I Am Over If

"Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken."

-Rudyard Kipling, "If"



I have never even read the Dumas. Nor fils nor pere. It was a gas. Or it was supposed to have been. We smoked Gauloises on the Canebiere and talked about what it would be like to speak French and live on the French Riviera, the famed mystical place spoken of so frequently on broadcast primetime television shows in the late 80s and early 90s. You always wanted to go there and I always wanted to be with you.

It's too late. You can't appropriate someone else's dreams, or you just end up with poorly transplanted nightmares. It's a shame I never had my own dreams, but I have always been a little blessed, you might have said, "bless-ED," as in "poor of spirit." Your dreams just seemed like they were so much more attainable and formed. I want the airy night to seep into my skin and become a china pattern that will withstand the test of time, like Wedgwood, the summer wind to caress me and change form into a miniature butterfly dancing a graceless, tripping rondeau through my hands to describe an eternal feeling of awestruck compassion for the world, as the evening on the downs in London when I discovered that the faerie kingdom awaits those who see with the patience and wonder of a child's eyes. You want to get a decent set of china that won't chip too easily when you get married, but you never want to marry. It's more practical, you say, to marry for gifts and divorce after one tax year.

Looking up from your roll-top desk one night, over your cat's-eye glasses, with a wink you said you thought your tax return might afford you a vacation this year. My taxes were left undone, as I knew I'd be left owing as every other year, so I slouched over to you to squeeze you and hold you tight, my arms slung over your neck from around the back of your chair.

You called me a heartless pussy. So right you were, I don't think you will ever know how right you have been about that all along. But I did it for you, everything for you. It was easy enough to save up the money, even for that machine-bought package of Gauloises with the fleet bell-helmet of Mercury emblazoned on the vein-blue box since neither of us smoked any more. We didn't need much, just airline tickets, backpacks full of dried food goods, and a few Euros bought dearly at the airport. Your genuine, industrious frugality and my petulant cheapness masked as attention to less worldly concerns complemented each other in the realm of travel. Just to be there, halfway around the world on a day with nothing more than the blue sky opened at our feet like the petals of some miraculous flower left here for us by the gods, that was enough.

The bleached-white stone and stucco of the villas and hotels slackened everything, gouging into us and slashing across our foreheads, and turned our footsteps into halting, altitude-sick affairs. The heavy Mediterranean air with its taste of salt mixed with bottle after bottle of spring water with effervescent bubbles turned us each into a tug buoyed by carbonic gas, dragging our precious cargo along endless promenades and diversions, over sea walls and under bridges older than our family names. How could we lose, the sun damning us to half-steam, but some internal sense guiding us to the Isle d'If? If.

"If," your response was always "If" whenever I asked where you would like to go most in the world. It took research after some fair-handed stumbling in the right direction. Eventually I learned to reply, "Marseilles, I hear, is nice in the summer and autumn."

"The famed Chateau d'If is, in fact, a military installation," I wanted to murmur when we arrived by ferry, "and like all military installations, If is essentially a rock with barracks on top. We'll be lucky if there's grass." There was none. If was a prison, much like Alcatraz, and has finally become a tourist attraction. It reminds me of Dover Castle, preserved so well that there is almost nothing of value to be gleaned from the visiting of it. If was never tested, never given over to enemies, never escaped. If was an isolationist hellhole and has become a different kind of vortex, a drain on attention. If was never a sight for sore eyes, but I kept my mouth shut.

My own Iron Mask I wore for hours as we climbed stairs and searched every nook and cranny of the place for traces of historical and literary relevance. Your childish face went girlish to the point of cloying, beckoning saccharine; it was a mystery to be uncovered for you, and the only joy I got from the place was watching you fall further into the trance you had woven for yourself from old books and realistic dreams. If had you under its spell. You had lost your head, and I tried to keep mine for the both of us. I tried not to tire by waiting. But the waiting left me wanting.

By the time we returned to Marseilles proper, our micro-vacation was coming to a close. Your expectant eyes were hesitant at every turn. You really looked like a rabbit on the run. I know I should have been full of love and appreciation for your enchantment, but as we dined at a simple peasant cafe watching the sun set over the Bay of Marseilles with the imaginary Iberia in the distance, all I could think about was what a wasted day the Chateau d'If had been. You have never been more beautiful than you were that evening, in a simple floral dress with white azaleas woven in your hair - when you came down from the hostel steps to meet me outside, smoking cigarettes again, Eliot's "La Figlia Che Piange" rang in my head like a fire alarm - your smile an intoxicant more powerful than any wine I have ever tasted, your laugh and cajolery urging me, a stoic for today, to breathe life and you into my lungs, to allow the moment to wash over me.

It was impossible. The sun crashed behind distant clouds and I wracked us on unfamiliar shores, icy and impenetrable, more like fjords thousands of miles North than the byzantine, fingerling-shaped cavities more conversant with this arcing French coastline. The rabbit-delirium of your eyes solidified so instantaneously into glacial venom, I almost fell out of my chair, frozen.
You swore you had lost a friend that day - "Where did you go? Where are you?" you asked, and my reply was deafening: silence - and I was to see later just how lost I had become, and how Antarctic you could be on the airplane ride home, the telephone calls, the pleading late-night knocks on the doors, the dazed, blinding, wandering ecstasy of anguish visited upon me by my own shame. "Not even the man I hate." You sneered, "Not even a man."

A question burns through me, through this promontory sheet of ice I wear like an albatross, my face pressed out into the searing wind, a question I cannot bear to speak aloud. It scours the corners of my mind, banishing the doldrums to elsewhere wherever they are found. I am haunted by the beckoning words repeated like an incantation raising spirits of love's labor lost, at once soft and sharp, a featherbed of nails. These memories rend and destroy, slowly, churning every part of my existence into debris and dust; when they recede I will be an unkempt cemetery, horrifying, sepulchral grotesques of granite strewn about. When they recede perhaps I can again ask my question, in the burgeoning sprigs of fresh grass, clumpy and lush, by a cool stream near no bridge or wall. When they recede perhaps I can be a man. When, O when, will the sun shine again?