an excerpt from “Sleep Suite”
The Eleventh
Two huge cops. They were waltzing in the street chest to chest. Hands clasped. Their care for each other showed white in their tremendous knuckles. The drunk tipped the bottle of wine through the sun into his mouth. Bright red with the sun in the green glass. With his red mouth the drunk said something to his friend. His red tongue lied limp and naughty on the bed of his lip. They both laughed richly and seemed a part of everything more or less. Not isolated from it.
A dog trotted by with human feet. It was profane. The sound of slapping it made. In the bushes also profane was a cat who sat upright against a tree like a man, his arms framing his round belly, his hind legs crossed in the dirt before him. She and I were watching. We may have been the only ones who saw them. A crow on a branch slept. A crow! Sleeping! It was so sunny, so hot. Babies were smiling at parked cars.
Robbie crossed the street far away. His head doesn’t seem huge until you are far away from it. He sings about a girl named Lacy. Everybody knows who Lacy really is. Each girl in the audience wishes she had somebody singing about her and calling her Lacy, many wished it was Robbie himself singing. Those are not my words. They are the words of a girl. I went to see him play and searched the faces of girls for some indication of the thoughts behind them. The day was bright and Robbie looked very bright. His hair was like a new penny. He was alone and out of sight and going about his life, and it was definitely him, and neither of us called out to him or said anything because there was nothing to say out in the sun where nothing separated us from everybody and we didn’t feel the panic of something that we once took as solid pouring out, just bleeding out, while we quite deliberately did nothing to stop it.
Nearer, right near us, an older Indian man crouched near the curb. By the abundance of pigeon droppings it was evident he was reading the pigeon droppings. It was not even in doubt. Another Indian man approached him and said something angrily in another language. Something like, “must you do this in the middle of the day?” A day. A night. This is not a distinction only noted by people. Ask the cat sitting like a man. But a beautiful day is such a specific possession, each to each person its own precious sorrow.
It takes no critical thought to move from a general statement to specific incident. This is the first lesson of how to speak to people intelligently. The second is only tell the very best dreams. Three to four a year even if your dreams obsess you. Or else people will think of you badly, even eventually your lover. This was not a dream. I told that to her expecting her to say something like, “how do you know?” because she has always to state a rebuttal to what I say. She only sat on the chair in the sunny kitchen drinking a tall glass of water so slowly she was also breathing in and out of it. She was far off, farther than Robbie was when we saw him down the street. Her fingers pushed grains of salt on the tablecloth and the sounds of her breathing and her throat swallowing were huge in the kitchen. Someone hammered metal bars or sheet metal down the street.
There was a dog with human feet and two cops waltzing. People sitting at tables on the sidewalk were laughing. Who can blame them? Huge cops waltzing is the kind of thing that makes some people feel it isn’t foolish to keep looking, that it is even-money everything is not already determined. Others shared the joy similar to when somebody shows you a shirt that terrifies you on the hanger but when you put it on you feel beautiful and that opportunities for enhancing your pleasure lie in thousands of ordinary places. Going from specifics to law, that is the hard thing. Going from a beautiful day, a sunny beautiful day, to anything else— don’t be retarded. Before she was even finished drinking her water there was the sound of fabric tearing and something dripping on the floor. Every object in the house glowed without shame. We slept through the rest of the sun. She stayed in the kitchen. I was in a deck chair in the mudroom.
—Jason Daniel Schwartz
You can find more of his work here:
http://corollary3.blogspot.com/
Jason Daniel Schwartz lives in New York City and teaches creative writing at Rutgers University. His stories have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, in a chapbook on Corollary Press, and in a few other places.
