Phantom Camera

Whatever happens here happens for a reason. It so happens it’s not a very good reason. A tactless thermodynamic, a static interference, the chemical flukes and chance fractures, but the quality of the light is Algiers by evening, is Andalusia at dusk. Triggering fireflies are manic synapses of the garden, a faraway traffic the soft rush a vinyl record makes, and here you are with your handful of blueberries and your breezy magazine, nearing an almost balmy calm, feeling nearly epic and instrumental when a prairie gust makes a tambourine of the wind chime tugging it into an abrupt puddle of pick-up sticks on the patio brick. You take this as a jangly reminder of what differs between what you’re awaiting and what lumbers toward you with a bludgeon in tow. What slow artillery launched out of earshot is arced and nearing, what patient misfortune of cracked glass anticipates your bare foot on a beach dune next summer, influenza on a handrail, what lymphomas percolate, and who will you cuckold and who rat out, and whose body is that gliding through an eventual ICU so serenely you’d almost believe it reposed as you are tonight on your chaise lawn chair if it weren’t for the neurons in you whose single task is disbelief. But you leave these switched off in the momentary Barcelona, the dwindling Tunis of nightfall. You kindle instead that other axon whose errand it is to reassemble the memory of a notepad you left in the seat-back pocket of an airliner that’s probably ferried it with all your scrawled remembrances by now to the other side of the sea so somebody there might discover it. Somebody might translate and construe. Someone you can almost picture reading in a remote morning, in whiffs of heather and guava, and though you’re mostly obscured in the ho-hum arrival of another domestic night, you go ahead and grin anyway for that other in the indefinite offing whom you can almost make out, who even now pictures you too, fanciful mammal, you charmed conspiracy of nucleotides, all your unwitting electrons in their right place.