabbed by a knife (indicative) but by what he felt (subjunctive). “This is what they put on slaves,” he says, of the GPS fastened to his leg.

They want to see them so that they can’t be seen as us. My neighbor wore an anklet for months; image of a narrative lost on me. The narrative for this man is who he is, which is hardly story, but being. We’re beings apart from the gossip we tell about ourselves. An anklet erases that.

I want to walk away calls for the subjunctive; I walked away does not. The man in the anklet can do neither, though he walks. He can't want to walk in the way I or my dog walk. To walk is to identify as the person being watched. “Do you think of yourself as a convict, or a cook?” one prisoner asks another.

Man killed at the maximum security prison. But the newspaper photograph attests to another story behind the story. He called himself Denise, wore lipstick and a bun for his mugshot. The man (for he was a man) who killed him had killed before. Sentences that tell us this waver between he and she, birth and death, a face trapped in a box with a smile on her face.