Read Online Streams of Babel by Carol Plum-Ucci - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Carol Plum-Ucci
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father.
" My eyes glazed over, unable to focus enough to read, though I was pretty certain that if the name Jeremy Ireland had passed by my eyes, I would have noticed. But one half-interesting fact came clear: You could tell when Aleese was needing her drugs, because her pretty, rounded handwriting would turn squarish and jagged, and her sentences became twisted and full of embittered words.
I'd heard enough of that in five years, so my eyes sought a passage that was rounded and pretty. Very few at the end were, but toward the beginning, they were about half and half. I stared at one dated just a few days before the first one I'd read ... it looked like she was also on an airplane. My eyes zeroed in, maybe because it was melodious, almost rocking me and Baba...
It's as if this airplane is soaring upward, upward, upward, through the reaches of space, presenting the grand overview of our troubled planet as the sun sets behind it. I think of the wars and the rumors of wars, and I see little pinpricks of orange blink and bulge on the Dark Continent, as the blazes of war snuff out dozens more lives before returning to black.
Then Asia flickers—first Palestine, then Iran, then Jordan, then Iraq, then back downward to the Nile again, and over Africa. I can hear a million voices—victims on tenor, terrorists on bass, soldiers on baritone, civilians on alto, children on soprano. As we used to say in school choir,
"God, somebody's off!"
We are, all of us, conjoined in sad song, committed to our marriage of bad harmonies. We're linked as closely to those whom we hate as those whom we love. Film and photo
and e-mail and planes—they pull our faces together as tightly as beads on a string. A hand waves in North Africa; a wind ripples in America. A gun designed in Virginia, with metal purchased from China, sends its bullet through the guts of a foot soldier in Somalia. The hateful collide with the loving; the wise collide with the foolish; the loving are sometimes hateful; and the simplest of people often seem to be most wise. And as I've already proposed, the dead collide with the living, and if I'm not proof of that, then nothing is.
I'm returning to America, because I want to die there, because for me, there is nothing left. Nothing except some memories, and One Nation under God, which, in spite of all its little hypocrisies and ill-bred boorishness, still appears to have Providence on its side. It's the one place where, from up here, I don't see the orange flickers of civil unrest, political upheaval, or invasion. America has managed to keep its dignity. Even though I have not, I want to be part of it again. I want to die in my own backyard, where dignity persists, like the wildflowers that bloom regardless of what men can do...
And that was it. Just a thoughtful passage. It was hauntingly prophetic as concerned her, and yet so very strange—reminding me in its poetic language of what I had tried so hard to sound like while trying not to sound like her. I didn't know what to make of that.
I snapped the book shut. Aleese had been coming home to America—probably knowing she was coming to Oma and me—and she never mentioned me at all. I didn't know why that should hurt me at this point. I had never dared to love her.
The book fell out of my arms, and I realized, as sleep hazed in, that my headache was gone and the chills of fever had turned to a clammy, drenching sweat. I threw the blankets off and tossed Baba down the mattress so we were joined only by my fingertips. And I enjoyed a moment of feeling that at least my body barometer was working right again. I hoped my bout with sickness was going away for good.
I prayed for that, picking at Baba's belly, until sleep took me away from sad thoughts, away from sickness. Suddenly, I was the one flying in a plane, looking down on our planet at dusk and seeing, instead of deadly orange flickers, an endless trail of beautiful white dots, as if one person were joined to the next,
" My eyes glazed over, unable to focus enough to read, though I was pretty certain that if the name Jeremy Ireland had passed by my eyes, I would have noticed. But one half-interesting fact came clear: You could tell when Aleese was needing her drugs, because her pretty, rounded handwriting would turn squarish and jagged, and her sentences became twisted and full of embittered words.
I'd heard enough of that in five years, so my eyes sought a passage that was rounded and pretty. Very few at the end were, but toward the beginning, they were about half and half. I stared at one dated just a few days before the first one I'd read ... it looked like she was also on an airplane. My eyes zeroed in, maybe because it was melodious, almost rocking me and Baba...
It's as if this airplane is soaring upward, upward, upward, through the reaches of space, presenting the grand overview of our troubled planet as the sun sets behind it. I think of the wars and the rumors of wars, and I see little pinpricks of orange blink and bulge on the Dark Continent, as the blazes of war snuff out dozens more lives before returning to black.
Then Asia flickers—first Palestine, then Iran, then Jordan, then Iraq, then back downward to the Nile again, and over Africa. I can hear a million voices—victims on tenor, terrorists on bass, soldiers on baritone, civilians on alto, children on soprano. As we used to say in school choir,
"God, somebody's off!"
We are, all of us, conjoined in sad song, committed to our marriage of bad harmonies. We're linked as closely to those whom we hate as those whom we love. Film and photo
and e-mail and planes—they pull our faces together as tightly as beads on a string. A hand waves in North Africa; a wind ripples in America. A gun designed in Virginia, with metal purchased from China, sends its bullet through the guts of a foot soldier in Somalia. The hateful collide with the loving; the wise collide with the foolish; the loving are sometimes hateful; and the simplest of people often seem to be most wise. And as I've already proposed, the dead collide with the living, and if I'm not proof of that, then nothing is.
I'm returning to America, because I want to die there, because for me, there is nothing left. Nothing except some memories, and One Nation under God, which, in spite of all its little hypocrisies and ill-bred boorishness, still appears to have Providence on its side. It's the one place where, from up here, I don't see the orange flickers of civil unrest, political upheaval, or invasion. America has managed to keep its dignity. Even though I have not, I want to be part of it again. I want to die in my own backyard, where dignity persists, like the wildflowers that bloom regardless of what men can do...
And that was it. Just a thoughtful passage. It was hauntingly prophetic as concerned her, and yet so very strange—reminding me in its poetic language of what I had tried so hard to sound like while trying not to sound like her. I didn't know what to make of that.
I snapped the book shut. Aleese had been coming home to America—probably knowing she was coming to Oma and me—and she never mentioned me at all. I didn't know why that should hurt me at this point. I had never dared to love her.
The book fell out of my arms, and I realized, as sleep hazed in, that my headache was gone and the chills of fever had turned to a clammy, drenching sweat. I threw the blankets off and tossed Baba down the mattress so we were joined only by my fingertips. And I enjoyed a moment of feeling that at least my body barometer was working right again. I hoped my bout with sickness was going away for good.
I prayed for that, picking at Baba's belly, until sleep took me away from sad thoughts, away from sickness. Suddenly, I was the one flying in a plane, looking down on our planet at dusk and seeing, instead of deadly orange flickers, an endless trail of beautiful white dots, as if one person were joined to the next,
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