A wonderful dream and a horrific nightmare, a fuzzy consciousness of pain and family, Pockets is a novel of fragments—both literally and figuratively. In a series of prose-poem chapters, the nameless narrator, in a largely Jewish 1960s suburb in the northern reaches of Toronto, repeatedly enters the world, as if for the first time. His landscape is one of bicycles with banana seats, Red Skelton, trilobite fossils, and overwhelming loss. Among shadows that both comfort and threaten, a brother who drifts through the sky, he finds his narrative full of pockets of emptiness he can’t help but try to fill.
A heartbreakingly personal and brilliantly evocative work, Pockets redefines the novel, delivering infinite scope in something diminutive and pocket-sized. It is a work to be read and reread for its poetic beauty and hidden gems of revelation.
A wonderful dream and a horrific nightmare, a fuzzy consciousness of pain and family, Pockets is a novel of fragments—both literally and figuratively. In a series of prose-poem chapters, the nameless narrator, in a largely Jewish 1960s suburb in the northern reaches of Toronto, repeatedly enters the world, as if for the first time. His landscape is one of bicycles with banana seats, Red Skelton, trilobite fossils, and overwhelming loss. Among shadows that both comfort and threaten, a brother who drifts through the sky, he finds his narrative full of pockets of emptiness he can’t help but try to fill.
A heartbreakingly personal and brilliantly evocative work, Pockets redefines the novel, delivering infinite scope in something diminutive and pocket-sized. It is a work to be read and reread for its poetic beauty and hidden gems of revelation.
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Overview
A wonderful dream and a horrific nightmare, a fuzzy consciousness of pain and family, Pockets is a novel of fragments—both literally and figuratively. In a series of prose-poem chapters, the nameless narrator, in a largely Jewish 1960s suburb in the northern reaches of Toronto, repeatedly enters the world, as if for the first time. His landscape is one of bicycles with banana seats, Red Skelton, trilobite fossils, and overwhelming loss. Among shadows that both comfort and threaten, a brother who drifts through the sky, he finds his narrative full of pockets of emptiness he can’t help but try to fill.
A heartbreakingly personal and brilliantly evocative work, Pockets redefines the novel, delivering infinite scope in something diminutive and pocket-sized. It is a work to be read and reread for its poetic beauty and hidden gems of revelation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781773050898 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 09/06/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 99 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
I looked out my bedroom window and saw my brother floating over the weeping willows. His feet fluttered, as if he were wearing flippers. His arms trailed at his sides, his fingertips pointing back to where he had just come from. Where he had just come from now looked like a hovering oil slick, glittering with traces of the moon's pale light.
The houses crouched in their yards, amid the damp grass, and they breathed almost silently. Every so often one twitched or shuddered. Rain streaked down their windows. The tip of an evergreen was tilted by the wind, but it pushed back, straightening itself until it pointed toward the thick clouds.
A comet whipped through the night sky. The next comet waited its turn. And still more after that one, more and more comets. There was some jostling in the line, a bit of shoving, and then calm.
I stood in my bedroom, at the foot of my unmade bed. I turned on a lamp and my shadow was thrown across the floor. With effort, it pulled itself to its feet and lurched toward the window. The phone rang once and then whoever it was hung up.
I reached into the bottom of my pants pockets, grasped the seams, and pulled the pockets out till they looked like dog ears flopping against my thighs. They were empty. I counted to eighteen, and stuffed them back into my pants. Then I scooped up palmfuls of my own shadow from the floor and filled my pockets with them.
Pants are trousers. Trousers are slacks. Shirts are blouses. Socks are stockings. That summer, I dug for clams while wearing clam-diggers. Or maybe I dug for trilobites. Was it trilobites?
Morning arrived. The house was silent. It didn't move. I looked out the window. My brother stood in the backyard, beside the red-brick barbecue our father had built. He reached forward and his hand grew immense. He wrapped his enormous fingers around the house and crammed it into his pocket. I turned on my lamp and everything disappeared.
The door to my parents' bedroom was shut. Gently, I pushed it open and peeked in. The television threw a glow onto their bed. They lay side by side, my mother and father, completely still. I heard the voice of Deborah Kerr in The Innocents. It was, therefore, sometime after 1961. I slipped out of the house, into my car, and drove to the cemetery. I reached into my pockets, took out some small rocks, and placed them on the headstone my parents shared.
The Hebrew alphabet has twenty-two letters. The Hebrew school I attended was located in the basement of the synagogue near our house. The teacher called me by my Hebrew name — Zalman. It takes four Hebrew letters to spell Zalman. There are four stages involved in something or other to do with the Kabbalah. It is marvellous how everything is connected.
On Easter Island, there are heads made of stone. Eight hundred and eighty-seven of them. The men who carved them rubbed the gigantic heads with pumice when they were finished. I liked to sit at my piano and play Trois Gymnopedies. Who doesn't? Erik Satie, who composed it, cleaned his skin with a pumice stone, one square inch at a time.
The boy next door and I sat under the wooden porch in his backyard, examining the small grey stones, one at a time, rolling them in our fingers, looking for trilobite fossils. His shiny black yarmulke fell off and he put it back on over his shiny black hair, then pushed the bobby pin into place. This was called archaeology.
I crouched inside the snow fort. I ate some ice. The sounds from outside were muffled. I ate some more ice. The ice made crunching noises as I chewed it. The world outside was destroyed when we collided with another planet. I floated through space in my silent snow fort. When I looked out the door, I saw stars, stars, stars against the endless black nothingness.
I peered through my living room window at the house across the street and into their living room window. I could see my friend Stevie. He reached down and pulled out his pants pockets. Coins fell out, and raisins. A baseball glove and a twisted menorah. Newts scampered down his legs, and goldfish drifted into the air, as if the living room were filled with water. Stevie pushed his pockets back into his pants, wiped the back of one hand across his nostrils, and disappeared from my view. Soon his front door opened. He appeared on the porch. Then he was on the roof. Then he stepped out of his open garage. He walked away down our street, down Pannahill Road. The street rolled up after him, revealing a dark ravine beneath.
I looked at my wristwatch in disbelief. "Why don't you believe me?" it asked.
As I sat cross-legged on the floor of my parents' bedroom at lunchtime watching The Flintstones on television, I felt a tickle on the knuckles of my right hand. It was a daddy-long-legs. Or maybe it was the 1955 movie Daddy Long Legs, starring Fred Astaire as Jervis Pendleton III and Leslie Caron as Julie Andre. Whichever it was, it scurried across the back of my hand and vanished.
On the sidewalk, two men faced each other. One man said, "Mister, can you spare a quarter?" The other man pulled his empty pockets out of his slacks, as if to say, "Admire the fine material."
I pedalled my new red bicycle to the end of the block. I looked back at our house. My brother stood at the foot of the driveway watching me. He wore a white T-shirt and blue jeans. I was not allowed to ride any farther than the stop sign. I looked at the grey-and-yellow triplexes a block away. Marky lived in one. I rode past the stop sign and up, up, toward the triplexes. I wobbled from side to side on my red bicycle. My brother snitched. The slam of my father's footsteps as he strode after me along Pannahill Road was like a series of meteors hitting the earth. I stood with Marky looking at my new bicycle, and soon my father's shadow fell over us. His large thumb came down and squashed me into the concrete. Marky examined the smudge on the driveway in front of the triplex he lived in.
Back on earth, some people didn't have houses. Meanwhile, some houses didn't have people.
My father was handy. In the basement, next to the furnace, he had a workshop full of tools and pieces of wood and metal. Also, he banged nails into walls and hung paintings on them. Once, he missed the nail and struck his thumb with the hammer. When my friends came over, they always asked to look at his cleft thumb.
In the black-and-white photo taken ten years before I was born, my father and mother look like movie stars. They stand in a field, wind whispering through their hair. The photo whispered in my ear, "See how they smile. See their eyes shine. They have no worries yet, your parents."
In the ravine behind my school, I walked along the snow-covered path. I watched my breath turn into clouds. I could hear my own breathing. My boots squeaked on the ground. A thing caught my eye and I knelt. I brushed away some snow with my mittened hand. The face of a frozen squirrel was revealed. It looked into my eyes.
My father followed the ambulance that carried my brother to the hospital. The red lights on top of the ambulance flashed in his chest. Crisp brown leaves drifted from the trees and swirled in the streets. He arrived soon after the ambulance. Later that night, I sat on the foot of his bed. He lay on top of the covers, his clothes rumpled, his hair rumpled, red lights flashing in his chest. He rubbed his dark eyes. "I tried to save him," he said.
A boll weevil curled up into a tiny grey ball on the grey curb. It rocked slightly in the warm breeze. A 1966 blue Ford station wagon rolled by. Neither the boll weevil nor the station wagon was aware of the other. A sprinkling of rain began to fall. Soon the entire road looked like it was covered by shadow.
My mother. Her lips touched my forehead. She walked out the front door. A winter draft swept across the floor toward me and bowled me over. I heard her start her car. My grandfather's voice from downstairs. He called her name. I drifted along the hardwood floor. He called her name again. On the television, a president got shot in the head.
I closed my bedroom door and stood on my bed. I rolled up an Archie comic and held it to my mouth like a microphone. I opened my mouth. I thought of Herman's Hermits and "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter." I thought of Gerry and the Pacemakers and "I Like It." I took a breath. Soon I would hear my voice. I wondered what it would sound like.
In our basement was an old fridge. The noise it made was louder than the stuttering hum of the new fridge upstairs in our kitchen. It was white with a silver handle. It contained a turkey. The turkey had presented itself to my father as a reward for my father's success in bowling. My father took three or four long strides. The ball left his hands. The sound of the ball rolling down the lane is the sound of me not remembering what that sound sounded like.
The phone rang. It hung on the kitchen wall and rang. Its dangling curled cord swayed slightly. We all sat at the dinner table and watched it ring. A green bowl of corn niblets on the counter watched it ring, too. It rang eight times and then it stopped.
The girl next door had never heard of the Beatles. I laughed. She laughed, too. Her name was Karen. She showed me her Cowsills comic book, and her mother gave us peanut-butter sandwiches and milk in glasses that had once held yahrzeit candles. I looked out of their kitchen window and saw my own house. My grandfather was standing on the roof beside his treadle-operated sewing machine. He was born in Poland and he clenched a piece of thread between his teeth.
Spools of black, brown, and grey thread emerged from the clouds, unravelling as they sailed down toward earth. Earth, meanwhile, braced itself.
My mother lay in the hospital bed. The nurse injected a needle into her thigh. She asked me to hold a piece of cotton hard against the spot where the needle had entered, then she left the room, and I was alone with my mother. My hand trembled. I wasn't sure whether my mother was awake. Her television was on. It was news. It was a trial. I stood there pressing the piece of cotton against my mother's thigh. Days passed. I placed a rock on her headstone. A spool landed beside my feet.
I ran down the empty street. I passed through the yellow glow of street lamp after street lamp. My running shoes slapped the pavement. Thunder rumbled in the distance.
The Angel of Death flew out of our Passover Haggadah and slew me with a sword. On Passover, my mother and father and brother and grandfather opened the Haggadah to read and pray and sing, and they saw the woodcut image of me skewered on the sword. "I thought he was up in his room," my father said.
When I woke up, I was surprised to find myself swimming through the air, my skin cool and damp from a light drizzle. Beneath me was an enormous weeping willow. I passed the window of a house, where a small lamp threw light on the face of a boy lying in his bed, looking across the room and out the window. Just before he left my field of vision, I recognized the boy as me, peering out the window at his brother drifting by.
Marky and I performed The Marriage of Figaro in the garage of my house. This consisted of us standing on the concrete floor singing, "Figaro, Figaro, Figaro," over and over again. Then we told some jokes and talked in funny voices. For his ventriloquism demonstration, Marky used a stuffed toy animal that my dog, Rufus, had humped. The garage door was closed and the performance was illuminated by a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. All the corners of the garage were shrouded in shadows and probably filled with spiders. The five audience members sat on car tires and on cardboard boxes filled with shingles. It smelled like oil in there, or maybe gasoline. Admission to our show was only five cents, and the value was excellent. One of the jokes was: "What do ghosts eat for breakfast?" The answer was: "Evaporated milk and ghost toast."
I stood in the ninth-floor hallway of my grandparents' apartment building. I opened the door marked "GARBAGE" and stepped into the tiny garbage room. It smelled like garbage. I opened the garbage chute and peered down. It smelled like garbage. The building turned upside down and I landed on the ceiling.
Tiny spiders were lowering themselves from my parents' ceiling. They were all over the place. My mother said they came out of the curtains. The curtains depicted scenes from Venice. Canals and gondoliers. I ran from the room, brushing at my hair frantically to knock any spiders away. Those spiders were so tiny. I could feel them in my hair for the rest of the day.
Marky did not like the books about the boy detectives. "Look, this is a good one," I said. "This is a good one, too, I like this one." There were thousands of them and they were all good. You got to know everybody. Frank and Joe Hardy. Chet Morton. Fenton Hardy. Aunt Gertrude. Iola Morton, and Biff Hooper. Also Phil Cohen. I peered at the page in disbelief. There was a Phil Cohen.
Stevie was on his lawn, cutting grass with hedge clippers. "Look," he said, "I'm cutting the grass!" I reached in to help clear away some of the cut grass. The tip of my right index finger got snipped off. Stevie ran away. In the hospital, they put a rubber thing that looked like a nipple over my finger. My parents had to apply Mercurochrome four times a day. It stained my finger red. I refused to go to school with a nipple-finger.
Music came out of the radio on the kitchen table. The song was very repetitive. The house was empty. The telephone was silent. A bird hit the living room window.
I pulled out my pockets to prove that I had nothing in my pockets. He pushed me on the grass and laughed and bicycled away. I got up and brushed the dirt and blades of grass off my pants. Later I watched Thumbelina at the Willow Theatre. Coke travelled up through a red-and-white-striped straw, into my mouth.
Tadpoles swimming in circles through murky water in a bowl on my dresser. Dust floating in the beams of sunlight gushing in through the window. Cartoon frogs with hats and canes singing, "Give My Regards to Broadway." This is how we lived in those days.
On the floor of my brother's bedroom, which years earlier had been my bedroom, until I moved out and my brother moved back in, lay bits of tape, torn plastic pouches, a damp towel, a plastic syringe. The detritus of his collapse and the paramedics' efforts. I went back into my father's bedroom. He was asleep. It was four-thirty in the morning. A photo of my mother, before she became sick, stood on the nightstand beside him. A movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme was on the TV. When my father woke up, it would be time to choose a casket for the funeral that afternoon. I wandered to the sunken living room, wanting to sit at my old piano and see if I remembered Erik Satie. But the living room was filled with water, reaching up the piano's legs. I saw flashes of eels and Chinese goldfish beneath the water's dark surface. A crocodile lounged on the steps leading down. I went into the dining room, sat at the table, and slowly spun the lazy Susan until the sun came up and the windows shattered.
A noise from my closet. I turned on my lamp. I was in a room I didn't recognize. When I turned my lamp off, then on again, I was back in my own room. My shadow thrown against the wall looked like Danny Kaye in a scene from The Man from the Diner's Club.
Marky and I sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor of his living room, in front of the stereo. A Jewish-soup smell came from the kitchen. He lowered the stylus onto the vinyl and it bounced a moment, then played a song by Randy Newman, "Lonely at the Top." I met Randy Newman backstage at his concert at Convocation Hall. We both had big noses, glasses, pot-bellies, and curly grey hair. Randy Newman squinted at me and said, "It's like I'm looking at myself twenty years ago." I asked Marky to play "Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear" again.
I looked out my bedroom window. My brother swam past once more through the sky. "I told you I could do this," he said. I climbed into the window frame to watch him through the screen as he got farther away, until the speck of him disappeared into a dark cloud. I opened my fist and in my palm I discovered a tiny ambulance, its red lights flashing.
If a ghost floats in through your window in the middle of the night, is it impolite to ask whose ghost it is?
My father and mother were in the front seat of the Ford station wagon, facing out the front window, and my brother and I were in the small back seat at the rear of the wagon, facing out the back window. We were on the highway. When a car pulled up behind the station wagon so close that we could see the driver's face, my brother and I waved. If the driver waved back, we got one point.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Pockets"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Stuart Ross.
Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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