The Journalist

THE JOURNALIST / Ai 1 In the old photograph, I'm holding my nose and my friend, Stutz, has a finger down his throat. We're sixteen, in Cedar Falls. It's all still a joke. In my mind, I'm back there. The blonde who used me like a dirty rag is gone in a red convertible. The top is down. She sits beside the Greek from out of town, his hair slicked down with bergamont. I don't care, I do care that she cruises the streets of Little America without me. I take a last drag off my Lucky, pull my cap low and take the old road to the fairgrounds. I'm sixteen. What do I know about love and passion, I think, as I watch the circus set up, watch as the elephants pitch and sway, heads and trunks swinging wildly. When the yellow leaves stir and spin around me, I walk back to the river and skim stones across the clear, gold water of early evening, til the 7:18 whistle blows. Then as if on command, I start running from childhood, from the hometown that keeps me a boy when I want to be a man. Manhood, a dream, an illusion, I think, as I lay down the photograph 66 · The Missouri Review and stand still in the anemic glow of the darkroom lights, my body giving off the formaldehyde smell of the unknown. In Viet Nam in 1966, I stood among the gathering crowd, as the Buddhist nun doused her robe with gasoline. As an American, I couldn't understand and as I stood there, I imagined myself moving through the crowd to stop her, but I didn't. I held my camera in position. Then it happened so quickly— her assistant stepped forward with a match. Flames rose up the nun's robe and covered her face, then her charred body slowly fell to the ground. That year in Viet Nam, I threw my life in the air like a silver baton. I could catch it with my eyes closed. Til one night, it sailed into black space like a wish and disappeared. Or was it me who vanished, sucking the hard, rock candy of the future, sure that a man's life is art, that mine had to be? But tonight, I'm fifty-three. I've drunk my way to the bottom of that river of my youth and I'm lying there like a fat carp, belly-down in the muck. And nothing, not the blonde, the red car, Ai The Missouri Review · 67 or the smell of new money can get me up again. I lay out the photographs of the nun. I remember how her assistant spoke to the crowd, how no one acknowledged her, how we stood another two or three minutes, til I put my hand in my pocket brought out the matchbook and threw it to the nun's side. I stare at the last photograph— the nun's heart that would not burn, the assistant, her hand stretched toward me with the matchbook in it. What is left out?— a man, me, stepping forward, tearing off a match, striking it and touching it to the heart. I throw the photographs in the metal wastebasket, then take the nun's heart from the glass container of formaldehyde. I light a match. Still the heart won't burn. I put the fire out, close my eyes and see myself running, holding a lump, wrapped in a handkerchief. I think someone will stop me or try to, but no one does. I open my eyes, take the heart and hold it against my own. When I was sixteen, I was the dutiful son. I washed my hands, helped my mother set the table, got my hair cut, my shoes shined. I tipped the black man I called 'boy" a dime. I didn't excel, but I knew I could be heroic 68 · The Missouri Review Ai if I had to. I'd set the sharp end of the compass down on blank paper and with the pencil end, I was drawing the circle that would contain...