Dividing By Percentages
It’s the month of January. The Romans named it after Janus, a god who was never born. He dwells at the tangible limits of Earth and the outer extremity of Heaven, a watchman on the wall, an interloper. His head is like a gate, one face pointed towards the future and a second face, painted to look toward the past. A gross door, a passage of touching, Janus is the keeper of the forgotten, a sentinel of our remembrance, with granite, clay, and plaster for bones.
If Janus had a brother, he might be my boss, Ray Davis. He’s the production foreman at Flex-Strut, the factory I’ve worked at the thirteen years. The building sprawls from seven different expansions over nineteen years and from the sky, looks like a table game of Dominos, the newer structures butted up against the old, in every direction, and always at right angles. The ceilings are fifty-foot high, like a dusty sheet-metal cathedral, rust colored light pours in through plastic windows, down upon its beating heart altar, which I’m operating today: The giant Sutherland steel press, which, thankfully, is automated, and does all the math for me.
Whereas Janus had Roman architecture and taste, Ray is at home here. A scant 86 years old, he doesn’t let anyone call him Raymond, because it’s his father’s name. Most of the time he is all-business, without a spare word or thought beyond getting guys set to work for the day. On other occasions, without warning, some ghost gets ahold of him, ensnared and possessed by its memory, until he can makeshift a confession to expel it.
This particular morning, the first week of 2018, he pulls up alongside me on the same jazzy scooter he’s tooled around in since heart surgery five years ago, caked with mud and winter to every part of it. Ray looks at me, his road-salt skin and the crags, the inbetweener scars of an orphan in his forehead, under deep colorless flays of unsleep, and says that a long time ago he owned a rooming house, no board, “Mostly drunks — drinkin’. Guys just waking up, taking themselves down to the bar and back. I remember their faces looked like a dried fish.”
Beneath his words, some unnamed desire, like a sinkhole in the earth, buckles down through me, down from my ear to my gut. I fall through the concrete floor of the shop, but Ray doesn’t miss a beat, he keeps right on talking like everything is normal, like he’s seen this all before. I fall faster, then out of all light and then lastly out from the sound of his voice. I am gone. Some part of me, broke loose, off into this dream, maybe, a hushed chasm of want, a dark tandem of fear and the warm howling urge to look into it.
Maybe I am dying. Maybe I am blacked out, face first on the floor. Either way, as I reach the bottom, and my eyes adjust, I see something. It comes into focus: A beach. The empty sky. A round plastic cafe table, dingy, obscured under countless layers of repainted white, powder coated, sun baked and ashen with salt-wear and the wind. You, sitting at it, your back to me, face pointed at the sea horizon. Our daughters, exactly as old as they are today, digging in the sand with plastic spades. Their darkened melanin giggles. Their seashell windows pushed into hand built castles (I cannot speak of their little thumbs and how they shouldn’t change). All over the table between us there are endless, dark green bottles of wine served in sight of the ocean. Your hand prints and lip marks fog every glass, lined up with the sun, in rows, by year and color. I lose track trying to count them.
And there it is, what brought me here, the call that pulled me under: If only I could keep it like this. If only I could sit here and talk to you, deep into all night, despite sand fleas and sunburn, long after the days have run out from beneath all numbers for them. If only our daughters could stay unchanged by the greater world, and the fat around their wrists stay puffy and creased. If only, untethered from time, I could sit here across from you, just as we are now, thirty-something, slightly overweight, deathless and brilliant, two heavy and polished Bronze Age mirrors, drunk on the unblemished void of our shared knowing. This—the hinge of Janus’s gate, the creaking axis of what is always incomplete, the port where all life considers itself, divided from its greater whole.
Then, suddenly, with a gasp, I snap back from the vision. I never want to come back. Ray Davis is there, still talking and waiting for me to come back. I told him, “I never wanted to come back.”
Ray smiles and shifts the buggy out of neutral, but before he releases the hand brake, says, “Coming back is the only reason why we love where we go. Those men who lived in my roomin’ house, hadn’t a damn thing. Just the job and the drink. In not-too-long they’d pick up and be off somewhere else, following both.”
Later that night, I came up from working in the basement, and there you were, sitting on the small sofa in the living room, focused on your graduate work, answering invisible questions, hair pulled back and squinting at your laptop screen. You ask if I can check your long division. Of course, my first instinct was to tell you about the table, about the dream I had, about how there used to just be rooms in my house but now you are in some of them, about what it is like to come into a room that you are sitting in, and that the two, the way it was before and the way it is now, the past and future, both, keep changing me.
The table can wait, as it does. Instead, I sit down next to you and pretend to look over each equation thoughtfully, even though I’m shit for math, and you know I am.
This piece was originally published in May 2019, Issue 4 of Gordon Square Review, and now here with minor edits.
