June 15, 2009

Thinking of the boys at Phil Mechanic, and the girls, varied and funny, each bristling with particularities. DA was a set designer in New York, and wants to work here, but wants to work for the $900 a week he claims he was getting there. A playwright, the founder of the entire enterprise, would die of shock if offered a sum like that. DA comes to our window to smoke and leaves a heap of butts on the sill. He sat in the hall and did charcoal portraits throughout the stroll. All the faces look like him, a little, but that’s all right, for he is beautiful. D told me of the chasm in the sea and the mermen he saw when he was living on the beach. Red Logan’s red mother climbs the stairs with cookies in her hands. Jolene is inexhaustible in her cordiality and ambition. The whole thing floats on her. I am exhaustible in so many ways I’ve stopped counting. J tells strangers the story of his paintings, the insect ninjas and squirting narcotic berries and all, without a stitch of self-consciousness. Jinx fires rubber chickens from his chicken-launcher with the lovely delight of a ten year old. “Special” Kevin runs to catch the chickens before they hit the ground. R, a student with whom I quarreled because he did not take his studies seriously, and dropped out, reappears with his photographs. The photos are, to put the best light on them, ordinary, but he claims them as milestones in his extraordinary life’s journey. I cannot stop being the teacher, and praise the photos for virtues they do not, but might someday, possess. Everyone calls me “doctor” or “the professor,” and I answer to it as though I understood it at all.

An English couple named Puttick jump to their deaths off a sea cliff, inconsolable with grief over th death of their son. The dead child’s body was with them in one rucksack, his toys in another. Tyler McMillan dies after his father ties him to a tree for 18 hours. A man named Angel Mendoza bit out his son’s eyes and then began hacking at his own legs with a hatchet. Covering Cherub. . . .

I was looking out the front window when the pink mallow over Jocasta’s grave began to shake. There was no wind. Neither the mallow plant next to it nor any other plant in the garden moved. It swayed and shook. There was no animal near it. I ran out in my bare feet. There was nothing visible, and yet the plant was swaying almost violently. I stamped the ground and shouted. I took hold of the plant. I felt a firmness that was stronger than the firmness of roots; something was pulling from the underside. I ran back to the porch for a spade. There were no holes where an animal might have tunneled in, and I know of no animal that approaches carrion from under ground like that. I stabbed the spade around the plant. I hit nothing, but the mallow stopped swaying. I hear myself thinking, “Surely if Jocasta revived she would cry out, and not just try to dig herself out.” Of course, it was no such thing. I don’t know what it was, except deeply disturbing. Tried to do some weeding, but the garden, for the moment, was too creepy.