For my money (and I don’t have any, please subscribe!) Mike DeCapite is one of the best writers I have read in a long time. I am pleased to present here two excerpts from his new novel.
-Andrei Codrescu
The following is an excerpt from a novel in progress with a working title Presence.
I switched off the flame and lifted the moka pot by its black plastic handle, which was too hot to hold for any longer, I knew, than it would take me to turn from the stove to the cup on the counter behind me and start pouring the coffee, when the handle’s pressure on my fingers would shift. This was my level of familiarity with my life.
*
Sunlight flashing on a blue vinyl train seat . . . and then not . . .
*
Every morning I lie awake trying to separate myself from the dark, like the way I’m trying to separate this book from the material of my life. Who are you, in particular, before you get up? There’s the sound of the city, that general nonspecific sound at the window screens. Usually I hear it as a form of silence. But it’s as loud as a waterfall. If there were a waterfall ten blocks north, say 23rd Street, it would sound like this. I can lie there for only so long before I have to get away from my thoughts, get up, get myself together.
*
She closed the refrigerator door and I was waiting on the other side of it with my cup, which triggered a long involuntary indrawn gasp of recoiling horror.
And then she laughed at herself. Hard and long. While I rinsed the cup at the sink.
“You do turn up in the strangest places, Michael.”
*
It’s a low-cloud morning out there. Maybe twenty blocks uptown, lights are trembling on the skeleton of a new building like the interplay of associations between the present and the past. Rooftops and water towers against the embodied sky. The soft brick reds and browns. Everything’s actual, but there’s a softness. A depth. Of wordless meaning, that is. That presence of the wordless past. Everything’s a vibration between present and past. Everything’s got presence.
*
Last night we were lying in bed.
I was saying “I feel like my identity—my memory—because I guess those are the same, right? Your identity and your memory take up the same space, right? They’re coincident, or coextensive, or whatever the word is. And I feel like that space is shrinking. I’m like a polar bear on a melting—”
She reached over and pressed my front teeth with her finger. I was silenced.
“Go on,” she said.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I wanted to see if they were loose.”
“They’re not.”
“I never noticed before that one of them sticks out a little. Go on, tell me.”
“I don’t remember what I was saying now, I feel like you just hit the reset button.”
“You feel like you’re on an ice floe.”
“Oh. Yeah, I feel like I used to have a firm ground of identity to stand on, comprising all the things I knew, all my reading and experience, and my assumptions and opinions and convictions. So I was supported by a pretty big platform, which is now shrinking away, getting smaller all the time, as I’m forgetting all that. So I’m stranded on this ice floe of the present. But I don’t really mind, because I don’t need to know who I am.”
*
Are there bells, in the wind?
*
Sitting over a late lunch outside, under an umbrella, on the Mediterranean. Everything blue and white. Funny how one minute you’re here, the next minute you’re there. One minute you’re on 14th Street——blink and you’re in Juan-les-Pins, with a salade Niçoise. And we take it all in stride! No big deal! What else you got? Because this is who we really are, it’s in our nature. This is what we expect from life: change, disjunction, nonlinearity, parallel worlds. This is what life is. The proof? This is what our dreams are like, our imaginations. Nothing surprises us, not the most radical leaps, the most sudden changes of location or circumstance, the reappearance of the dead. We’re built for it.
*
I hadn’t opened my eyes when the boom of dumpsters being emptied oriented me on my childhood street, behind the shopping center, in Euclid, Ohio. As though the elevator of my consciousness had opened on a previous floor. A world I hadn’t lived in for nearly fifty years.
*
If we live in the “fixed block universe of eternalism,” the flow of time is an illusion just as the flow of 24 frames per second is an illusion. Every moment is separate: there’s nothing between them. Does this mean the whole universe is blinking in and out like a fluorescent light or, come to think of it, a quantum particle? Maybe this is why we’re so at home with discontinuity.
*
intermittent windows in the night, with steam blowing off the rooftops . . .
*
Today I woke at 4:20 and lay there in the dark.
The next time I looked at the clock it was 4:49, and I got up.
Thinking This is what we’re dealing with here. This is is the crux of our situation. That you look at a clock and it’s different from last time.
*
On the second day of February I walked out after work and crossed the street and, for the first time this year there was still some day left.
*
Friday evening, 108th and Amsterdam, everyone’s out: kids on plastic scooters with wheels that light up, the women on chairs outside the beauty parlor, the men outside the barber, three more in front of the liquor store. A man in a white linen suit and white sneakers and immaculate silver hair crosses to where a phone at the curb is leaning on a cylindrical bluetooth speaker that makes the whole night a salsa party, and it’s just so makeshift and cool that June and I look at each other and laugh.
“How fabulous!” she says. “If that doesn’t give you a lift, what does?”
Take that, Kristi Noem.
Texting with Steve
Mike: “But the Robert Irwin building at Marfa—for all the thought and planning and money and effort that went into it, and for all our expense in getting there and paying for a private viewing—was no better, for me, than watching a sunbeam on the wall in our studio at the Vermeer.”
Steve: “Those sunbeams are transcendent.”
Mike: “In fact, it was better at the Vermeer because it was in my life. It was at hand, of my own making. Do you get sunbeams on the wall at your place?”
Steve: “Not much. I used to, but then they put up an apartment building in the empty lot across the street. I have an indelible memory of morning sunlight pouring through the window of Carol’s bedroom (in college), just at the instant that Hendrix’s ‘Angel’ came on the radio.”
Mike: “That’s what our real life consists of, these ephemeral moments, right?”
Steve: “Absolutely—the beauty and meaning that we can hold onto only in memory.”
Mike: “Do you feel it’s meaningful in that it sums up something about that period of your life, or in an impersonal way?”
Steve: “I guess it’s meaningful in that it was one of those rare moments when life presented itself as something much deeper than I can normally comprehend. High-order clarity. Trying hard not to sound too cosmic and all, but it was COSMIC, man.”
Typing this, I look up from my new couch corner—we moved the lamp from one side to the other—and notice, out back, a steam shadow pouring from a chimney shadow on a brightened wall.
We can’t make more time, we can only make more of the time we have.
Mike DeCapite's published work includes the novels Jacket Weather and Through the Windshield, the chapbook Creamsicle Blue, and the short-prose collection Radiant Fog.
