Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [50]
“That’s amazing,” I said, vaguely.
She smiled as though she understood what I was referring to and sat back down beside me. I asked her if she knew anybody who died in the bombings. She said no. She said many of the dead were immigrants. She said that it was a crime against working people and that she didn’t know many working people. Do you, she asked, and I thought for a while, then said I wasn’t sure. She launched into a very detailed and, so far as I could tell, sophisticated projection of the political ramifications of the bombings. She was sure ETA had nothing to do with it. I didn’t say anything. She went to a stereo I hadn’t noticed and put on music.
The music filled the room and for a moment, maybe two measures, I felt intensely present. She said she should go back but that there was food and drink and clean towels. She had noticed I had smoked my last cigarette and pointed to a pack on the desk. She kissed me good-bye on the lips but it did not feel like an event.
When I was alone in the apartment I walked to her closet and looked through her clothes. I smelled one or two of the hanging dresses. There was a dresser inside the closet and I opened and shut the drawers. Then I went into the bathroom and looked around. Everything was spotless and I wondered if she cleaned it herself. Maybe an immigrant cleaned her apartment, an immigrant who’d been blown apart. There were a few bottles of pills behind the mirror but I couldn’t tell what they were. Then I rolled a strong spliff with the last of the hash from my bag and smoked it on the balcony. When I was finished I took off my shoes and lay down on her bed. In the stack of books nearest her bed I saw a small poetry magazine from the U.S., an issue in which I was published. I was astonished that a tiny magazine published in New York featuring poems I had written in Providence about Topeka was here, in this gorgeous apartment in Madrid. Not that poems were about anything. Then I remembered I had given her the magazine. I removed it from the stack, knocking the stack over, and found my poem:
Possessing a weapon has made me bashful.
Tears appreciate in this economy of pleasure.
The ether of data engulfs the capitol.
Possessing a weapon has made me forgetful.
My oboe tars her cenotaph.
The surface is in process.
Coruscant skinks emerge in force.
The moon spits on a copse of spruce.
Plausible opposites stir in the brush.
Jupiter spins in its ruts.
The wind extends its every courtesy.
I have never been here.
Understand?
You have never seen me.
__________________________
I wasn’t sure if Teresa had slept in the bed with me; there were sleeping bags and pillows on the floor, but they might have been Arturo’s or Rafa’s, neither of whom was in the apartment now. The sleeping bags made me think of body bags lined up beside the tracks, although I hadn’t seen that yet. I had confused memories of people entering the apartment when I was half-asleep, snatches of their drunken conversation, the smell of marijuana, maybe a body next to me, breathing. Teresa was on the phone, speaking quietly so as not to wake me. I would not be able to ask her if she had slept in the bed; if she did, that would constitute a new level of intimacy and I could hardly admit I had no memory of it. For all I knew we’d kissed and fooled around; while I doubted that, I could imagine it in a way that felt like remembering.
The cat was still on the red couch, blinking. Although I had not made a noise or moved, Teresa knew I was awake, and brought me, phone tucked between ear and shoulder, an espresso; I hadn’t heard the machine. I couldn’t