Jakarta by Rodrigo Márquez Tizano

Author:Rodrigo Márquez Tizano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2019-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

54.

There were mornings—I remember now—when we woke in Jakarta.

55.

It’s dark by the time Morgan comes back to the lot. He has a rucksack over one shoulder and his breathing is ragged, like he’s been in a chase. He doesn’t apologize for having taken so long, and he doesn’t need to. For Morgan, we would have waited until the end of time, or longer even: in the lot. In the lot, joined in emptiness, silent but in unison—because the stone, inscrutable as ever, stalled at that part, and because, at least in the memory, this other memory that is the stone and its visions or rather the physical sensations that the stone and its visions bring about, it may seem that in his absence there was nothing but a long silence interspersed with the first cold winds of the year, the ones that sweep down from the Sierra at nightfall to announce summer’s end, unhitched convoys gusting down the slopes to crash headlong into the city, welcome, really, after the months of constant oppressive heat. That was followed by further silences, profound, harsher, or more belligerent, presaging his return. Such an interval that the dog forgot us, curled up on the ground, and slept awhile. But now Morgan’s back, and the dog jumps up, as though it smells the mortal end of day, the death of day. Morgan’s come a long way. He is like a heavenly body moments before it hits the earth, a comet that, after the eons of its formation, of condensing among interstellar gasses, shooting stars, water vapor, and tumultuous oxides of all kinds, is ready to take its place in the great procession—part of the code whose origin we will ultimately be forced to acknowledge as indecipherable and, what’s worse, indescribable, because though the numerous obstacles that Morgan had to negotiate to arrive here do comprise an account, and though that account could well be paraphrased and examined for certain general inconsistencies, it is absurd to look for the first cause or to try to establish a schema in which earlier causes may correspond, and what’s more, it is not ours to know whether what we are now seeing is but a variation: Morgan, panting, pedals into view after a period of around two hours, seeming to speed up when he senses we’ve seen him in the darkness, picked him out against the yellow crest-like fronds of the coastal palms (in which the rushing wind is amplified), although that shroud-like darkness, according to Clara, may be nothing more than artifice, a sham version of what was really there in the first place, so Clara says (still cońńected, still projecting): it’s just place, an image that occupies no plane other than the general quality of place-ness, it makes very little difference who’s there or what moment in time it seems to occupy, or if it happens to be another one of us, Birdface Helguera, say, emerging from the distant dark of the palm trees on a bicycle,

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