The Wake

Here I am, lukewarm coffee sprinkled with a meager ration of cigarettes in the luminous hour before the sun burns the air and gives rise to that wholly industrial mood of the day. The ka-chunk and the whirring of engines as they pass by on the road.

Dazed glances, frantic-paced people waiting for Arby’s or Quiznos, some semi-coherent homeless man stumbles by from one place to another, heat shimmers off the sidewalk, people wait for the bus in front of Burger King, and garbage flutters down the street.

There’s no romance to daily life in the city: it’s too selfconscious, too purposeful.

Right now, none of that exists. It’s quiet here, and the coffee still has that hint of warmth that makes it drinkable. Cold coffee is like death, it vaguely resembles what it was, but there’s nothing pleasurable about it.

Strangely, I’m reminded of Jackie Kennedy in her postassassination years, quietly letting the oceans of Vodka wash over her broken memories.

I wonder, someone of her breeding, what would have been her brand of choice? Was she disposed to any brand loyalties, or did she just desperately guzzle whatever was within her arm’s reach? Did she have anyone send for the firewater, or did she go there herself? Did she bring the bottle up to the register, hiding behind her trademark over-sized sunglasses?

I almost picture her in that pink dress that she wore on the day that is so firmly etched in our minds, Zapruder, sitting alone at some nondescript linoleum table, her puffy eyes focused downward. The open bottle would stand there; the foil would have been peeled away desperately. Uncorked, contents half-gone.

Imagine it, an abusive, alcoholic and philandering father. Husband hooked on methamphetamine and a philanderer himself. Husband shot and killed next to her, blood everywhere. An expectant public that could not stop molesting the deepest recesses of her life. Yet, that stoicism: gritting her teeth in some elegant smile, and drowning the screams down in the hazy depths of drink. For all, nothing but a mirror was she. Tabula Rasa.

Here, the iridescent blue of the predawn light is a moment in this morning that will soon pass; the birds are starting to chirp. For those who are left living to ponder the better part of what could have been is the only hope they’ll ever know. For those that died, perhaps they’ve found some peace. Jackie’s vodka bottle may, yet, still sit on some eternal table, where she contemplates her woozy loneliness.

Already the light has grown more than I like, and the sky has taken on that gray color of morning.