As It HappenedSeth AbramsonIf I do not vividly describe it, you willthink the scene is dull; forgive me if you fail to believe even half the story. I know she emerged from a month's silent retreat at Ban Ban in love; another temporary monk from the States, who said he was moved by the way she blinked after a rainstorm--yes, he said just that. If you can believe it, he held her in mute adoration, and with her, a world of simple cantankerous things: crockery exploded by machine gunners at a local base camp, rounds hot and hollow as clocks, ticking off the next reload and another decanter placed atop the stump; the dead weight of the courtyard's autumn sump of wet blue branches; a spot in the vaults they came to share in secret, by chance meeting after the morning rites and special salted eggs--well, you mustn’t believe it. What Emerson called the eternal man is dead, that sense of the storyteller as communal cathexis; it is more contemporary than that, the mere collection of coincidences, some creeping to bed to sleep quietly alongside, others just standing in doorways. When I tell it, the two must actually touch, she must speak to him: a few sultry and assonant words, which in the telling break at least one promise. Seth Abramson |