American Histories. John Edgar Wideman

can’t disguise.

      SHAPE THE WORLD IS IN

       in the secret heart of every secret heart a secret heart lies broken

      What is the shape of the unknown world surrounding me. Surrounding us. An empty question no doubt, as certain sets in logic are said to be empty. If a world is not known, how would anyone recognize its shape, even if they happened to catch a glimpse. Some people put faces on their gods or give their gods names and intelligible languages. I’m smart enough to know better, but ask my unanswerable question anyway. What surrounds me. How does it shape my beginning and end. The question worries me. I can’t help asking it.

      Especially early in the morning—five, six a.m.—and I’m on the toilet and sounds drift up. Through the plumbing, I suppose. Distant, quiet sounds that are also eerily close and intimate. My ears magnify what they hear. Like telescopes produce close-ups of the moon, planets, stars. Like binoculars reveal secrets inside a neighbor’s window. Sounds shrinking distance. Empowering me. But if the sounds are far away, they cannot be as close as they seem. Am I hearing sounds inside or outside. Is there any way to tell whether something’s truly out there or only here, inside me. Or both. Or nowhere. Listening, speculating doesn’t get me closer to knowing. Maybe I’m peering through a telescope’s wrong end or looking ass-backwards through binoculars I’ve reversed.

      On mornings like this one, as I attempt to make sense of what I’m hearing, I feel myself getting smaller and smaller. As if I’m disappearing. Once I’m totally out of the way, perhaps sounds will clarify the world’s shape. Transform me the way sound’s magic turns noise to music. I’ll be transparent to myself. Present and absent as I listen. Hear answers to an unanswerable question. Wait and listen. Listen and wait. Abuse sounds the way some people abuse drugs and alcohol. You understand what I mean, don’t you. I use these early-morning sounds to forget who I am while I’m listening. Like the word race abused by a person who wants to forget another person’s a human being.

      Bathroom sounds of bathing in a tub. Am I here or there. Or two places at once. Mother and son sounds. Her washing him. Is that what I’m hearing. Although son large enough now to bathe mother. If it’s them, they are two members of a family of three. Fellow tenants I’ve often observed going up and coming down in the elevator, though over all the years I’ve resided here, I’ve never seen the three of them together. Father a large, somewhat hulking retired cop. Dark-brown man, shy, with a limp. Maybe on a disability pension. Was he wounded on duty. Son visibly slow. Mother’s color makes them a mixed couple, and son resembles neither mom nor pop. Adopted maybe. Or child of previous marriage. A boy who’s the size of a smallish young man now. Old enough to grow a tribe of black hairs above his severely everted upper lip. He resembles mostly himself now. With hints of that genetic clan likeness that identifies Down syndrome kids.

      Who is doing what to whom down below. And what is the shape of the universe that begins foreign and unknown just beneath my feet beyond the onionskin of floor required to separate stories of a New York City high-rise co-op. Phantom flushes in the quiet, then silence, a faint roar echoing in the pipes while a shower runs, then more silence, and once in a great while voices, a cough, sigh, grunt, an irritated exclamation, silence again until a mother hums a lullaby or do I hear soft, singsong crooning of a boy caressed, tickled, soothed as he sinks deeper into a tubful of warm water, head tilted backward till he’s almost submerged. Does she warn him, careful, careful, you’ll get soapsuds in your eyes, soap she rubs into a lather on short arms, short legs he pokes out of the water and wiggles for her and then again and again, silence again, quiet, nothing but guesses most mornings, silent like when it’s the father of the family’s turn to lifeguard, hunkered down on a toilet probably directly below mine while I sit and daydream a boy who’s almost near enough to touch and far away as a siren wailing in the city streets or earthquake in Guatemala or firestorms raging on a sun in another galaxy as it’s consumed by a black hole whose birth I had followed on an iPad video simulation and recalled one morning squatting, waiting for my bowels to let go.

      Same questions about the shape of the world I used to ask when a teacher, Mrs. Cosa, stood behind her desk writing on the blackboard. Asked myself, not her. She was too far away to ask. Her world no less mysterious, no less confusing to me than mine. She was peculiarly detached. Disembodied is a word I could have used to describe Mrs. Cosa if I knew that word back then. My teacher at the board chalking words. Rules the class should copy into workbooks and memorize and be prepared to repeat on demand forever. Passing on these necessary words and rules happens to be her job, and she transmits them to us. Not responsible for words or rules any more than we are—they are not her, not hers—she probably learned them in a fashion similar to how we learn them, and wherever she lives when she leaves the classroom, she may obey or employ them or not, and there she may or may not pass them on to others, just as we are supposed to pass them on where we live, probably.

      Words and rules here and she’s not here, is what I thought. She’s just up there—teacher not person—and we’re just kids, not people either, her captive audience, and we aren’t supposed to notice or be distracted by her body, history, identity, her personality in a classroom quiet as a grave except for taps and scratches of her writing on the blackboard. She’s nobody in particular. Anonymous as a cop with a bullhorn blasting orders to an unruly crowd.

      Her back mostly turned to us, Mrs. Cosa speaks over her shoulder in a manner that conveys nothing about herself, about us, except her tone of voice makes it clear she is not herself, not anyone, nor are we. We understand we must not miss the information her words are imparting, because without it we would certainly be less than the little we are, and we are nothing really anyway, nor is she. No matter how she’s dressed, her age, size, years of teaching experience, it’s not about her. Or us. Only rules, words on the blackboard count, her voice informs us. They count and belong to a larger, more significant world, basically inaccessible to her or to us. The importance of that other world apparent as it materializes in words she recites and inscribes on the board. Even our small minds can grasp the difference between that other place and this makeshift classroom where we have turned up to be exposed to something greater than we are or anything we might imagine on our own.

      Rules and words incontestably not us, and for that reason we’re correct to ignore her, the teacher, and ignore ourselves, a group of students incontestably not present, though here we are, too, and we better take down in our workbooks the rules, words she doesn’t exactly fling over her shoulder or sprinkle like a farm lady feeding chickens. But we ought to be grateful as chickens. Our lives at risk, at stake if we don’t pay attention or even if we do. We better gobble up what little we can of those words and rules to guide us in a dangerous, unforgiving world we will occasionally awaken from sleep to find ourselves immersed in, surrounded by.

      In the morning, eavesdropping on sounds that drift up through the floor, occasionally I hear a radio or TV playing somewhere, in an empty room I believe, nobody listening to an announcer’s voice all business, articulating snippets of news that fade, dissolve before I’m able to identify a single word, and I regret I didn’t flat-out ask Mrs. Cosa the shape of the world.

      Of course, no fourth-grade teacher, then or now, could answer my questions about where or how an unknowable world begins or ends. I don’t blame Mrs. Cosa, even feel sorry for her. Not her fault I kept my question inside myself. Big crush on her once, piece of chalk in her hand, a small, neat, pale white lady all alone up there in front of us in her cat-eye glasses. Then again I’d get furious with her for reminding me we were all of us, teacher, room, school, hopelessly lost. Nowhere in fact. She’s a turd, a stinking, ugly speck of shit floating around on the back of a roach with us till we all fall off again and land deeper in mucky nowhere.

      If Mrs. Cosa heard me think that, I don’t believe she’d be angry or hurt or insulted. She might even nod, Yes. Yes, but she’s not responsible for what she is, is she. Doesn’t know, does she. She’s just there where she is. Like us in our seats or desks or boxes or emptified heads. Somebody else or some giant animal maybe squatted and pooped us, pooped her in front of us so don’t ask. She didn’t do it. Doesn’t, couldn’t know the answer. Words and rules not her, not hers. You shitty kids, what she would probably think or say about us if