In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
-Mark Strand
We’re in Brussels walking across a quiet square half-lost and cold. The sky is gray, the city quiet. What we thought we’d find isn’t here though we’ve been walking for hours.
“I’m hungry, I need to eat,” you say, a few steps ahead.
I see something lying on the cobblestones.
“Don’t pick it up,” you say. “It’s dirty.”
There’s a wet, cold wind blowing across the square.
I kneel down. It’s half a snapshot, torn down the middle. An infant with a mess of black hair sitting on a man’s lap. She (he?) is looking happily at the camera, her mouth open.
The man holds her delicately. He has long hands and between the fore and ring fingers of his right hand he holds her fat wrist precisely the way you hold a cigarette.
I pick up the photograph and put it in my pocket.
“You don’t have to touch it,” I say.
“It’s sad,” you say walking faster.
I nod as we cross to the other side of the square and turn down a small side street. I’ve got it in my coat pocket. I’m aware of the thing despite its near absence of weight. I imagine I can feel it, curling there in the woolen warmth of my coat.
We’re looking for a place to eat but it’s late afternoon on the last day of the year.
“Should we just eat here?” I nod at a terrible looking gyro shop called Mykonos.
“I don’t know,” you say twirling your fingers absentmindedly through your hair.
The two of us stare into the white light of the restaurant. A thin girl wearing heavy black eyeliner looks up from scooping fries. She watches us standing there in the middle of the street.
What do we look like the two of us standing there in the wind, eyeballing the place?
We must look like those bewildered and disappointed tourists you see wandering around St. Michel. Is this Paris? Is this what we've been waiting for?
“No,” I say. “Come on.”
So we end up in the bar of an expensive hotel off the Grande Place. There’s a band rehearsing and a group of workers in blue coveralls setting up tables and chairs around a small stage. They keep their heads down and whisper quietly to one another in Arabic. A tall woman in tight jeans sings to her band in Portuguese.
We order an expensive lunch and are grateful enough for the warmth and to be sitting down that we don’t talk about the prices. There’s a guy drinking a scotch. There’s a couple reading the Herald Tribune, a pot of tea in front of them.
We’re out of things to say to one another.
I take the photograph from my pocket and put it on the table. The man holding the child has been torn away. There’s a bit of his nose pressed against the baby’s cheek, a sliver of his bottom lip, his chin, a hairy arm, those delicate hands. A knee. The rest is gone. They’re sitting on a cheap yellow-brown leatherette couch. In the background, there’s a baby’s bottle, pale flowered wallpaper. The room seems dark. After the burst of flash, I imagine the room dimly lit.
I turn the photograph over. It’s dated October 25th, 2001.
When the waiter comes with a bottle of water I return the photograph to my pocket.
How does this scrap end up with me?
The tear down the middle seems deliberate, expert. So much care has been taken to remove the man’s face while preserving the child’s. But then why leave those hands? Why not a horizontal tear? And if someone were trying to remove the man and keep the baby, why does this half end up on the street? Perhaps it was a mistake; perhaps it fell from someone’s wallet as they ran across the square.
Is the child dead? Does someone want her forgotten? Whatever is left of the photograph and wherever it is, the man will have a half a face.
Perhaps both pieces were dropped on the square and I’ve only found one. Maybe the other half is scraping along the streets in the wind. Or maybe someone else has found it.
I can’t stop thinking, as hard as I try, that it was a woman who tore the photo in half – the limitations of my imagination.
Our food still hasn’t come. We complain to the waiter. He feigns concern. The tables have been arranged and the workers are gone. The band stops playing. The singer hums the end of a slow Bossa Nova melody and then flicks off her microphone.
“Ciao,” she calls out to her band waving her hand in the air with a campy flourish. She clicks away across the marble floors.
Then the bar goes quiet and I’m suddenly aware of the absence of noise.
A few moments pass before a tall American man strides into the bar.
“Can you have a sandwich here?” He asks the bartender. “I’ve been walking all over this city looking for a sandwich. I can’t find one anywhere. One guy’s got the stuff but no bread. The other guy’s got the bread but no stuff. I just want a sandwich.”
The bartender smiles. He laughs politely. “Yes, sir,” he says. “Here, you can have a sandwich.”
“Great. Doesn’t seem a lot to ask for. Fucking sandwich.”
When he stops talking I’m struck by the same sensation; the sudden absence of noise: what is not there rather than what is.
You smile at me.
I shake my head. “Why do people think anyone cares? Does he think the bartender cares about his search for a sandwich? Buy the “stuff,” go next door, buy the bread, and make your own “fucking sandwich.””
You laugh and look over at the man.
“What’s he doing?”
“Looking at his hands,” you say.
I nod and look at you watching him. You tighten your mouth and push your lips slightly to the side. I look at you and watch your pretty cat eyes turning sad. And I nod before you say it.
“Lonely people talk to strangers about sandwiches.”
I slide my hand into my coat pocket and touch the photograph.
I wonder when I’ll have children. You wonder when we’ll have children.
In a field I am the absence of field.
I think about the child in my coat pocket and I say to her silently,
Wherever you are, you are what is missing.
