cacti in the sun
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.
Brown had had no idea about America. He grew up in the Soviet Union, or what was left of it, in a family where TV was banned, and bedtime stories came from his parents’ lips. His parents had run from the city as soon as they could, leaving their college educations to till the land of their great-grandparents. Not for the glory of communism, but out of fear, he believed. They genuinely feared the progress of technology, as if it were only a matter of time before they would become robots, locked in patterns until their batteries dried out. At the airport that day, after they said goodbye to Andrej, his father, after the pile of precarious luggage had been secured to the crippled cart that surely stemmed from Khrushchev’s days, his mother had ceremoniously blinked her last look at her native land, or at least the asphalted web of roads that was its current stand-in, and closed her eyes at the first sight of a turnstile. He guided her through check-in as if she was blind, up the Aeroflot’s powder blue aisle, down Frankfurt’s almost liquid marbled hallways, over the oddly office-like texture of the carpeted floors in JFK, all the way to the rental car place in Portland, where the flowery woman behind the counter had looked at her with pity and smiled at his accent. Here in the city nobody minded, but there his halting words had encouraged questions. Always the same. “What was it like?” Then, when he asked what what was like, they rephrased, starting with their traditional assumption of telepathy. “You know. When the wall fell.” How could Brown explain they only found out much later, when the first junk mail overflowed their small mailbox and painted the overgrown gravel of the driveway with garish rainbowy promises. Without TV or news, time used to pass slowly, flowing through their house at the speed of fallen leaves. Brown thought the city would change time’s pace, yet here he often felt in a stationary state of flux, as if he was in the eye of the storm, as if the sheer number of factoids and news reports whirling around him somehow added up to zero; the blurry hum wrapped the citizens in an ergonomic blanket of noise, without really drawing them out of their metropolitan bell jar, sleepwalking them through their daily landscape. Uptown, downtown, elsewhere.
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