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Moonshine 
I've realised why Ted Berrigan is not so
hot
Edward
Berrigan, the Seattle engineer, not
that other one
He writes to his wife in Kuala Lumpur:
"What are you up to down there?"
("Doris... I'm getting to like middle age...")
See? boring
it's because he has the inborn talents
of a painter, not an engineer;
no matter how hard he tries, etc.
Another Boeing rolls off the assembly line
Ted thinks he's okay
he's not okay,
it's divorce time in Seattle.
He'll be the next to go: Doris! Doris!
maybe...
Later
imitating the collected works of
the Darmstadt Engineering Group
reading soup in the darkened kitchen
he's Canadian, they tell me
an "emigrant"; his wife's sick
she flies home to Ontario in a Boeing jumbo —
did Ted build it? At least the fuselage? She
takes up a fat-free diet; it's goodbye to Seattle,
hello Saskatchewan: middle age
rises above the tundra
the Boeing plant is bathed in its glow.
3-D
When you look out the window at the neighbours
then glance back quickly, she seems fine.
Gaunt, maybe, a little neurotic...
it's the food she's eating, and the "happy pills".
There she goes, listening to important things:
the song bones, the engine wrapped in plastic,
custom pillars supporting a landscape, a jet
ploughing into the mountainside... Look
away again, out of the diary. Guess what?
She got a new job, she hated everything. Why
"everything"? Better — better for all of us —
if she could be looked after... a luggage locker,
that would be fine, or a holiday resort,
she could shout if she wanted to, couldn't she?
You look away, into the passenger compartment
of the car, and there she is, half alive,
reading the Discovery Kit, over and over.
The Colors of the Days
Monday — blue-gray, with a band of pearl gray around the edges.
Start work renaming the little flitches of colour on the paint chart. The air is chill,
the sky blanched. The streets creak under a drift of powder snow, and the factories have
locked their doors. There is traffic on the street below, but not much; mainly late 1940s
sedans — beige, dull blue and lime-green — driving about slowly. What are they
looking for?
Tuesday — green, the yellow-green of Pernod, a slight dip in the
ride, a sour taste at the bottom of the glass. Susie says she's tired; she stayed out late
at a publisher's party last night. Now the doorbell rings. Through the lens I can see a
Korean gentleman standing there in the hallway holding a bunch of flowers and a large
piece of notepaper, trying to deliver them to the wrong address, again. Afternoon —
the month's supply of newspapers arrive from Australia. I note that the art reviewer of
the Wagga Wagga Advertiser has attacked Monet again, to little effect.
Wednesday — a picnic rug, mainly light yellow, some gray along the
sides, a kind of check pattern. The climate seems to be warming up. There's a dust cloud
on the horizon, to the west. It can't be the Cavalry. Everyone's moving out of town,
that's what it is, motors straining under the load, trailers full of junk.
Thursday — brown, grainy, the tint not full enough, a strip of
silver trim. I decide to sit in the old leather armchair for a while. I light my pipe and
read Popular Mechanics again, the issue that tells you how to build your own glider from
balsa wood and doped khaki cloth. Dope — a kind of glue. But how do you launch it?
And where would you go in the thing? I can see myself gliding high in the clear skies over
Colorado looking for a suitable spot to land, a clearing beside a tumbling spring where I
will build a makeshift hut and set to work carving out a niche for myself in the ravishing
wilderness. Decades later a prospecting party will stumble upon my high-tech ranch built
into the side of a hill, the Armorglass � walls, the highball cabinet with concealed
lighting, the surveillance cameras, the secret launch pad tunnel.
Friday — black, a stripe of white and light tan where it dips at the
bottom, as the metal swoops down and then up into the evening. A knot of people are
standing around on the worn green linoleum in the hallway, drinking cheap red wine from
paper cups and arguing about the place of socialism in a shopping-mall culture. There's a
sense of something about to happen, but not quite yet.
Saturday — fields of white cloth loose in the breeze, some seagulls
high up, far out across the pale green water, then some yachts moving away. Susie has
placed an old towel on the garden path and she's lying there, a Saint detective paperback
shading her face, trying to develop a tan the way you might try to develop a photograph.
On that front, nothing much is happening. She's saving up to go to London, by boat. What
sort of a future does she think she'll have there?
... [ Years pass ] ...
She comes back from Europe, old, tired and unwell, distressed at having wasted the best
part of her life.
Sunday — a flush of red, old maroon paint with a stripe of cream shining along the
flank, now the newspapers are folded, now the evening closes in with distant sounds of
cool jazz leaking from a club where no one is listening — one last glass of sparkling
water — and the doors bang shut with a gust of wind and rubbish in the back alley.
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