Fab: An Early Obit

OK, Fabienne: footnote.

I suppose :

Her fingers laced through my chest hair, drawn tightly to her mouth in the tent, I suppose. I suppose that that says all I might. She must know that hurts. She must pretend that she's asleep. She must pull the reaction out of -- my skin? my chest?

Or.

Or son corp de danseuse naked head-towards-feet curved backward over my two arms, curved again to kiss the London floor between her ankles, shaking in seizure, dying dove like doves I shot.

Or.

Or the blowjob on Havasu in daylight. "Keep paddling out" she says. "They're going to see. Fab? Fab, the lifeguards have jumped off the platform."

(Ants eat thru the tent, I pull her hand, she won't go on the lake at night.)

Or.

Or asleep suddenly on the campgound table as storm crosses the steppe, approaching strident purple-blackening tumescence cloudbank darkening our starry Utah midnight, gleaming. Her hair grown out now, a bit, as long as my finger from tip almost to the first knuckle, grown fast and blonding fast, whipping frenzy at her ears, her eyes still asleep still as I place the stones, one hand holding a corner of the tarp firm to the table as I roll another stone close, pump it with my leg and arm up on to the table to the tarp, to it hold firmly in place over her blankets.

And another stone, as though the tarp won't billow. And eight. And nine. And twelve. And another stone, as though a grave. And another only stone.

Her lashes in the wind alive.

"Oh, Jack, this finest place to die" she'd said that day. Why can't she feel the wind? I watch her still -- why can't she feel the wind? --

So, Fabienne.

Never mind:I'm standing in a library in Alambres, the girl in Paris, presumably, newly married. Pardon the drama.

What did Fabienne say? Her words and would I remember? -- something "wind might dry our bones could leave us clean as stars, so quiet, something something something.

Maybe she lied about the plant in Bretagne or the radioactive tailings by the coal mine in Anjou where she played con los hijos de los campesinos españoles in convincing castellano. Or even her leukemia. She might have thought I'd leave politely, leave her to the man she must have known on our first night that she would marry, the man who had reviewed her work in Le canard enchainé, whom she found comfortable but did not love -- she claimed.

If I can't say this is true, why not a paean to a ghost? Besides, Fab wouldn't die on me so quickly; she's just extremely gone.

Therefore :

"Hello. I walk in here several days a week, once or twice a day, photocopy a few documents, stroll into the stacks for a few seconds only, then always leave without a book."

And how should I presume?

Mayday

"You work for ECorp."

I'd thrown my bicycle in the back of his pickup where he pulled over on that long stretch near Walker Narrows -- an act of faith, but an innocent one -- thrown it in and jumped into the cab grateful enough. Then I got the novelistic long moment, his head framed in the window of the pickup, the eyes the ears the nose the line of the hair no one I knew: no one from Voltage Temps, no one I'd passed in LISA's corridors sneaking to the john. And I considering how fast the truck might be going, how the asphalt would rasp and tear were I to jump, where or whether a point might come in which I could snag the bike from the back, snag it and have a few feet down some road before he might turn.

The pops of the shotguns just off at El Cuello Rojo Trap and Skeet spoke

Time

Time

Time .

12 gauge, 20 gauge -- For years my father reloaded shells from a huge tin of slow-burning Unique powder someone had special-ordered and abandoned. They'd flash a good foot out of a 25-inch barrel and roar; I listened for his roar.

Time.

"Yes," I answer, answer the driver who has pulled over. If he knows, what can I tell him?

"Ha! Look at yourself, man - no, your eyes: look in the mirror. You fool! Like I can't spot an engineer so close to ECorp, nothing else for fucking miles."

Nothing else. Voltage Temps signs my checks; I work for LISA, at the office there in Alambres, so of course I work for ECorp:

"Don't we all?"

"Who else but an engineer would peddle through the middle of nowhere on a bicycle with his shirt open and his tie flapping in the air like a goddamn dog's tongue."

I don't know any engineers: what I'll write comes without expertise.

"You headed down the bike trail, down the river?"

"Sure." A little out of my way, but I'd ride with no traffic, and that would do.

So I sat and looked at the ducks on the river. I decided to write you, to write this, to actually post it.

Just don't believe a word.