The Hawk of Icarus

It was winter.  An old friend came upon an injured hawk. He read many books on falconry and nursed it back to health.    In the spring, he pinned a bluejay’s feather on his lawn.  He let the bird fly and after a while it returned, alighting near the feather.  My friend was pleased. 

By the next winter the hawk was his.  He had trained it to fly above his boat while they sailed on the sound.  The feather was pinned to his fishing hat, and even on days when they stayed out all night, the hawk would return, exhausted, and perch near the helm where my friend had hung his hat.  A blizzard came.  They were lost at sea.  The hat washed ashore the next morning, the feather too was gone.

By: Sebastian Martinez

Surprise Visitor

She opened the front door to find a lover there.  She had not seen him in years.  They embraced.  They kissed.  They said things.  Because all eyes wander and even in love we fear silent witnesses, she scanned the street for nosy neighbors.  She saw a man in a black suit appear at the end of the block.  He walked towards them.  She did not give the man a second thought. 

            As he passed behind them, the man stopped behind her lover, shot him in the back, and continued down the sidewalk.  She tried to understand why this man she had loved had been flung at her, all blood and silence.  She looked toward the man who was walking away, not fully aware, not fully engaged.  She looked on until his silhouette almost disappeared at the corner of the road.  But he turned, and returned, and shot her as well, leaving no witness.

By: Sebastian Martinez

            Whenever Mrs. Collins got drunk, (not mean but just, drunk,) she’d tell about the night she met the Astronaut at the Playboy Mansion, “and the classy mansion in Chicago,” she would say.  “Not that ridiculous monstrosity Hugh lifted out West.”  The Astronaut was lit after drinking what she called, “a physician’s nightmare.  Liquid fuel for real a rocket man.”  He was going somewhere. “Where to?” she had asked.

             “To the moon!” He had laughed. 
            Mrs. Collins always told that one smiling, until she got to the part about the moon.  She became awfully quiet, and told us to go outside and play, even if it was storming nasty out there and it was midnight…           

            Crossing the bridge, after I had left the office, I wanted to drive my motorcycle through the guard rail.  Honest.  But a friend had a van for me to stay.  He had insisted I meet him at the college that night.  “For a round,” he had said.  I knew what he meant, but I had nowhere else to go.  I could stay in his van after that, until I figured it out.

            I was bored and I wanted to do it.  Bored is what you get when all you have is a nine to five.  Not have like things you can get with the salary.  But have as in, “you’re all I have in life.”

            An alligator lived in a small pond by the office building.  A puddle, really.  For weeks, I sat out there on cigarette breaks, knowing all waves break on ash.  Wondering how a creature that had owned the world, had looked dinosaurs in the eye, was defeated by human fires. 

            Thoughts like these occur on motorcycles.  Ascent and descent.  Change and the central glue that allows life to swing on its own pendulum.  Crossings can be for either; conquest or exile.  And your word.  All grave centers can summon the world in the warrant of a man’s word, collapse unto themselves.  Promise and desire wash up in an impossible ocean of ash.  All waves break on ash, so people break your promise before you can hold it.  You cross the bridge and no one expects you on the other side. 

            By the time I parked my motorcycle in front of the liquor store, I wasn’t sure if I had ever made it over the bridge.  I had been looking at a guard rail and then I was in the storefront parking lot.  It’s when your actions turn automatic that a nine to five gains its true lethality.  It wasn’t the first time I couldn’t recall a single moment of my drive.  Automated, automaton, auto-pilot.  I grabbed an eighteen-pack of Millers from the back room freezer.  Decisive, independent, refreshed.  A bad job and a long bridge made abstract by the urgent cold of a beer can.  The diurnal line between a life worth living and a life worth ending.           

            In entropy, man will not be able to stop the universe from collapsing into itself.  It’s useless to tell you that I thought about this as I drove into the college campus because this is my exact point about it.  Campus was just my logical direction of collapse.  We can’t stop entropy, neither in ourselves nor in the stars.  We all burn out of fuel and explode or fall in.  Waves break on ash.  On and on, until all the light bulbs in the universe run out of gas.  At least, until the god-computer flicks a switch back on.

            “You a student here?” he asked.

            I flicked open my visor and let the gate security guard look at my face. 

            “Oh,” he said, “haven’t seen you in a while, Ethan.”

            I nodded and drove past the gate.  I was pissed too.  And I wanted to party.  So I looked up at God and parked Cassandra and accepted solitude.

            My friend was nowhere to be found, probably still in class.  Walking around with a case of beer under one arm and I remembered campus was still surrounded by water.  I opened a beer and headed to the beach.  No one there.  The sun was coming down.  Dusk I liked because I got to share it alone. 

            I didn’t hear her.  I was looking over the edge of the sea.

            “What are you doing here?” she said.

            I had an obvious answer but I also had that boredom and anger and my friend was late.  “Looking for you,” I said. 

            She sat down and looked at the case of beer. 

            “Here.”  I unscrewed the cap and passed her a fresh bottle.

            What saddened me really about the whole cosmic ordeal is by the end we didn’t even care to remember where the solar system was.  I mean, shit: the Sun, the Earth, the Moon?  We forgot it all.  We left in our happy rocket ships and forgot these rocks that had been our centers.  The rise became so grand it made entropy inevitable.  Our dead, blue rock sitting in the abyss. 

            “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
            I knew it wasn’t true, but she had those eyes.  Green.  Silver green.  The color of levitation.  “What if I said I won’t remember you?”

            “That’s all right,” she said.  “You want to hear music?”

            There was a piano studio behind the campus theater.  I heard the jingle of keys and she wanted to play.

            I had always thought she was beautiful not because of herself but in spite of herself.  The woman that makes a room shine but doesn’t notice.  In some strange sense her eyes reminded me of the mountains back home, the shudder of green. 

            We spoke as we walked, yeah, but mostly we smiled.  I always enjoyed the privacy of those tiny practice studios.  Just enough space for a piano and a chair.  I sat and watched as the arch of her back made the back of her blouse flow a little in the breeze of the ceiling fan.  I listened to the string sweetened chords coming out of that wooden mass, the sound warm and robust, filling everything.  It got cramped so I stood behind her with my hands on her shoulders.

            It’s absurd to say I felt like I was floating because I know I had been drinking and feeling empty in general.  But there she was, the cold skin of her shoulders stretching under my hands, maneuvering around the piano keys.  The song was nice.  I closed my eyes.  I felt her grab my hand and pull her blouse with it.  I didn’t open my eyes.  Even when I grabbed her by her waist and pulled her up against the keys.  And she didn’t stop playing the piano either.  I was still listening, too and somehow, lost in the song of woman and piano I heard the moon.  That’s right, heard it.

            She was confused.  I told her I stopped because we should go for a ride.  Her eyes were sad all of a sudden.  I told her it had nothing to do with anything but my desire for fresh air and more privacy, but she looked away.  She nevertheless smiled and grabbed my waist as she got on the motorcycle.  I turned the ignition and drove out toward the bridge.  The big bridge with lights, though.  I realized as I drove out of campus that I’d never go north on the old bridge again.

            We got to the bridge and the sea foam threw silver sparks at the moon from the water below.  Trucks passed without slowing down.  The wind howled at that height, one hundred and seventy feet above the bay.  Not exactly a lover’s peak because of all the suicides, but I loved this place the most.  Maybe love is deepest at the consequence of death.  The moon was beautiful enough to be full. 

            “Could you live with yourself if it turned out to be a lie?”

            “What?” I asked.

            “That moon up there.  I know that’s why you brought me here.  I know you come out here at nights.”

            “Yeah, it’s quiet,” I tried to explain about entropy and sound before she made a face.  About how it all energy is spent and there’s nothing we can do.  But she understood and I explained that sometimes the loud indifferent noises made for great silence.

            “I saw you out here, my last time here?” she said.

            “I didn’t.”

            “You were driving by.  I was looking at the water.  I like the water in this moonlight.”  She turned away when I tried to kiss her. 

            “I wouldn’t quit if I were you,” she said.

            “I think I can take a hint.”

            “No, I didn’t mean that.  You’ll understand.  But I wouldn’t quit.”

            “I won’t,” I said.  I realized though, that this is exactly what I had done, and why that old bridge was burned, and why I would have to leave soon.  But I realized, too, that no matter where I ran I’d hear her words, and my answer, and I’d never stop thinking that I had made a promise.

            We stood for a while, both of us looking at that moon, making love to that moon, waves crashed and sea foam spread, truck horns bellowed and the pavement shook under their weight, and our hearts moaned that night, they howled drunk and maddened looking at that moon.

            There are two things I wish I had told her before I left that night.  The first happened when I was five and crossing the Atlantic with my grandfather.  I woke up afraid.  He was asleep and it was midnight.  I walked out portside where the moon was shining and leaned on the rail.  A woman was also staring at the moon.  She turned and smiled at me.  I looked down.  I’ve never seen such terrible darkness.

            The second was a dream, at the family farm.  Judges in dark tunics surrounded me.  They ordered me to build the perfect fire on our fireplace and when I was done, they brought a girl I had never seen.  At their order, I had to throw her in the fire and watch as she vanished in the gold blue flames.  I had never built such a beautiful fire.

            “But you loved her?” Michael said.

            “I’ll always love her.  Love is not a blessing.”

            “But you’ll see her again?”

            “No, I never did.”  I said.  I hugged him and left for the boarding gate.

            It reminded me of Mars and the moon and the sky.  Oh, simple sky, what grief you hold against rock.  Man’s most basic case against time.  The Big Glue.  The gesture that covers the wide expanse before the eyes.  It can be a sea and it can be a new love, it can be a blanket of space or the untouchable kingdom of stars.  She’s moaning, my moon.  Moaning with our azure home that spins in the abyss.   One day, far away, we won’t know it.  Not knowing even why we look anymore.  Far beyond.  Beyond the sun.  Engines will fire and latches will close.  Off we’ll go from our center and our home because the heart is more selfish than both.  In twenty or twenty thousand years, if we’re human enough to make it that long, we won’t even be. 

            She’s happy.  She moans and says she will follow straight to the moon and the heart believes her as it believes in happiness but the human is bigger than even the heart.

            Bigger than even the sun.

            …In the classics chamber of the Met, in New York, a marble sculpture of Cupid dies in the crossfire of Aphrodite’s indifferent shoulder and the futile lust of Hercules.  I kind of hoped the angel was asleep, but we all knew he was broken.

                              by Sebastian Martinez