Faintly Falling

Karen and I were in Ms Finch Miller Jones’ ‘British Literature’ survey. This was one of the three English classes I was taking my senior year. I was typically scatterbrained and scrappy, reading Carlos Fuentes with Lenore Allison, Thomas Hardy in BritLit, being a teaching assistant for Gerry Foote, parsing the lyrics of ‘Graceland’ and trying to read ‘Orientalism’ with Sweeney. It’s a wonder I passed any classes. The Brit Lit class was hard, serious, not to be trifled with, the real deal. It had that stentorian glint that the supremely canonical picks up with age. Karen and I commiserated, by turns angry, sad, disgusted, enlightened by one early scene in one book. At one point, in Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’, Sissy recounts her father beating their dog, Merrylegs.

-

‘And your father was always kind? To the last?’ asked Louisa
contravening the great principle, and wondering very much.

‘Always, always!’ returned Sissy, clasping her hands. ‘Kinder and
kinder than I can tell. He was angry only one night, and that was
not to me, but Merrylegs. Merrylegs;’ she whispered the awful
fact; ‘is his performing dog.’

‘Why was he angry with the dog?’ Louisa demanded.

‘Father, soon after they came home from performing, told Merrylegs
to jump up on the backs of the two chairs and stand across them -
which is one of his tricks. He looked at father, and didn't do it
at once. Everything of father's had gone wrong that night, and he
hadn't pleased the public at all. He cried out that the very dog
knew he was failing, and had no compassion on him. Then he beat
the dog, and I was frightened, and said, “Father, father! Pray
don't hurt the creature who is so fond of you! O Heaven forgive
you, father, stop!” And he stopped, and the dog was bloody, and
father lay down crying on the floor with the dog in his arms, and
the dog licked his face.’

Louisa saw that she was sobbing; and going to her, kissed her, took
her hand, and sat down beside her.

-

Out by the fountain in Lincoln’s back courtyard, Karen flicked leaves off the concrete edge, and we worried over Merrylegs. This minor scene in a very long book is the only one that stuck. And we talked about why all of our pity was heaped on a dog amidst the ceaseless barrage of sorrow in Dickens’ novel. And in talking about Merrylegs, we found that the real dagger to the heart, the real yank that left gaping holes, was that Merrylegs licks the face of his brutalizer. A small epiphanal moment that reminded me of Tara Colleen B.’s poem about how she would still want to kiss Jason Applebottom even if he shot her dead. Karen tallied it up as another example of how fucked up love can be.

In the Brit Lit class, we chose authors. Hubris led me to Joyce. I read and reread ‘Dubliners’ because it was one of those books that gave the impression of so much going on, and yet in the actual perfect and spare prose, all that I thought was going on was absent, materializing from the open white spaces between the words. Only the last story in the book was satisfying in its slip into the cosmic moving from the self-conscious nitpickery of manners and quips and details into some vast opening of dark and perilous regret, loss, realization, and doubt flecked by snow and song and lamplight. ‘The Dead’. Karen decided we needed to see the new movie, John Huston’s adaptation of the story that came out in December. We talked about this in class, making a plan. Another student in the class, Renee Robbins, also had Joyce, and somehow she was worked into the plan. A Friday or Saturday night. Dry and cold in that chalky winter way that Portland sometimes gets. Karen and I drove way out to pick up Renee. She seemed to live impossibly farther south than Karen lived impossibly west. With Renee we returned to downtown Portland and the still glossy, bright and angular KOIN cinemas. In my neophytism, the place still smacked as some kind of upscale high-brow place that showed movies for opera aficiandos. Escalators. Glass. The scent of popcorn suppressed probably by some elaborate robotic system. Instead, essence of hotel lobby and German chrome. Carpet. But we saw the movie and it was very good, though much is lost by not being inside Gabriel’s both insecure and arrogant head. It all comes together in the final reverie as he looks out into the swirl of flickering and vanishing snow and reflects on the world’s transience. We walked quietly to the car, but we started talking more when the heat came on, the radio came up, the city sped by. Did she always love Michael Furey? Would Gabriel’s epiphany mean anything to him? Can people really love that long and tough and deep? Just before dropping Renee, we were driving on a straight flat stretch crowded by trees on either side. Thump! Karen slowed and almost stopped. ‘What was that?’ She pulled over. She asked me to look. I climbed out and walked back and found a crumpled gray heap, a possum. There was no blood. And the possum was still breathing, short flashes of breath. I was afraid to touch it or move it. I went back to the car and told Karen. Renee had to get home. As we drove away, Karen was crying. ‘I killed an animal. I killed an ANIMAL.’ She put the emphasis on the last word, as if killing something else would have been better. I looked back and told Karen that the possum was crawling away, to the side of the road. I wanted her to feel better. We dropped Renee, and driving back, we could see no possum in the road. Karen was still sad, telling me that she never wanted to kill an animal. An animal. She told me that she was going to drive by the possum spot extra fast, so we wouldn’t see it if it were dead. Okay, I said. She floored the gas and I think we must have been going about 50 when we passed the possum spot. Back on normal roads and normal speeds, I was (and still am)—as Gabriel—casting about my mind for words of consolation and finding only lame and useless ones. So I lied and told Karen that the possum was gone. ‘When we went zooming by, I saw that it was gone. You didn’t kill an animal Karen. It’s okay. It walked into the trees. It will be okay.’ I am not sure she believed me. It snowed the next day, and I drove all the way back down there to the possum spot. I didn’t find the animal. There was just snow, and brittle frozen grass, and the rush and spatter of cars rushing on.

U2, 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For'