Petals of Pushpema
Petals of Pushpema
Walking down Pearl Street, Eroica Zelignaut could not believe her good fortune.
Having just finished her graduate degree on the history of Lower Manhattan, she was now living in the neighborhood she had spent her lifetime studying. At the corner, she peeked into the windows of Fraunces Tavern where George Washington had strategized during the Revolutionary War era and was thrilled she now lived on the same block.
It was a clear crisp Sunday in the last week of October 2012, the neighborhood empty of its madhouse weekday Wall Street workforce. The morning’s rain had only just let up and the sun shone brightly as Eroica meandered past Broad Street and then Whitehall, her eye lingering on the ghostly vapors that rose from the wet slick cobblestones.
Crossing Broadway, she looked north toward the twisting canyon of skyscrapers where the bronze sculpture of Charging Bull stood guard at Bowling Green, the beginning point of the island-length footpath the Lenape called Wickquasgeck Trail, and where tribes of many nations had once gathered to barter goods.
To the south, she saw people bursting out of the doors of the Staten Island ferry terminal, the blossoming figures turning into occult patterns. She thought of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” — “The apparition of these faces in a crowd / Petals on a wet, black bough.”
She entered Battery Park’s inner promenade lined on both sides by tall trees of orange, red, and yellow-gold leaves. Strolling under that glorious blaze of color, she felt it was a prelude to a cold dark winter. She passed black benches empty of visitors and all around her she felt the decay of nature grinning at her like a jack o’ lantern, then winking goodbye, making death seem alternately inevitable, final and yet ever returning.
Roaming northerly among the turning trees, she knew what was drawing her onward. Row upon row of granite slabs, carved with the names of those lost in battle, gave way to a gigantic Korean War Soldier, a bronze eagle commemorating World War Two fighters and a memorial to the Dutch and Walloon settlers who helped build Castle Clinton to defend the harbor from the British in 1812. She looked out on a pier where a sculpture of three merchant marines stood on a sinking ship. Celebrations of death and intimations of immortality surrounded her, and the magic mushrooms she had shared with her boyfriend an hour ago were really amplifying this return-to-forever feeling.
*
Andrew Prokos
Having made two wrong turns in the Historic District’s winding streets on his way back from the camera shop, filmmaker Mark Tense worried he might be late for his rendezvous with his new live-in girlfriend, the performance artist-historian Eroica Zelignaut, and star of his latest project—a documentary made in this neighborhood that had launched their careers.
Crossing Nassau Street, he thought of local advocate Big Mike who had hired the two of them, funded the production cost and then sub-leased them his loft on Pearl Street when he left last week on a national tour with the film they made. Mark felt that Big Mike knew how to work their strengths in combination to bridge every impasse—she as historian-scriptwriter-narrator emanating charm, he as director-cameraman-documentarian emanating can-do solutions.
Today was the anniversary of his meeting Eroica, and Big Mike had left a gift to help them celebrate—a small bag of psilocybin mushrooms, “just enough for you two,” as he wrote in his R. Crumb card. Mark felt no strangeness yet, but as he sauntered through Zuccotti Park, he recalled the Occupy Wall Street protests held last October. Having been stood up by his interviewee, he had been set to leave when Eroica began her schtick—he drew a ringside seat and rolled tape. Dressed as a Munsee trapper/seller of pelts, Eroica shared the pre-Columbian view of 10,000 years and spoke of the Occupy movement’s intentions in the context of the Dutch, British and American empires that have owned Wall Street and this park’s space for the last five hundred years.
Mark’s ten-minute video of her performance got a million hits and put them in front of Big Mike’s coalition of Financial District residents who were planning an Occupy boycott of the South Street Seaport. Run by a carpetbagging corporation in New England, the seaport was considered fake and plastic to the locals, a Potemkin village disguising a generic suburban mall—selling goods beyond their price range. Because it made an eyesore out of the same waterfront Walt Whitman had immortalized in Leaves of Grass with his teeming human throng emblematic of a democratic vista, the coalition wanted to re-Whitmanize the seaport with a welcome to everyone, including local New Yorkers. That celebration of inclusion was what Mark had captured with his documentary of the boycott.
Turning left on Broadway, he re-played his favorite moment in the film. His camera panned the faces of the rapt tearful audience after the NYC Historic District Community Choir had sung “The Water Is Wide,” accompanied by the Historic District Jazz Band. When the instrumentalists finished soloing, his camera zoomed in on Eroica who stood at the microphone dressed as a bearded Walt Whitman look-alike and read aloud a section of his “On Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” that fit into the song’s form:
“It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not;
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;
I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d.”
Mark considered her performance to be the documentary’s climatic scene. Big Mike had thought so too and had said as much when he had called to wish them a happy anniversary and to hire them to roam old Mannahatta (below the grid) and collect photos and ideas for their next film project.
Approaching Bowling Green, his new Nikon around his neck, Mark was thrilled to play his part.
*
Eroica Zelignaut sat down on an empty section of the long black wooden bench that lined the park’s eastern edge. She had a clear view of Bowling Green and hoped to see her boyfriend appear as things were going south at increasing speed. Everything around her was dying. She had hoped that wandering lower Manhattan under the influence of sacred shrooms might offer new ways of seeing old historic locales. But a post-lunch bout of clammy seasick mushroom burp sausage beer nausea suddenly overtook her and she sat straight-spined against the flat bench. She had tripped before but never this intensely. And this was just hello, stranger.
She closed her eyes and tried to mellow down with long and deep breaths. The indigestion burned off and the uncoiling of the kundalini under the fourth vertebrae began, that I’m-gonna-have-a-baby-contraction, a Martha Graham reach into her solar plexus. And when an invisible temple gong sounded within her, everything began to vibrate particles of flux, fluttering and free falling in a flow of unbound motion, energy humming its eternal delight, the curling-swirling-twirling-unfurling cosmic dance of Generate-Organize-Destroy-Silence which she felt was the universe’s benevolent, four-chambered G-O-D-S’ heart pumping blood through her veins and likewise the veins in the leaves of the tulip tree above her and its roots below her under the earth. All connected.
The sensation grew deeper and stronger, and the lioness within her roared and ate her fear. She realized she was the passenger, not the driver, on this inner outing.
As her boyfriend walked up, her look said: “I’m trusting you, Cool-and-in-command.”
*
Cool-and-in-command was Mark’s handle and, like the confident director he pretended to be, he flashed a cool-and-in-command smile back at his beaming girlfriend. At the odd but simultaneous recognition that the one knew what the other was thinking and feeling—not from words but facial clues and secret codes, telepathic tentacles and loving hearts—they burst into riotous guffaws. Hooting their heads off, rolling on the ground, gasping for air as if to make real the phrase, you’ll die laughing, they were coming apart at the seams.
Mark Tense feared he would spill into hysteria and permanent damage. He thought he better keep a lid on it because the censors were everywhere, taking over the smiles that turned from amusement to horror as people passed by. And what’s so funny anyway, he wondered, the song of other presences seeking visitation through our psychic runways? Is our laughter merely the last line of resistance before we’re overcome by beings and Bethlehems never dreamed of, joyful and triumphant, oh come all ye through these fragile, flawed, and fallible human antennae!
All at once Mark stopped laughing at the exact moment his girlfriend stopped. He stood still and felt as if some forbidden chapter of the American Way Gone Wrong had opened. They listened for the changes in pitch as some force, yet unknown, saturated deeper into the ground of their consciousness. Spinal dials soaked in terror anticipating some ungodly encounter, they saw in the abandoned road map of each other’s face no direction forward.
*
Eroica Zelignaut knew they needed a more private location. They were rushing too hard for public consumption. Grabbing her compliant boyfriend’s hand, she headed up the pedestrian-free State Street. They soon turned onto Coenties Slip, entered the Vietnam Veterans Plaza and sat under a stand of quaking birch trees with butter-gold leaves.
Finally in this quiet place in the empty memorial, they got themselves together. She sat still for a long time while he photographed the plaza. When he returned to her side, Eroica told him of her grandfather’s bravery in the face of being lied to about his mission—Nixon’s illegal bombing of Cambodia—and its consequences on his health. She compared the president’s trick play on our country’s Vietnam vets to the rotting piers and heliport that they looked out on. Eroica said that during the nineteenth century young men seeking the pleasures of a brothel or the promise of work would drink a Micky Finn, get fleeced, then Shanghai-ed onto a vessel’s hold and shipped out to sea from these piers only to wake up indentured to the captain on a voyage to the West Indies.
*
Mark Tense confirmed Eroica’s woeful tale of lures and snares along the slip. He added a slow cinematic dissolve to her descriptions: moonlight rippling along the East River, where clipper ships of old gave way to the burning homes of African-Americans during the 1863 Draft Riots, which, in turn, gave way to helicopters rippling rice paddies in Vietnam a hundred years later and landing on today’s heliport leading to this memorial filling with the fallout from the nearby Twin Towers collapse on 9/11.
Walking northerly hand-in-hand with his girlfriend, Mark thought the unsunny side of the street’s history was easier to take because they had shared their worst-case scenarios. But he felt as if he was the mook who had been slipped a Mickey Finn. Surges of energy kept blasting within him, as if to explode him out of his body and send him into the sun, his true home.
He wondered if these magic mushrooms were half-unlocking secrets held within these streets as well as within him. All he knew of tripping was MDMA. Lightweight and easy like a dance groove, Molly shone everyone’s love halo. But shrooms was weirder than a haunted Halloween party. Though on an excellent adventure—hunting and gathering neighborhood content with his Nikon—Mark Tense could not shake the suspicion that threat, if not disaster and death, was tracking him. Yet as long as he could keep moving, he sensed he would be all right.
The weather was turning warmer and, along South Street Seaport, tourists in bright colored clothing were descending from out-of-state buses and filling the square. Avoiding the crowds, he and she roamed easterly, boarded the 1891 schooner at the dock and watched the East River for a long while. After strolling under the FDR Drive, they popped out from under the Brooklyn Bridge overpass and stood directly in front of One Police Plaza. It was headquarters for New York’s finest and the gateway to the city’s authority zone of municipal, county and federal courthouses which spread out all around them with civil, family and criminal annexes and holding pens alongside City Hall and the Tweed Courthouse. Sunlight brilliantly limned that downtown skyline, but Mark Tense put the camera in his backpack.
“I’m using my Nikon not to experience the day but to distance myself from it,” he told her. “Instead of being it, I’m recording it.”
“You make it sound like a crime.”
“It is a crime and I’m a fraud. I can no longer outrun it. The laugh’s on me, the ‘up and coming downtown filmmaker from the uptown forests of Inwood.’”
“Quoting your own press now? You really are tripping, dear,” she said.
“Underworld agents will reveal the real Mark Tense and repudiate me, his imposter!”
Mark Tense looked over at the NYPD brick fortress and felt the features of his face begin to melt. His forehead sagged slowly into his eye sockets; his cheeks chin nose ears collapsed, turning his features into grotesque kaleidoscopic shapes. He touched the space where his face had been and it was bone.
“I can’t go on without a face,” he told his girlfriend gravely.
“Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull,” his girlfriend said. “You’re living that line from Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.”
“You see it too,” he said louder than he meant to.
Amazed that she was experiencing the same hallucination of his face collapsing and coming off, he read danger in her face and realized the police could be watching.
“Let’s go north,” she said, putting her arm around his waist to get him moving. “You won’t need a name or a face or a camera in Chinatown. As for today’s adventure, Whitman says in ‘Song of the Open Road,’ ‘Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d, I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.’”
Her assuring voice drove deeper in Mark the improbable but undeniable déjà vu sensation that, on a spooky wet but sunny autumn day like today, he had wept tears over these Whitman lines before and had been here before in some other form to love his loving girlfriend who was showing him that love was itself the form of forms underlying all things.
They ambled northerly along Park Row, turned on Mott Street and disappeared into Chinatown’s narrow winding lanes and sloping hills.
*
Eroica sat hours later with her boyfriend on a green bench and watched the sun ripple golden on the Hudson River and sink into New Jersey’s industrial jaws. Glad to be sitting still, she had been hiking with him non-stop above Canal Street, over to Little Italy and the West Village, south through Soho, Tribeca, and into the western section of the Historic District before claiming their favorite bench along serene South Cove Park.
She pulled an apple from her backpack, took a bite and shared it with her boyfriend. Walking-talking-discovering-discussing the afternoon away had restored him. But it had worn her out, lowered her defenses and heightened her sense of humor. When her phone beeped, she sang along with her machine, “Eroica’s not here right now, but would you like to leave a message?” Then she laughed out loud at the idea that a more knowing entity than herself was in charge and wondered if the tragic joke underneath all the other jokes was that she was trapped in a self that was not her, merely a last-minute version she did not even know, sent in to protect some inner-her-ness that she was not sure even existed. So that’s what put-downs and no exits are for, she thought as she chewed on the tart apple, lost in the maze where the subject dies of exhaustion.
Coming out of the bathroom, Eroica saw him sitting straight-spined, his head shaking up and down violently. She did not know what automatic mudras were, but she ran over, reached out and held him. He came back to Earth, happy his tuned-in girlfriend had once again known what to do and glad to be in her trusting arms. Suddenly everything was intensely enriched, as if all the characters in the play had taken their masks off behind the stage and had a great laugh.
Mark Tense, grateful but uncertain regarding his brief stay in a more ecstatic reality, sipped the shot of mezcal that Eroica had poured for him. Looking up at the kitchen skylight at the same time, they saw what was next. Soon there would be wine, candlelight, a warmed-up gooey lasagna dinner, repeated listens to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and then, perplexed by psychic events that exceeded their understanding, curious talks into the night. But twilight now beckoned and they walked up to the roof to meet that deep blue glow.
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