Pilgrimages

You can find a lot of reasons to keep living in a crackly French language cult-film, you know which one. There’s a man and a woman walking to the Main Street Pharmacy, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a short distance from their home near the university. It is said that Isabel, Karl’s wife, has a law degree or is a rocket scientist. She’s more of a bookworm than Karl, who is a professor. Karl loves to think and type, and I can still picture him (from my car), after the bars have all closed down, in his low-ceilinged library. It’s illuminated like one of those nativity scenes in front of churches at Christmas. Karl’s head tilted, the center of a quiet tableau, feet resting on a Mexican rug. On a table an antique globe. It’s when I’m still in high school and know better than to drink wine at one of their parties, with the artists and the musicians (I know some of them). I point at their back garden, overflowing with narrow paths, poppies, and holly hocks, and ask Isabel, Is that your naked baby? There’s a small machine with levers and gears. For all I know, it’s somebody’s heart. My own father was a breadman in this town. It’s 2 a.m. and I have a book about Apollinaire with Karl’s name in it from a used bookshop on the square. I drive by it a lot and eventually go in. I swear that inside they have a whole corner arranged like Karl’s private library, his room for typing and thinking. The books are all mixed up, tall next to short, “C” next to “W.”  I often think about how this town must look from above, white picket fences forming letters. To find anything here I have to keep starting from the same spot, next to the bridge over the wide river. A pharmacist in an officious white coat featuring his name, Jery, is mixing powders. I’m perusing the racks of pulp fiction, he’s there with his assistant and measuring tools. I ask, Have you seen Isabel? Karl? He says, uneasily, I’m not sure I know them, a light of recognition in his eye. I scrape out landscapes on paper, with grasses, with train whistles. There are some bad gurus, for sure, but Karl, with his affinity for looping music, is one of the best.