bullet drives me to the brim of tears if I could cry I swore I wouldn't spend my dotage lachrymose, pissed off at shoulder shrug of life, a prisoner in the Chateau of If, inveighing every ship I've missed, or red come up, my money on the black

I think of death all day because it is at hand, that is at Hannah's hand, I choose to stay I've thought to let it go, especially when every screw is turned, my brainpan ready to explode it's Jerry's easy righteousness sets teeth on edge not even moral, no, some Solomon, deliberating, wise, a man who's occupied with saving lives, no none of those he says it's not his job to have opinions on validity of self-dispatch, Detective Friday searching only for the facts, a keen observer of the letter of the law and judging, speculating only on the Dow

we'd primed ourselves for this eleven years ago that lucent day we signed the codicil, behind his swivel chair an aquatint I'd given him, Joe Friedman, friend of forty years our lawyer wept, we stayed dry-eyed, we're seventy we said and come through harrow and despair, survived unspeakable brutality, afford us our small dignity in death in this republic sanctifying life for all its citizens but sends men off to war, persecutes dissenters, coddles naked tyrants we all die so where's the great to-do if we decide when that shall be, only for ourselves not innocents it's called a living will he cried but presupposes your departure and my loss

what am I saying, Hannah, never this, not contemplating this, this reckless shelling by an addict's piece, but something commonplace, a ticker stopped from stuttering a quote, a bowel tied up in a knot or plumbing rotted, sprung a leak we never thought that one of us would will to stay despite the evidence of terminal decay I can't release you yet, can't tear myself away, recasting all my memories like bones, I have to come to grips with them -- quite speechless Hannah at my ruined motor and my iron will not fearful, no, defiant if I'm anything

you hover apprehensively with Raquel by your side to help, hobbling from your spine-supporting seat to lave my face my eyes with tender ministry you offer me at my volition surcease from my pain or hemlock when I've had enough

it's simple technically to let it go if you've a ready attaché with bags of capsules safely stashed away against the time an overdose of aspirin will do you in the AMA may claim that under law you're theirs to keep alive, experiment, collect their fees, even if you're out of it, insensate flesh be-shitting all your sheets, plugged into bulls of Monsignors or edicts from the Cross, but they would need the Pill Police to stop you if you've thought it through

your eyes, my dear, are sun-flecked Sterling Forest pools, Niagara hair plunged whitely to your waist, a mist of it along your cheek my hand was laid there New Year's Day when we made timeless love, oh Hannah I remember clear our flaccid flesh so rigidly alive just after our siesta snooze sweet spoon-curled under you I was I've never tired of your body melting back to me Saint Matthew Passion playing for you on the bedside disk, the afternoon eternity, our motion minimal we'd just the Amish comforter and warm white sheets retaining all our body heat and in the snowy streets below the frantic sounds of sirens and of kids

my ancient self is crippled now, laid down here by a junkie Casca desperate for his angry fix, riven and constricted by his .22, and paralyzed, as is the century, unwilling to succumb before I've put some point on it, although the scythe may simply cull me en passant

my end-game lay in wait for me my birthday eve that Saturday two months ago the influenza'd left me weak but I felt confident as always for my constitutional the distance to the newsstand for my Sunday Times, my legs in service if I took it slow at ten o'clock, the cold night air was pregnant with the coming snow oh lovely I recall each ordinary, measured step I poked along left right each move a foot or so, breathing deep, my vision keen, alive right then, the doorman at 200, Chinese laundry in the basement, shuttered windows, Broadway traffic sparse, few passersby six blocks from Zabars, newsstand fifty feet ahead, the street lamp bulb had blown, the shadowed doorway near the corner motion? someone? he stepped out his left hand held a pistol so it seemed, his mouth agape, his hot eyes burning fearful at me in the freezing night, consuming us inside his kiln of misery in Goyaesque tableau of Le Fusée, his hair on end his sunken cheeks and hollow eye betrayed the opiate he used to dull his pain, his epileptic gun ajerk, now head now crotch now arm old man let's have it now! he'd seen too many thrillers or been part of them let's have it now old man right now

I think his teeth were rotten or the shadows made them so in that stunned moment out of time, quite short my anger superseded fear his gun now threatening my heart, his desperate mouth contorted, now old man let's have it now it wasn't the old man so much I say, it was my indignation at the busted light the busted sidewalks busted drains get lost, I said, get lost and plodded on

not saying then not then but since inside my head that lost is what he was, this sad pariah and his busted life tossed away like styrofoam, get lost I said and him already foundering still inconceivably afloat in all the flotsam and debris of busted needles cardboard shelters shooting galleries and epidemic AIDS get lost I said and plodded on

I felt the smack of it and heard the echoes in the empty street and saw the flash before I fell did he intend to shoot -- not clear it wasn't his recoil at oh get lost, not really what I meant, I meant I'm eighty-one and all my life, I meant I'm deeply angry at the state of things that shifting to the right had left the poor without a shift, I meant I'm only going for the Times there ought to be a cop, I meant you can't be helped at least by me, I meant I'm conscience-stricken for the world and you

he didn't rob me so they say he must have run, no closer to a needle powder silver fixing of his life but still in need he ran, I stayed and bled they say substantially before a young Jamaican found me fallen and called help

and now you've gone, you're satisfied that I'm OK, astonishing the way you know Magritte shadows dance above me Gulley Jimson breeze makes murals on the pristine wall my canvases were small till '59, my out of character humility had stopped me always, do I dare and will I have the wit, the painterly perception, grit and grandeur to daub away all confident that I can bring it off

hello, it's sun-tanned Jerry, Doctor Brock, dropped in again to look me over have you? twice this week I'm still alive and much the worse for eighty-one two months of wear you've Hannah by your side I will my eyes to say I'm just as fractious as I ever was if given half a chance I'll do a triptych for your office wall for free there isn't half a chance your piercing ice-blue stare replies, nor any other fraction that'll get you out of this I know, I blink, I'll stick around pro tem, my leering grave yawns hungrily in Forest Hills but I'll hold on a bit, my brain's not tired yet, just shot

there is no graduation dance, no valediction, when we've lived long enough to almost get it right -- an honorable discharge at the moment juste would sound OK to me you're lapsing kid, self-pity is plebian, where is your Spartan boy who let the fox eat half his entrails out and never did give in Greek to me how he could stomach it -- besides that, he was Farmer Jones and I'm B. Ross by George my egomania increases as I fail, a vice more honored in the breeches when you're standing tall

my eyes are arcing, arcing and I'm on my side he's turned me to the wall, I guess he's done Raquel will wash me I suppose or change my clothes, explore for bedsores heaven knows my point of view is no more limited than most concentrating on the Klee the sun ignites the maze the legend and the question mark I saw it first at Jimmy's when he hung my breakout show, in '61 it was, on Madison, he traded me for two new gouaches and a monotype, I thought it madness at the time for him to swap this master for three works by Benno Ross no matter how original and yet he'd proven right if only by the price Paul died too soon as do we all and yet it's all bonanza from the night you're made, a chance collision in the lottery of come the most are dying from the day they're born, neglect or poverty of class or race, thrust into life in shambles of Soweto or a Dublin slum not many rise above it for a crumb and I've had loaves and vintage pressings yes and Hannah too and opportunity, an entrant in the 18-karat list of those who tilt at art a chance to get it right, to re-define, defy the gravity of what's been done, make revolution in a line

and on a soapbox, Union Square, and marched with Lefty on the picket line, who's come and gone now to the angry jeers of bitter millions, mine not least and yet I'm not some school-kid, innocent pedestrian the fault, dear Benno, may not have lain with Stalin but with you

what revolutionary worth the name who wouldn't opt for Marat over Robespierre or Leon over Joe Brecht tells us circumstance won't have it so -- between ingenious theory and praxis chasms yawn for which we've never laid a span, in theory we're always building Habitat but when the plumbers come we talk waste management and poisoned landfill Pirate Jenny metamorphosed to a Nazi snitch, jealous of her wealthy bosses -- Jews

the fundamental trouble with all theory resides in now old man, right now Lenin in his Basel safe-house smashing all the world to bits like Omar to remold it knew that Engels architect and Marx unChristian scientist called feldshurs rustic idiots -- proletarians alone would do as rock to build his Church upon but Wilhelm knocked and Ferdinand was shot and history was roaring at him now old man, right now and he forgot, or put aside and rushed off to the Finland Station where he would cross to carillons of Basil ringing in the new, propelled on stage to act before he got the hook, now laid in mausoleum brought to book by some mad murderess who'd tried to get it right

I'm hardly some iconoclast, abjuring gods that failed I never did believe in aught but me and if the world is fucked up, well tant pis, I tried to paint it right

the portrait I like best is me as boulanger, I called it Pain and critics argued that my play on words was only my conceit, a game, that in the painting I controlled the dough, the yeast, so where's the pain the baker, Antaean in white, is half the wall-size canvas, on his shoulders blue of Mediteranée and in the corner right a detailed Deborah from memory, a miniature mama engineer beside a window, yidishe Vermeer peering past the pile to passing scene foreshortened by her Matterhorn of coats I painted it in '70, a lone black lock of hair poked out beneath my toque a hint of pony tail my yellow eyes acknowledging that in the agony to do it right we fail, despite the miracle of one true line one value in the tone that matches that unerring inner view go back to it in twenty years no, no, where is the bone, I want to see it bare, the shadow's wrong

my baker is eternal like the miller or the miller's wife, capacious burgher opposite the fact since I am slight the face is mine, Kirk Douglas chin, my nose like papa's but brought down to scale the hands, now useless to me, probe the dough with meaty fingers, thick, resourceful, master of the plastic mass

the mass is plastic, true enough -- church on Sunday, kneel five times toward Mecca every day, touch blinding white kufiya to the earth, chant ommmm in Himalayas or in dung-wall synagogues, bray prayers heavenward for death or birth or marriage or for naught but muezzin has called the masses to the hem of God

a godless single female eel in the Sargasso Sea lays eggs in millions -- elvers heed the call from England, Denmark, leagues away and tear off to fresh water estuaries to fulfill the pulling of the tides, their destiny an even money bet to wind up in some heron's maw or else mature so they can spawn, beget, imagine that

and is each one a fish or just some catspaw mechanism to achieve Darwinian reality well shit on that, that there's some Higher Purpose than my own is ludicrous, and yet no sooner does the Russian State break up than churches fill to overflowing and the call for Jewish murder is revived Christians fed to lions, Hebrews fed to Cossacks, Palestinians to Jews, the sociobiology of the nutrition chain

well I'm a fish for all of that, I travel lonely, save for friends and Hannah, found no school like Socrates nor does one close me in and muzzle, trammel me and make me prey to angler's hook, I lay here trussed and yet my mind stays free if all they wanted was my soul such as it is why they could have it but they lie, they want my mind and I'm a fish, I am the miracle of me as are we all if we but knew it so to be

yet there I was that night upon the gurney, bandaged, hooked, disoriented, Jerry's valuating eyes on mine then I saw Hannah and remembered all but couldn't move and thought I'd been restrained, tried to speak but nothing came, they held my sentence to my eyes on yellow paper from some legal pad, they'd come to a decision pending my OK, the slug was deep imbedded in mid-brain, too hazardous to rummage through my graying matter, it could kill, best not to operate, the damage had been done and I was paralyzed and obviously mute but I could see and breathe and eat and think and could have morphine when I suffered pain

my eyes sought Hannah's, mouth agape to shout out what? that we are felled at random to atone not even for our own but others' sins, to question would I ever draw a line, importuning remember Hannah our accord, our pact that we would help each other leave this mortal coil if life became so burdensome it throttled joy, and she with tears just streaming down her cheek thinking all my thoughts for me, returning to me all my possibilities limited but free I closed my eyes then in Emergency, the screaming night reduced to hissing fluorescent lamps above my head and tracked my options through my riven brain -- to be in pain and speechless, brushless, or to leave Hobson's choice not Hamlet -- leave? leave her? leave life?, I saw their waiting faces when I raised my lids, Jerry wrote blink twice for yes, that you agree we will not operate, the consequences understood

life bolts in the doorway of the Operating Room, Convention Hall, Interrogation cell and suddenly you're brought to book unshriven, now old man, right now, let's have your answer to this question, monumental in its implications for the world, your life -- forget that moment halcyon but gone when you could be all reasoning and calm, we shall do thus and so gurneying is what we manage worst, confronted by the Polaroid insistence of right now

right then it was too soon to wrest control of buried shell and murdered cells and say although it might be that I'll die all etherized upon the slab awaiting resurrection or the knife, let's go for it instead I answered yes it seemed to me I got it right if only for that click and I survived to find a respite where in clarity I might decide to stay or go, not yet, not yet, and so I stayed and stay, no Hannah no, not yet decision put aside once idle in the current's flow

and here's Raquel with all my morning's smorgasbord and Hannah radiant as ever with her hazel eyes alight as if she'd just discovered me and me her husband almost fifty years, how does she keep her disposition clear as hobbled as she is with fickle footing hesitant to turn too quickly, bend too far, no longer able to employ her Bach although she'll always make her music for my inner ear her flesh is cross-hatched like a Navajo arroyo gashed with life's erosions etching to get near the bedrock of her bone a Hiroshige woodblock paring the extraneous to reach the core and hers is luminous like Turner burning through the fog our eyes connect

my studio on Union Square do you remember it? reminded me of Paris and the red-tiled mansard rooftops opposite the Seine, the tiny garret windows winking in the sun I faced The Perfect Awning factory across the street where black haired Spanish women lugged their leaden rolls of cloth and whirred their needles, heads bent low to guard their flashing fingers the other side was Klein's, forever on the Square, now fancy condominiums in retrospect the rent was not oppressive years before the Reagan Revolution and the Bottom Line the way the light was splendid on my tiny fridge and burner, sometimes Nina posing for me naked, open to the skylight on the worn divan, or hand to brow her hairy armpit bathed in sun, while I hunched over at the easel making art, or rain outside, the rivulets ran down the glass and gray light sat upon my cup as I invented shape and shadow, black and brown-ness of it mine, uniquely mine Nina looking at the finished work would mutter why I needed her since I had rearranged her parts

my favorite before the war was Pam, she held a pose as if already poured and hardened in her time and place, perfection for an afternoon, her kid was sickly, murmurs of the heart, rheumatic fever, heaven knows, the specialist took everything she made as though he was her pimp, she came to me, undressed, and opened up her purse to him her son was Kevin, met him once when he was nine and tendered by his body's ills, big eyes like hers with tears enough to fill a bath father'd drifted off first time she sat she wasn't older than the century, her breasts no longer taut, aureoles were henna rose and mulberry, her calves were muscled from her waitress night-time job, six foot or more you glimpsed her rangy mid-West soul in lustrous turquoise eyes that verged on weeping as they locked with yours, her hair was purple black, like Napoli not Iowa, and bobbed quite close to cup her face it was her sad attempt at style her mourning eyes had made her ductile, long ago surrendered to the world to have its way with her and if she posed for hours arched or crumpled, kneeling, prone, she'd take her fifteen minute break, light up a Lucky throw a robe on, stare at nothing and return to her contortion unresistant, workable, ready to be molded into life by anyone, by me, I hadn't voted yet

surprisingly the most are like that, go along with any enterprise rather than revolt, pressed into ghettoes, posses, factories or squads, they tug their forelocks and accept, save oddball malcontents and anarchists, protestants and heretics, incendiary rebels passionate to change the way of things, reorder values, house the homeless, parcel out the land and fracture decibels and light to throw a new perspective, tell us where we are

the last I saw her, 1940 early March, huddled in her winter coat, a gawky creature flushed with cold the snow just melting on her coal black hair, her babushka had come undone, she smiled her tearful smile and started to undress even as she came across the sill, her puzzled eyes swept boxes, bundles, rolls of canvas, sketch-pads, frames, I told her I'd joined up, that there would be a war and if I waited I might be too old, that Spain was where I should have made my stand her tears poured instantly, why you she said, you're talented, there's youngsters out there who can go instead, how plighted are you, what if you get hurt I promised to take care I kept that scrap of address in her scribbled hand but she had disappeared when I came back -- returned perhaps to Ames to build a nest for Kevin on her daddy's land

had I been deaf to her demand? did she want more of me, to be her Lochinvar riding from the East to set her free, I had been deaf so often metaphorically I might have misconstrued the tears she shed which might have been for Kevin's father, not for me, another man she'd pinned her hopes on who had wandered off, his ears attuned to heartbeats other than her own

when I returned the atolls mushroomed in the fallout of atomic bombs but I refused to yield to tidal waves of Mondrian's impersonal authority that swamped our minds to tell us that the world was tidy, lines behaved themselves, were straight, when Einstein told us that they bent

aiyee, it's just a twinge -- and here you are, your nerve ends answering the impulse of my pain I swear our bodies have one pool of blood your lips are forming words, you sign "How bad?" I blink my eyes no no not bad you smile as gratified as I to lock with me by eye or flesh or in the palpable connection of the dancing air you smooth my sheets with stiff unwieldy fingers and you smile at me

aiiiyyyy, hyena, trying me if I will be your meal Hannah signing, can you manage this I think he's turned away since I'm not ready to cash in I'm just curmudgeony enough to stick around

I'm nothing they can pigeon-hole, too cynical to be a bleeding heart, too battered to forgive, too rational to pray, they could ignore me if my work was less conspicuous but as it is they have to choose some way to deal with me -- outrageous, ageless, feisty -- could be worse

here's Jimmy, my main dealer, looking good, his cheeks like Fra Angelico, his skin still glowing pink, but then he's sixty-three and had a new rich widow for his bed to waltz the New Year in he's done the most for me, took me on although his gallery was full and stuck me on the wall and there were years of thin -- he never faltered, said his eye was never wrong I vaulted from obscurity with Kennedy just dead and Nam a distant thunder and the world was ready for expressionism in my enigmatic style against the tide of psychedelic pop, perhaps it was my tongue in cheek that made it go or lines that didn't soften to a blur in any case I never painted for an audience, just me, and Jimmy understood

it was my series of brown paper bags that caught the public, not my nudes and hardly by design the bags were mine, uniquely mine the viewer's eye would see the bag as I did, shadowed by the setting sun or bright come home from shopping, emptied now of everything except its own remarkable intrinsic truth with warms and colds and depths to be explored the colors, ah the colors that I dared to juxtapose and I became a name to reckon with

success has always been a two-edged sword hackers never face that contradiction, advertising to the Devil that their soul's for sale, that they are up for any compromise, uncognizant that panting vendors rarely find the mark it takes a dance of infinite complexity since simultaneous all genius is both balanced and a-lop, there is no recipe or long ago they would have bottled it for Hannah, me, all swaddled in our privacy there was a moment's choice that moment when I had my succés fou and rocketed from underground to superstar in '64, we could have opted I suppose to close off avenues to their approach, rejected interviews retired to our hermitage, but I enjoyed my prick of exposition, spindling all their Holleriths, punching holes in all their givens or their four or forty questions -- I became a symbol but of what it's hard to say -- unregenerate, irreverent, bohemian and quaint all matter, no less art

I'm even hung in angled condos built for baby moguls in designer jeans who need a pro to decorate, afraid they'll make some statement with a fabric they'll regret, needing medals of identity like Queen Anne chairs or weather-vanes, saguaros rustled east of Santa Fe and when they have arrived at last, at Amagansett, Malibu, there's Ross, my c.v. neatly taped behind the frame to lend my bona fides to their acumen approved by MOMA, Getty and by Forbes they'll batter down your doors to buy a piece of you and do I mind, not really Vincent sold one painting while he lived, Picasso hundreds -- went their ways

if artists are leviathans then there are pilot fish galore who snatch our leavings or like predatory parasites of Kodiak ingest us piece by piece quite certain of supply at feeding time because another noble orca will swim by a tick away what's easier than preying on a creature so puffed up by ego while convinced he hasn't got it right that any charlatan can buy his wonders with some flattery and twenty bucks, a pourboire almost as an afterthought, keeping art unsullied with some vile concern for dough for every Peggy Guggenheim, Duveen, for every Morgan there are thousands out there waiting for us whales, a dying breed those few who've mastered doubt

for doubt can sap resolve you can't decide if doing art is how you'll spend your life, it grabs you by the throat inhabits every nerve, there's no decision to be made, there is no other way if you're Picasso, Ross or some unknown just hanging on with seven one-man shows a garret at ten thousand per, precariously perched and always not quite there while metaphoric Tadzio extends his golden hand, near enough to touch, almost, you dying on the strand

Raquel has organized our morning ritual, she cleans and oils me like a Silver Ghost, wheeled out of my garage for fearful spins along the L I E with other relics Morgans, Olds, tin lizzies, even Tuckers, spiffy for display, gleaming for an hour's run at low, hurried back to hospital while it's still daylight diagnosing that no damage has been done or undue strain been put upon the artifact I might have been a castaway like millions of the autobodies in their Potter's Field basilicas towering over landscapes shore to shore that I succeeded or survived at all is half to chance the other half to cussedness, a stubborn digging in, a fuck-you stance before they made it a la mode, how easy to get swallowed up like papa in their burials, how rare, how fortunate how privileged to be the one gram of uranium exuded by the pitchblende rising in its half-life to the sky

Raquel's a specialist at wheel-chair time, like Gorgeous George she's big enough to flatten most, three hundred pounds, a muscular Barbadan with improbable blonde hair she lifts me like a baby, smiles into my eyes and sets me in my silver high-chair ready to be fed my Gerber's mish-mash, broccoli or carrots heaven knows, I part my lips, her thick athletic fingers move the spoon oh oh it slouches back, hyena crashing through the grass so carelessly to stare all solemn and impassive waiting cautiously my firebrand, my curse or else my willingness to let life go oooooooh no, it's all that's left you too you cagey, guarded creature, when you die you're only offal for the vultures in the skyyyyyyy but while you live you're perfect, aren't you ohhhhhh Hannah there you are, your needle's poised, your eyes and mine are locked in pain, yours crying, wet, my Benno, now?, so soon my Benno, now? I fight the fiery goad that sears my brain and force my eyes to blink, my Hannah, no, not yet I see your needle of relief come down

This story was published in Hawaii Review (Winter 1995).

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