The Reading
Atmospheric, was what someone’d said when it was all over, which I repeated the next day on the phone to M from Spain who was talking about the Argentine and his fetishes.
A rose cloud hung over us in the bookstore corner, rose-colored air pushed the walls and ceiling up and out. Sam read, then I read, then Chloe, then Elina and a small moon rose in a corner of Bushwick and we made a little world there.
Although the Frenchman was delayed by storms at O’Hare and L was home with a broken tooth and an old old friend called to say hypomania … must rest now, we showed up and read on.
How earlier that night, we’d just met. Strangers, digging into oval platters of Ethiopian food with bread for hands, repeating our origin stories over the din.
What do you call it when you overlap umbrellas … a shield wall? Like a Roman legion, we marched down the sidewalk, laughing, all of us hidden behind this grand multi-petaled nylon flower we’d made and we brought the rose cloud into the bookstore. And we read.
The room inside so still. Then the air conditioner over the doorframe fell quick asleep and our voices overtook the night.
Our words opened up new spaces so even petite Elina and her small syllables filled us up. Cars falling from the sky, said the Russian, yes, true, though inexplicable. We laughed at Sam’s sad sad tale because we loved him just then and the meditation on temporal saturation left us hanging, meaning how long exactly does time last–
I can feel my soul, said the old old friend earlier that day. It’s in my face. (His mind was in rapid cycle.)
In the Russian tale, the psychic tells the wife: your husband has no soul! So she leaves him. But the second wife doesn’t seem to mind. She says she’s with the man for his body not his soul.
Afterward, J & J stay late talking Murakami whose work the Frenchman coincidentally adores. We all agree this is the best reading in a very long time. Despite the rain which made it more atmospheric, the one pronounced.
The painter-potter-bartender said tonight is a blood moon, longest of the century. For 103 minutes, a moon red in the shadow of Earth. Though in Brooklyn, we couldn’t see it for the storm and no one here was even looking.
We had our rose cloud in the corner and took our wine in old teacups with broken handles.