Mercury Rising

By Elba Kramer

You’re not in Essex anymore.

When I answer the door, I’m not in the English landscape, which is what I’m supposed to be writing a book about.  About England, and possibly about not being there.

“Hi,” says a chirpy young woman with wide eyes, “we’ve been saving the neighbors money.”  Her partner is a sheepish young man who shuffles his feet.  It’s dark.  The woman has spidery, fidgety limbs, and has been doing money things in the dark with my neighbors.

I can’t remember why I’m not in England, which is where we’d gone to simultaneously love and leave America.

“Rogers,” says the woman.

“Robbers,” says little Liam in the next room.

“We’re Rogers.  Have you been losing money with Bell?”

Liam says, “Daddy has a knife.  He uses it for answering the door when it’s dark.”

“I thought he was a pacifist,” says Sebastian, the older and wiser boy.

When I admit to the woman that I think we might have been losing money with Bell, she has me.  “Ah-hah,” she says.  “And what do you do?”

Besides lose money with Bell, I guess.  “Um, I’m writing a book on England?”  I probably shouldn’t have made it into a question.

“Ooh, that’s great,” she says.  “We should, like, get your autograph.  Get in on the ground floor.”

Who said anything about the ground floor?

Liam hears this about getting in on the ground floor and scoots off yelling “robbers!”  In the daytime, sitting on the porch watching the black squirrels hunting the lone gray and mating with it, I’ve told Liam my theory that telephones should be free.  How in fact they are free, that we the people own them, just like we own the internet, but that rich people are always pretending they own them.  This theory seems unlikely in the dark.  I’d seen the ad for Bell out of a corner of my eye in the subway: “Like a guardian angel, Bell is watching over you.”

It’s the week during which I was supposed to be running the Salmon with some of the rowdies from Lowbagger, the off-piste environmental magazine, somewhere in America.  “Are we immigrants?” asks Sebastian.  “Maybe we’re emigrants,” I say.  Whatever we are, there are more of us in the world every year. 

In the daytime, above the subway depot, you can see America as a thin blue line far off across a wide tin-colored lake, so we must not be in England.  Thin line, big register of emotion: imagine the desire and sadness stirred by such a sight.  Love in the age of choleric scurryings, emotional indulgences, all the excesses of exile and its wacky self-impositions.  Some days I pull out the pocket scope Sebastian gave me for Christmas and stare at what looks like it might be a powerplant on the other side.  Mercury rising.

Amidst such transience, I’ve transposed my affection for America onto a trash county in England and found, in its wastes and wilds—filtered through laconic comments from my two boys—a mirroring of my romantic impulses.  I refuse even to admit to myself that we might now be in yet another country.  What happened to Essex?

The boys and I finally secure the door—the ground floor—against the woman with the probing white eyeballs. 

In this new country, there are compensations, even if you don’t include black squirrels and Rogers.  I’ve been invited to teach some courses to grad students, an invitation presumably extended by a well-meaning dean who forgot to backcheck some of the outrageous claims on the rap sheet that poses as my cv.  It’s the best university in the country, too.  “But I can only think of two universities in this country,” I tell my partner.

Later, on the first day of class, the best grad students in the country do show up.  But there are only two of them.  If there are any more out there, they have possibly been warned off by the central computer, which may have intuited something dangerous from my course description and offered the title “Psychogeographies” in lieu of the name I’d tendered: “Nature’s Future’s.”  The new name sticks.

Teaching nature in a university is an iffy proposition.  Philosophers can’t decide if nature exists, a hesitation that makes a lot of sense in a  place where the running water is inside faucets.  Teaching nature is like playing air guitar.  It’s mostly in the wrist action.

I’m a deschooler by instinct if not by training.  I like to sit wisely at home or go upriver and tell my sons about the meaning of life.  “Go deep within,” I say.  “I can’t,” says Sebastian, “I’m too skinny.”

Still, teaching nature in a university may be only slightly more counter-intuitive than putting out a lowbagging magazine.  It’s true that one day we might all realize that when the lowbaggers went off to the Salmon, they never came back, and the magazine has been running itself on software, like a moon landing done in a NASA studio.  Wise lowbaggers, lighting out for the territory.

I stopped reading for two years, not so long ago.  Stopped reading anything, I mean.  When I came back to the world of words, my partner gave me a book by B.K.S. Iyengar, the yoga guru.  “The nearly unstoppable taxonomic compulsion of our brains,” wrote Mr. Iyengar.  Tell me about it.  We’re like Adam and Eve, naming everything, putting it into words, even though Eden has long since become corrupt.  Naming nature, writing it, teaching it.  Ideas running up and down the wires like rodents.  Here we go.

Elba Kramer dispatches for Lowbagger from exile.