Stella Atlantis

Chapter 4

With the dead you can float. With the dead you can go anywhere. Finally, you can fly; finally, you are airborne to Soyuz and Cassini. Surfing the aurora borealis through the astrophysical waves.

The rain moves in from Tripoli, Benghazi, Latakia, the Mediterranean stations. The windy rain crosses the water to Iberia from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, those North African shorelines.

The dead are dead, yet the dead tremble against us. The dead are dead, yet they leave strange vibrations. The dead are wet with knowledge. People: the dead are known to the rain.

The wind blows across the Atlantic fissures to the Costa Brava, Catalonia, Barcelona, the old stone tunnels in the fisher quarter. El Born. November 2016

You see …

… sometimes when it was still dark and too many gallant shivs of loneliness came into him in his rooftop attic, Johnny Coma shuffled out the door to the roof patio, crossed the red tiles all wet with rain, found the right key in his pyjama pants, inserted the key in the slot to call the elevator, descended alone in what he always thought of as a tomb for two and stepped out into the stone alley in his blue striped pyjamas, just to be in the world. The solid arch over the alley where he lived gave the sense of long ago, a narrow stone box, with the ancient signs tacked onto the stone of Entrada y Salida, entrance and exit.

He shuffled about thirty steps in his well-worn pale green espadrilles, exiting at the wider Passeig del Born, his local pedestrian concourse, quiet, grand in its ancient modesty, the seven-storey buildings all attached to each other with their signature Barcelona balconies, the green blinds laid over the iron railings.

Johnny saw a light in the mist and stone.

Shit. Yeah. The one coffee guy. He always forgot that one coffee-sandwiches guy was open. Like a lantern in the dark. Johnny shuffled along. Nobody cared if he was in flippers or a clown suit or his same old tattered night stripes. All he wanted was rainy days and routine. Rain, routine and the words for the story of his daughter, Stella.

Grief has hair. Grief eats you. You are grief’s BLT.

He entered the lit coffee spot, asked the man behind the counter, a short gent about fifty, for a cortado. The man shouted in a pleasant alto, “Cortado,” to the back of the shop. A much older gent got up from a chair hidden by the coffee machine. He creaked to the machine. He pressed the buttons. He creaked to the counter, handed the coffee in a paper cup to the man behind the counter, who handed it to Johnny. A euro and a half. Life felt better already.

“¿Cuál es su horario, Señor?” Johnny asked. Sir, what are your hours?

“No hay horario.” We have no hours.

Perfect. Perfection.

Johnny shuffled out the door to the backless stone bench on the street.

The beer cans stashed by the street sellers had been stowed in the trash bins until the hours became after-hours and further street cerveza was needed. A few humans further down the Passeig del Born near Rec were waving pizza slices at each other in duelling disputations, ragged-trouser orators squaring off with pepperoni and anchovy triangles, about migrants and tyrants. Here on cocktail bar row.

Johnny Coma, the lone figure on a stone bench, near Montcada Street, in the rain shadow of the basilica Santa Maria del Mar. Saint Mary of the Sea, who has watched over the seamen, the fishers, the shoreline for a modest seven hundred years and change. He reached up to his ear, felt his writing tool tucked in there, felt the pencil’s ridges, took his trusty Palomino Blackwing 602 grey pencil down. Reached into his pyjama pants for the silver triangle, his pencil sharpener.

He twisted the faithful grey Blackwing round and round. Silver-edged sails emerged from the pencil sharpener, fell onto his blue and white stripes, along with sprinkles of moonlight scurf.

He wrote in his notebook: We have no hours.

He sat absorbing the light mist. He did love it here in the medieval quarter called the Born, El Born or El Borne, folded into the larger neighbourhood called La Ribera – the Shoreline – the little walled alleys, with names evoking hand-labour: the gremios, guilds, artisanal work over the centuries, Kettlemakers Street, Glassmakers Alley, Fishmongers, Hatmakers … It situated his knuckles and wrists.

The Mediterranean briny air. In the stone warrens he was a twelve-minute walk to the sea. Every time he returned to Barcelona, he was struck by the same eternal-return feeling, a return of the rush of love he had felt the very first time. Every sojourn entry was layered with every departure from the past, and every return again. Barcelona was separate from him, yet Barcelona was his secret lover.

And the old stone barrio had from the very first been waiting patiently for him, a mere thousand years.

He ran his thick calloused index finger on the golden metal part of the pencil, the ferrule between the pencil proper and the eraser at the end. The eraser was flat and pink and replaceable. Johnny loved all these details.

Ear to the rain. Lost in the kairos circle.

One of the disputatious guys down the way got up, ambled toward Johnny on the Passeig del Born, stopped, waved his pizza crust at the amber streetlight and whispered in a gravelly hork, “The swallows have fallen from the sky. The wings have come off. We are flying into unknown angles of attack.”

He reached over to Johnny’s smooth shaven head. Pulled out a night errant hair. “More for my treasure box,” he mumbled as he rounded the corner into one of the walled alleys, Vidrieria, Glassmakers Lane, his voice echoing up the ancient stone. “Tonight the Lady Hillary shall be regnant at last!”

“Of course,” Johnny said to the empty street. “Sancho. My old pal from the Pla de Palau. Good old Sancho.”

A whistle from one of the rooftops across from where Johnny sat, alone on the barrio promenade. The whistle bounced from the stone walls of Montcada out into the wider Passeig del Born.

A lean figure with long wavy hair leapt out of the dark of Montcada Street. In a black leotard under the amber rain of the high streetlights. From somewhere – a pocket? – the figure produced a length of rope.

Another high whistle.

A second figure appeared on a slim balcony five storeys up, above the shuttered cocteleria where even the lively vermouth was taking a snooze with fellow dead soldiers, and the figure lowered a length of rope from above.

The street figure caught it, tied the two ropes together. Began to climb.

Like Rapunzel in reverse, climbing with long wavy hair on the rope to the balcony. Then she – it looked like it could be a woman – turned a somersault, climbed further up.

Then she climbed down, hand over hand on the rope, feet curved.

Making circles with her hands, she walked toward Johnny.

“Gyrotonic,” she said, stopping in front of him. “Gyrotonic, Gyro-tonic, I’ve got gyro eyes on you.”

She smiled at the sky, the ancient welkin of this medieval precinct. She reached into a black jersey sleeve. Voila! A shiny black shoe. The other sleeve, another shoe. The shoes reflected the lamplight on the Passeig del Born. Quickly putting her feet into the shoes, tying them up, the mystery woman straightened up, appeared to pull energy from her knees to her waist, and hell on mirror wheels, she tap danced the syncopation out of the stone street in front of Johnny.

As if click-clacking in low taps offstage, she tap danced down the dark passageway of Montcada.

And walked on, waving at him over her shoulder.

They appear; they vanish. You see them once, never again. This is the city. You have to invent a life for a stranger. This, too, is the metropolis. Mister No Hours, Mx. Gyro, Sancho. The performance space called a city.

Johnny opened his arms, stood up, windmilled them to get the blood flowing, the right arm and the left arm going in opposite directions.

Deep breaths. He sat down on the backless stone bench. Dark and empty morning.

The world is contrapuntal, he thought. He could feel the muscle music coming from his shoulders down his forearms to his wrists. He retrieved his pencil from behind his ear. In his plain brown Moleskine notebook Johnny wrote:

November 2016, Passeig del Born, BCN, bench

Dear Stella,

You’re in my mind, but where are you? You walked like electricity through the storm in a dream I had last night. It was you.

Stella, the atoms coalesce. Yet, where are you, small bones I used to read to? Little fossil. If the child dies, the father is an orphan. What is the word for the father whose child is gone? It’s your dad, Stel, I’m so messed up – in the dream last night, I saw you shining. You swam toward me. Your skull was lit up. Inside your lit-up transparent skull your eyes looked out at me. But you swam past me, like you didn’t know me. I said, “Stella, it’s me. Dad. Johnny.”

You swam on the lam with feathery know-how.

Dad

He shuffled the ninety seconds back to his home alley, medieval and about fifty footsteps long. Such a tiny alley it rarely appears on maps. No door visible. Number – ½ – on a cruddy piece of old wood, weathered. A motorcycle strategically parked in front of a larger random-looking piece of wood covered in peeling posters, paint tags. Dark ill-lit alleys are great security. Johnny squeezed in the narrow space between the moto and the wall. He waved his key fob at a wooden board with a peeling photo from a yellowing twentieth-century newspaper: it was a photo of Dario Fo – the Italian left-leaning playwright disrupter called a clown – from the day Fo won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in the fall of ’97.

Johnny Coma waved his key fob at Dario Fo’s nose.

The wooden board opened. Johnny entered the dark foyer, about the size of a bathroom stall, put one of the keys on the key ring into an unmarked slot in the elevator. He felt like a wastrel indeed, returning to his roof studio like a thief with stolen words, nabbed from the world in its few thoughts in the rain time.

He lay down on the patio tiles. He wrote the word Gyrotonic in his notebook. He took a nap as the light before the dawn crept down the old stone quarter.

It was six forty in the morning. Official sunrise was about seven thirty this time of year. Dawn’s creeping light would start about seven. Time for him to visit with Sancho on the old familiar bench around the corner, the bench where they had kept company with each other over the years, when Johnny turned up in Barcelona and kept to himself in a self-contained way, writing.

He walked the one hundred steps from his front door to the square called Pla de Palau. The Palace Plaza. Though, as many an urban spot named palacio, it was modest.

There in the half-dark, was that really Sancho air-typing? Hands low, all proper as a touch typist on an invisible old Underwood typewriter, pinkies aloft on his p’s and his q’s.

“Pase adelante. Come on in. Welcome. Bienvenido.” He patted the wet slats. “Have a seat, we will be right with you.” Then he pulled an invisible sheet of paper out, placed it on top of an invisible ream sitting – apparently – on his other side and tidied the edges. “I will launch from Petrograd to Saint Petersburg.”

Johnny stretched his legs out. He was still wearing his blue-striped pyjamas. Sancho had on baggy pale-blue blue jeans, the kind that tell you that the wearer was American. A local Catalan man would be wearing indigo or black jeans, or cotton pants in a rust or a chore-coat blue. But what with the long moth-gnawed tweed topcoat and his matted hair and his public perch in the square, the baggy pale jeans were simply one more element of the hodgepodge.

“Perhaps, before Leningrad, I will do a local launch, a tour from Espaseria to – Esparteria!”

“Sancho, dear pal, Espaseria and Esparteria meet.”

“Oh dear, oh dear. One more typo waiting to happen. Then we shall launch from Comerç to Comercial.”

Johnny stayed silent on that one. Two streets a half a block away from each other.

“My liege,” Sancho said. “For your esteemed perusal.” He handed the invisible ream to Johnny, about a hundred invisible pages by the amount of space between Sancho’s palms.

“A perfect amount,” Johnny said.

“My yes,” said Sancho.

“To throw away.”

“Throw away?”

“I’ll tell you a little secret,” Johnny said. Whispering, “You can tell a pro by the number of pages they throw away. A beginner –”

“Huh,” Sancho said with haughtiness. “Beginners. Well.”

“No, listen, friend. A beginner brags, ‘I wrote a hundred pages.’ A pro brags, ‘I dumped four hundred pages, I’m heading back in to dump more.’”

“Will Stumpy win the election?”

“Throw it all away.”

“Bakunin blurbed me.”

“Sancho. Write five hundred words a day.”

“To throw away.”

“Away.”

“I think you’re daft. I hear on the Interweb you can binge in November and voila! Novel done. Mikhail will bring Miguel to my launch soiree … You did know, my liege, did you not, that Miguel de Cervantes, the very scribe of Don Quixote, washed up a couple blocks from here, in our own neighbourhood?”

“Yeah, I heard something about that.” Of course Johnny knew about Cervantes’s sojourn in Barcelona. After all, Miguel de Cervantes wrote the Second Part of Don Quixote, in this very area, right around the corner on Colom at number 2. His eyes looking out to the wharf, the port, when the water was closer in.

The nautical dawn was painting itself with olive, aubergine, fair virgin oil of the arbequina.

Sancho closed his eyes and, with an air of contentment, said, “We scribble, we have scribbled, we will have been scribbling.”

“Scribbling is a word professionals use, Sancho, to deflect from the grunge and rejection of art labour,” Johnny said. “Please don’t use it in an unearned way. Earn your stripes before you flaunt the lingo of experience.”

Sancho, almost like a dear devoted husband, was snoozing right at the key moment of conversation. God bless the beginners, Johnny thought, calmed counterintuitively by human company in the life of the city waking.

The two men stretched their legs out, Johnny in pale green espadrilles and Sancho in espadrilles in rose.

Sancho mumbled into his tweed collar, “Ah, many a Google and oft … ” then began to snore so loudly the foghorns were alarmed.

Johnny, for his part, had gone back into a dark mental channel. Behind his eyes, he dove down into water, entering the bathymetry of underwater mountains. He swam down into the Atlantic Ocean, the S-shaped Atlantic, a basin with its fine ocean trenches. The Atlantic, which separates the Old World and the New World. He swam down into the submarine canyons – was Stella there?

The abyssal plains, he wandered them in his brief sleep on the public bench, woke with his pencil moving in his hand, which looked disembodied. The guyot, yes that underwater volcanic mountain, the tablemount. All the pelagic levels. The S-shaped abyss.

His hand wrote the word: abyssopelagic.

When he opened his eyes, he had written a paragraph, and Donald J. Trump was the next president of those United States. Slowly, then all at once.