Francis Fernandes

​Stealthy
 
Every now and then, when the lights go dim and no one else is around, when thoughts of the bloody morrow cease to exist (for at least a couple minutes), I find myself jumping the useless corporate firewall into Google Earth, all aglow, like a kid, hands electrified, heading for the street where I used to live. I’m still blown by the mere technical feat: equipped with nothing but a box of wires and chips, you have the power to call forth the magic realm where all your childhood stories played themselves out. Fingers dancing on keys, our blue-and-green planet smoothly rotating, your cells pick up the gravitational waves from those wonderfully delirious street-hockey games. Hands that perform the impossible. Double click, and the eerie process of zooming in begins. You almost falter as the city--your city—comes into view. There it rises, like a snagged fish, legendary, shimmering: all at once you are a spaceman, a time-travelling angler reeling in a golden species. Or better still: some weary god in a business suit, grown numb through distance and habit, burdened with the weight of his twelve or so labours, dropped into this virtual life. The lilting cadence of a half-remembered song. A street grid blossoms and fills the screen. Animated by past glories, you hone in on your neighbourhood, where the street names appear out of nowhere. As though in your absence this world has become terribly verbatim. You see the ghost of your mother stepping out the front door with a piece of chalk in one hand, halting the traffic with the other. See her carefully inscribe the names on the cracked pot-holed asphalt. So much like her. Heart full of yearning, hands motioning, drawing you back to the hearth--to her. Bustling Hermes always on the go; serene Hestia tending the fire. Having glimpsed your mother, how can you not hear that bright sing-songy voice beckoning you in for dinner? How not recall, with the streets and the driveway of your own house now in plain view, that odd tug in the side, as the game, winding down in the blessed dusk—like the Battle of Troy—is about to be called? Or feel that nudge, like a premonition, that this universe you’ve fashioned for yourself cannot go on forever. The slapshots and wristers. The brilliant saves. Feathery pass! Flashing the leather! The perennial dekes and poke checks, the dazzling head fakes and lurches. Moves like The Rocket! No, like The Flower! No, like The Great One! The doubling over with laughter. The burning lungs. And, between plays, the staring off into the purple-blue distance: as though, even then, something mysterious is being whispered into the ear of this elated brazenfaced boy with the grand, foolish dreams; something about another kind of move that will one day be required—a conjurer’s feint, a maestro’s flick of the baton—to bridge these moments of freedom and remember what it’s like to live with every fibre of the body, in the place that remains, irrevocably, and for so long, the here and now. 
 
**

Greatness
 
Watching it on replay, I thought Ohtani kind of a jailbreak
screen and he’s three-point something down the line. I think
he’s safe anyways.
                     Brandon Hyde (Baltimore Orioles manager), August 2023, talking about the speed of Angels star Shohei Ohtani
 
In fact, it took him four-point-Oh-two seconds to get from the batter’s box to first base. The bum. But he still beat out the throw. And that burst of speed, his arm-and-leg pistons on that big sturdy frame smoothly pumping ninety feet down the Maginot line, the full-stretched lunge, the foot on the bag, and the heads shaking all through the dugouts of both squads—well, it won the game for his team. And to no one in particular I ask: who--or what--is this interplanetary being?! My daughter, who’s doing her homework in the same room (and is therefore smarter than me), pipes in: Yes, but did he paint the Mona Lisa? Did he perform dissections on human bodies and then sketch with unparalleled precision tendons, arteries and the human heart? Did he design the first parachute and all manner of flying machines? Ah, I see. Okay. But consider this (I mutter in my diamond-shaped mind): after a late cognac and smoke, tired of his flying machines and rotting cadavers, I bet he secretly doodled the dimensions and rules of a game played with thick oaken branches and a ball made from the bottle’s cork, from the loose thread in his tunic, and from his leather tobacco pouch. Baseball is a game for the ages. And today, yes, I witness true genius: this fêted phenom who not only hits homeruns like he’s swatting flies, but can throw fastballs and sliders that bedevil the savviest hitters in the league. And run! 
 
Bedeviled myself, I’m in the kitchen juggling two eggs for our post-game Benedict-flapjacks-dinner. Two more eggs rest on the counter like rookies waiting eagerly on the bench. She walks in, looks at me, and declares: According to Marcus Aurelius, if a thing is difficult for you, do not therefore suppose it to be beyond mortal power. Famished from her learning, she eyes the airborne objects warily, adding: By the way, he was leading a fast-fading empire on his favourite horse while surrounded by Iron Age barbarians AND AT THE SAME TIME coming up with reams of these shrewd stoic lines.
 
Before going to bed, I pop my head into her room to say goodnight. Like a minuet in an endless suite, she croons so beautifully: Did you know that Antoine de St Exupéry wrote The Little Prince after crashing his plane in the Libyan Desert? For days he was in a delirium when the idea came to him. He was trying to break the Paris-Saigon speed record.
 
So, naturally, that night, what happens is I dream of Marcus Aurelius on his galloping horse and Leonardo in his flapping ornithopter. The renaissance hippy descends and hauls the brawny Stoic into his craft. His grimy hands pulling levers and turning dials like a manager flashing signals, he nods to the third genius, who promptly steps out of a cirrocumulus dugout, hard-nosed, eyes peeled: oui, c’est lui, Antoine da man de St-Exupéry, clutch pinch-hitting aviator par excellence, face smeared with engine oil, tongue dry as sand. And lo! my flapjacks now rise imperially as this visionary trio soar through the stratosphere and land safely on the moon. They head straight for the lunar bleachers with cheese dogs and beers in hand (and dog-eared copies of Meditations in their pockets). Their Angels caps tilted at a jaunty angle, there they sit pointing three da Vinci-designed telescopes towards Angels Stadium, enlightened Angels with their eyes on the Angels, each with a Rawlings glove resting on his lap, just in case—yes, of course, just in case the great Shohei hits one out here and shows what mortal power can do.    
 
**
 
Last Call
 
Old friends cannot be created out of hand [...]
It is idle, having planted  an acorn in the morning,
​to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade  of the oak. 
                      Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Wind, Sand and Stars) 
 
Those times we shared a whiskey and you spoke of the many skies you knew, man how your eyes would sparkle. Like that Bedouin who, with the first morning light, and with a proffered cup, delivered Saint-Exupéry from his lonely exile. Sure, we don’t live forever. But those glasses, my friend, with your reflections and golden lessons, the rambling lines and silly jokes—well, they did their share to break life’s petty pace.
 
I dreamt of you last night, you see—without truly seeing you. You were nowhere to be seen, or heard. Only the wisp of a smirk, your laugh dissolved in heady wind. But I just knew—on account of the flying. Well, at least the feel of it: the great height, and knowing there's nothing between you and the ground, nothing to hold you in place. Yeah, you were out there. Somewhere just beyond the senses, beyond all this: the incessant motion, the swooping, the hovering, the freedom of being. You filled the unseen and unheard. While, believe it or not, garrotted landscapes, charred trees, splintered wings and ailerons—all that shit—sprung off the reels, sifting through the clockwork of time and memory. Still, I felt your presence, bro. There it is. As though the evidence of your flight: atoms and molecules, even the tiny glitch—that causal detail, the seed inside your final day—as if the whole bloody package had landed in some wondrous children’s fable: as light and ephemeral as the snow-dusted ashes now molding my steps.   
 
**
 
Cave Painting
 
They found her body on the path, splattered with mud and blood. A life-size canvas, all crumpled, as if ripped out of the frame and left there to shrivel and rot under the elements. I know the path. It skirts a huge dark field along the forest. I take it on my evening runs, under the stars. I must have just missed the terrible moment. Or maybe that night I skipped my routine, I'm not sure. I only know that one night a section was taped off and I had to change my route. Then, some nights later: a collection of wreaths, bouquets and burning candles under a tree, a few feet from the path. The winter-hard ground and wet foliage, and that one tree. It was strange to come across this memorial so late, with no one around but me. 
 
One of the students has heard the story on the news. In class, everyone is focused on what he says. A crime of passion, apparently. Love turned to rage, rage to action—and then this: the bloodlust, the violence. They are keen to speculate on the details. Except her. She doodles silently, sometimes raising her head and looking vaguely to the front, but not at me. They are a mix of immigrants from all sorts of places. Kazakhstan, Iran, Syria, Ukraine, Bulgaria. Everyone has their two cents’ worth on the craziness, the savagery, the uncontrollable blaze consuming the mind behind such a crime. I know they’re holding back, though. I can feel it. They harbour their own personal tragedies. Some things cannot be bandied about like mere gossip. Still, they are wide-eyed and curious. They express themselves in a language that is not their own. They are here to learn another culture’s language, to fit in, find work, and become part of society. Obey the rules. I listen for the syntax and grammar, this is true—it’s part of the job. But also for the little scintillating bits that reveal something about them. I can’t help it. That’s how I met her. Of course, running in the evenings, after dark, is fine. Necessary even. I once spotted a fox tearing across a snow-covered field in the dead of winter: my heart was racing from my own run, and my eyes followed the streaking bushy tail over the white ground, and I felt my heart beating in my chest and marvelled at this apparition. When I was young, I always thought death was so far away. And yet it is always very close. The wild and unrestrained; but also death. And the world is made up of people who all have their own take on what the hell we're doing here. And part of my job is to pay attention. Now, practicing the conditional mood, I speculate openly about what might have happened had I come across the altercation during my run. They ask me why it is I run in such a place after dark in the first place. Not her, though. She keeps to herself, immersed in her lone sketching. There are no ifs in some lives. I guess I shouldn’t have said what I said the last time we spoke. Clearly, it’s over. The others press on and ask me if it’s smart to go running after dark. Smart? When was I ever smart? Out loud, I joke: Well, if it’s something of mine they want, all I have are my shoes. So the worst that can happen is I finish my run barefoot, perhaps slightly frostbit, counting my lucky stars. I recall that in German it’s not a plurality of stars you are favoured with, but just the one: deinem Glückstern danken. I ask them for the equivalent in their own languages. It turns out (rather unsurprisingly) that star is pretty much universal. Yes. Of course. All of us, no matter where we come from, go back to frumpy, sweaty, star-gazing cave-dwellers. Uncouth sapiens who were surely grateful to make it through the day and share their kill while sitting around a warm fire after dark. Sitting together, chilling, admiring the stars, and telling gruesome stories of the hunt—maybe even a famous homicide thrown in for good measure—with an odd tingling inside the chest, a stirring, the way a song starts, or a poem, or the electric impulse to get up, grab a bit of charcoal and clay and start adorning the inside walls of the cave—their home, their ark—before the night came crashing down and their time, quick as lightning, quick as a knife to the heart, ceased for all eternity. 
 
**
 
Home and Away
 
A 1 a.m. puck drop meant I was up until four watching the game. Hence this late-morning workout. The biochemical confusion calling for the wild extremes of Glenn Gould’s Mozart. The first six piano sonatas. Their brilliant oddity eggs me on. Gould ridiculed the boy composer, yet still recorded these early works.  Aren’t we full of bloody contradictions? Like this holiday. May 1st. Here in Germany: International Workers’ Day. A time for demonstrations. Instead here I am honouring this factory of sweat and adrenaline we lug through the world—the one housed inside our skin, vying with longings and duties for existential salvation. My grandfather, for his part, never openly demonstrated against the Nazis. He loathed their ideology but was forced to join the party to protect his business. The company did help support writers who got under the skin of the SS. Mainly, it manufactured a special kind of electric lighting for highway tunnels. The Autobahn. The great project. Plans for the Autobahn preceded Hitler, and yet the Nazi propaganda machine sold the idea as the Straßen des Führers. The real skin of fascist dictators: blatant lies. Truth be told, I might have settled onGould’s Wagner (Siegfried-Idyll, Die Meistersinger), but this morning’s sun felt more Mozartian. Spring’s magic sheen: the excitement of playoff hockey. Last night the Habs were eliminated by the Capitals. But they’re a promising young bunch of no-quitters who surprised everyone this year. My mother never understood hockey. Its brutality an enigma: repellent stick-slashing and fighting as mere tribal warfare. It’s weird, I grew up in a peaceful country that tolerates fighting in hockey, and now I live in hers, where she cowered in bomb shelters as a little girl. It wasn’t until coming here that I truly understood Gould and his piano. Something about the architecture and the forests of pine that turns you on to classical music. Or possibly just my mother who had played Bach and Mendelssohn through the seasons of my youth. Who spread her good cheer like a Vivaldi or Telemann Sonata flowering in all our rooms. She would gush about how Gould was the first North American to perform in the Soviet Union; whereas I agonized over beating the Russians on the ice. When she died in January and I flew back for the funeral, the cold was galling. I used to play hockey in arctic conditions for hours on end, yet at her grave I couldn’t last a few minutes without my toes freezing. I’ve softened over the years—as my father pointed out. I miss the winters but my compromised circulation doesn’t. The morning workouts help get the blood flowing. I do push-ups and pull-ups and even some yoga poses. I avoid bringing up the yoga with my father. Speaking of which, the first time I saw a Wagner opera was when I took my mother to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. She was visiting, and since this was her own country I wasn’t going to mention hockey. We sat in the balcony and in the intermission sipped on wine and ate large pretzels. The recording I bought afterwards led me to Gould’s solo version of the Overture. The story is about an outsider knight who defies the traditions of a burghers’ music guild and ends up winning both a song contest as well as the hand of the goldsmith’s daughter. A sly lock-picker. I told her she shouldn’t mention the opera to my father. It was his favourite. In Canada it’s almost never staged, and he won’t cross the ocean. She saw this as her chance to convince me once and for all to settle down. As in: stop fooling myself, maybe even get married. She too had been an operative. An expert at breaking the codes of repressive regimes. Which meant she easily saw through me--and knew my pedigree wasn’t enough. Still, they gave me easy jobs. Like watching the country’s top league players from Latvia or Hungary, suspected as moles. My mother had been admired. I think the link between her father’s fortune and the Gestapo preyed on her conscience. My callowness, on the other hand, is what’s always kept me from getting better assignments. An example of how my petty mind works: Much is being made this season of the Capitals’ Ovechkin and his breaking Gretzky’s all-time goal-scoring record. Well, all I can do is diminish his feat by pointing to Gretzky’s near two thousand assists. Next to that, Ovechkin’s paltry seven hundred assists proves who was the better player. I’m not bitter because the Capitals ousted the Habs. It’s not about Ovechkin being Russian and supporting Putin, a ruthless despot. Or that the Capitals are based in Washington, where certain luminaries recently made overtures for Canada’s annexation. It’s just a fact. When I was a boy, I hated Gretzky and the Oilers. They usurped the Habs as Canada’s team. In all my years abroad, the Habs have never won the Cup. This is sad. Maybe my exile and this Cup Drought are connected. My mother is gone now and I have no one to argue with anymore. (My father and I cautiously sidestep discord.) Forget subterfuge. Forget statistics. To be honest, what I miss is the sharp clapping sound of pucks on the boards. The smell of the snow around the rink and snowflakes landing on my face. And I miss the way she used to come to the park in minus fifteen and call us in for dinner. The game wouldn’t break up as a result of our leaving. Only, there was a moment when it paused and everyone else watched us exit the rink. Watched and listened to my mother, who never lost her German accent—or that aura of kindness and detachment that many former secret agents cultivate. Maybe, as a boy, I was embarrassed. Or proud, in a complicated way. But today, remembering this moment, I can’t help being moved by our long journey home from the rink. Anyway, what it essentially comes down to is this: even if Washington, or some other team south of the border, go on to lift the Cup; even with me here, in this self-imposed exile; even if it’s a fact that Glenn Gould—or my grandfather for that matter—detested competitive sports—well, hockey will always be a momentous game. And chances are, I’ll always lose sleep over it.  

**

Francis Fernandes grew up and studied in Montréal, Canada. Since spring 2020, his writing has appeared in many literary journals, including Jerry Jazz Musician, Saint Katherine Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Third Wednesday, and The Brussels Review. He lives in Frankfurt, Germany, where he devotes his time to writing and teaching.