Free Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy by Joshua Corey Page B

life seen afresh at the movies, as strangers see it, as it is now
traversed by cops and gangbangers and housewives and Batman. The camera is a
prophetic voice stuck in neutral, it declares only that this is, that nothing
else shall be, it is the enemy of every future. We depend on the soundtrack for
a hint of that other, unseen world: footsteps, sirens, voices, music. The light
changes, the people cross. Things speed up and slow down, but there is no true
future. Ex cathedra : from the seat where your posture matters not at all. In camera : in the room. We
are sheltered. We are struck.
    Lamb in the station. Lamb on the train. In a compartment while a
landscape slides by, dappling in sunlight and purple shadows. Lamb giving the
eye to a young woman, long of torso and limb, sitting across from him with legs
crossed, her boyfriend stubbled and asleep with his head on her lap, her
fingers in his hair. Looking frankly back at him, at Lamb, a man, unspoken and
sexual exchange the camera can capture. Lamb in the washroom,
throwing water on his face, looking at it in the mirror, studying its planes
and angles so that we can study it too. At the movies mirrors pass for
narration, we watch him watching himself looking to discover what goes
unspoken, motivation, scars, marks of the past, signs of what’s to come. Music under the looking, the moving train. If the door slides open behind him and she appears, serious under dark brows
and lipsticked mouth, and advances to kiss him, he kisses her back, roughly,
the door slides shut and she’s already hooked her underwear with her thumbs,
pushing it down, he has her by the waist and hoists her up onto the narrow
sink, pushes his face into her neck, her fingers working at his crotch,
thrusting into her, watch her open mouth, Oh , the two of them rocking with the train,
fucking, the movies give us fucking, its futurelessness, alone in the dark in
the static electricity of watching Lamb, our surrogate, even if you’re a woman
it’s his skin we’re in, and the tight shot of her hand gripping his shoulder,
nails digging in. Then the cut, back to the compartment, where the young man
sits up, yawning, passes his hand over his face, looks around, confused. The
door opens, Lamb comes in, he closes it, sits down
opposite, picks up his newspaper, nods. The door opens, the young woman comes
in, adjusts her skirt, sits down next to the young man who puts his arm around
her automatically, she nestles against his chest, her face hidden. The young
man’s nostrils flare, his pupils dilate, he looks down at her, touching her
hair tentatively, he looks across at Lamb who is staring at his paper, he looks out the window where the sea is flashing by. He
opens his mouth and closes it: we see him deciding, as they say, to let
sleeping dogs lie. There is only this train, this stillness in motion, this
compartment bound over the sea, westward. Only the set of his jaw remembers.
And Lamb takes his laptop out of the top of his rolling suitcase, for writing
is an aid to memory and he, Lamb, is the writer.
    From her high chair little Lucy looks up from
her bowl of oatmeal as the train vibrates past the house as it does a hundred
times a day. “Choo-choo,” Ruth says to her, pausing with the spoon in midair.
Lucy concentrates. “Dada,” she says. Ben’s life is the train, whether he knows
it or not. The train he rides at this moment, that he rides every day, is an
arrow; the suburb and the city are bowstring and target. What defines Ben but
this coming and going, that straddling of his own existence? Where he lives is
not where he comes to rest: the train itself, sitting alone on the upper deck
as she knows he likes to do, laptop open, coffee in hand, taking on the
business of the day before the business day proper starts. Many men, women too,
more and more, south at the start of the day, north at the end of the day, to
and fro, their computers and smartphones like the hooks of lines they pull
themselves along