I was very heartened and even moved to notice over the past few weeks that, as I landed back at work and found less time to post here, a slow but steady stream of new readers and subscribers nonetheless appeared. Thank you, thank you! I am going to resume more regular writing and posting in March and I hope to have it be more free-flowing, wilder and weirder, and to invite some guests to write or speak with me. But first.
In January my friend and colleague in writing Thaddeus Rutkowski asked me to read some work of my own in celebration of his new book, Safe Colors: A Novel in Short Fictions at The Jefferson Market Library. I consider Thad a master of the short fiction form and have been watching and listening him perform his work for some 30 years now. And this piece somehow has the mark of his influence, if only glancing. I also owe some of the imagery in this piece to the artist, essayist and philosopher Megan Craig, who shared a draft of a wonderful essay she has written on stones with me last year that stayed in my mind long after I read it. In any case, I developed this for Thad’s reading, and publish it here now for what I hope is your enjoyment. More soon (he said hopefully)!
Having Turned Back in Silence
By Peter Catapano
They rode out of the morning into the sun, a coterie of blue clad minions released into the swarms of debris. What freed them to ride was the vast and rapid bleeding away of political concerns and passions, and the dust-heavy clatter of metal and bone.
All of a sudden they came to a halt, abruptly, the four of them, just as neatly as they had ridden on a high wire in lockstep, meticulously, on a dime.
The rider with the faint evidence of two small moles beneath her nose said: Whoa, whoa, whoa, then. Let us go, partners, in a direction that has heretofore eluded us, both toward and away from the sun. Let us do so elegantly, in a gentle sweeping motion, in circles.
Then the next rider, second in line, the mole-pocked rider’s cousin, once removed, said, Nay. We began in a slow trot, then moved on to canter. And then, what ho! Full gallop. Now we see that the sun has only just risen, showing the tip of the top of its fiery pate, its eyebrows of fire, its long-flamed tongue consuming flame itself to announce the morning at daybreak. The forecast, by the way, is for searing heat. Mississippi backyard barbecue heat, the heat of molten metals at the core of the earth. So how is it you tell us to ride elegantly, sweeping in circles?
And the mole-pocked rider said: So what? Now you don't trust me?
Her voice was full bodied and strong. It lulled the group into a warm acquiescence, a salty broth steaming to be shared from a fortified paper cup with brothers bloodied and shivering from hockey fights.
We can always turn back, the other two said in unison.
Then what? the mole pocked-rider's cousin said.
Then a third rider, a relative of no one, said: We've ridden ourselves into a riddle, come up to the wall and now paused. We see that the river is high, but not too high. It runs swiftly over rocks, but there are rocks beneath the rocks. We know this from past, he said, brother and sister — [did I say they were on horseback? They were on horseback.] And those rocks. They giveth the rocks below a sense of comfort, of safety and warmth. But the rocks above those rocks suffer in the sense that they remain exposed, at the mercy of elements, of lions and elephants, of hailstorms and sun. Exposed in their raw precarity, the rocks at the top are washed continually by the torrents and worn down by them, worn, worn, worn away. Over time they are loosened at the roots, and shift into new spaces, somehow still perched atop the rocks that sit more stable underneath the thick primeval mud not subject to the whims of nature and do not budge.
I think you get my meaning, cousins, he said, though he was, as I said at the outset, a relative of no one.
I see now because the picture has become clear as it dropped from my mouth that the four riders may be confused with the four horsemen of the apocalypse. But that is not the case. There is no relation. I do not know if the horses they rode were mares or steeds or what color they were or what markings they had or what noble breed they were born from only that they held the riders aloft on their slightly sagging backs, making the whole thing possible, as usual, silently, with no one recording their viewpoints or thoughts, which we know by the latest in animal neuroscience that they have.
At last, the fourth rider, male, stocky, two hands short of six feet, not unattractive and strong, mostly in his lower half with a small mouth and squinty eyes, the fourth rider, whose integrity could not be questioned, said, and I quote: It's clear we should return, have a nice meal, maybe open a bottle of scotch and fire up some s'mores and then tell stories about what might have transpired had we gone on. Had we rode proudly at a canter, then galloped mightily at day’s end into the dying sun, the Great Fiery One, the author of everything and all and see how we feel tomorrow?
There's no guarantee we will know then, but it will be a day just like this one. And the birth of a notion, a spark of intellectual fire will go off in the mind of another, and then he, she, they who created us, who conjured us from a waking mind, the possibility of our being will rise again. We'll put on the kettle and pour over some Café Bustelo from the market on Grand Street and consider what to do until the hunger for our existence, for the speed of all our knowing and the tales we have lived and not lived may be born. Unquote.
The four riders turned around then and rode back in silence. No one spoke as they pulled back their reins and returned to the crest of their disputed beginnings. The horses did neither speak for they only carried and snorted and clomped and so the thoughts of the horses will never be known, they remain hidden. Frustrating, I know. What did you expect? The riders never said they were riding toward meaning, only into the fierce face of the sun, the flame of obstinate obliteration back into a world without time in which they never existed and where the third rider, the relative of no one, was born again, this time to a different mother, a Scots-Irish flautist, who had a sister in Derry who had a child by a ferryman and gave him a cousin.