DEAD RINGERS
Millions of miles of celluloid
unspooled before me are unaccounted for,
but I remember exactly when and where
I first watched Eliot Mantle scream,
“Don’t touch him, he’s my brother!”
There were no Oscars; no Academy
committee, however prescient, could have known
that twenty years after its theater release,
it would, on a DVD in a laptop,
teleport a strapped poet in a room
rented illegally in a Morningside Heights co-op
to an apartment his father had
legally owned thirty years earlier
in Bombay. Strange things happen
in the movie. For instance, Eliot’s brother’s
name’s Beverly. Men with women’s names
were less common in the 1980s,
when the film was made,
and would have seemed incredible
in the decade before that,
when the world was so much more
precious and straitlaced. On our parking lot
one evening, I approached a boy—call him B—
for the frisbee he held onto close
to his chest as if for dear life,
a thin kid, a year or two younger than me,
who tried to say something when I stood
in front of him with an arm outstretched,
but didn’t, couldn’t, his jaws
moving while at the same time
refusing to move, his grunts
hoarse and desperate, coherent maybe only
to his mother and father and the stocky kid
—call him E—running toward me:
“Don’t touch him, he’s my brother.”
Snow blankets the path that arcs
around my house. In my study,
I watch it piling up from behind glass doors.
The undergrowth that lines it is a web
of scraggy fingers scratching the air,
of crisscrossing dendrites.
When I step outside, the piercing cold
throws me back in, my footprints
erased in minutes. The only sound
is of flakes tapping the glass.
On an afternoon like this, fifteen years ago,
I watched Dead Ringers, but not here,
in Ithaca, NY, though I was doing
more or less the same thing:
trying to write this poem. Instead
of trees rising from the sprawling
podium around me, were gray buildings.
The sunlight erupted in astounding
spurts across the courtyard, the descending
snow glittering like confetti,
as it does now. Nothing is more
egalitarian than the world
snow makes. How much like my modest
ranch my neighbors’ houses look with their roofs
and mine wearing hats of the same color,
the same material, their labored-over lawns
no different than my neglected one,
how indistinguishable the golf course
on the east and the graveyard on the west.
The birches and maples in the blinding
mirrored brilliance that burns
dimensions form an endless stretch,
from the backyard on the north
to the backyard on the south, straddling mine,
and on and on in both directions,
up and down the hills. The neighbors are
playing Scrabble by their fireplaces, and,
like the birds and the animals,
are nowhere to be seen, the brightness
unbearable. The animate
inanimate, nothing moves. The spectacle
of nihility enacts before me
in slow motion, the falling stars from an unseen
magic wand congealing and making
static whatever they touch. Not just
the empty schoolyards and playgrounds,
the empty benches in the empty parks,
the deserted waterfalls and gorges,
the abandoned gas pumps at the abandoned gas station
sharing the lot with the pizzeria
that never closes, where, yesterday,
our paths crossed before the storm set in,
not just the alcoholic working the register,
not just Beverly and Eliot, and their lovers, whom
they share, and B and E, and you and me,
but everyone and everything
are dead ringers for
everyone and everything, all in ice-
flecked downy railroad caps. I think,
more than forty years ago, I would have liked
to have hugged E, livid as he ran
toward me. I would have liked to turn my arm,
extended to B for the frisbee, to E
and grab him, hold him close as he stood
breathless in front of me. The intimate
gesture might have brought me to tears,
especially if he hugged me back.
I would have liked to introduce him
to my brother, D, and to our parents.
He and I might have become lifelong friends,
kindred spirits. Was it the lack in youth
of clasping experience
that kept me from embracing him?
Was it his rage?
Was it the silence to which I’d
tacitly sworn the life behind the walls
of my family’s apartment, D off
each morning to his special school,
I off to the ordeals of grammar
and geometry, the same silence that was
with me when, pen in hand, I stared into
a composition book, page blank,
not a line on it, let alone two that rhymed,
before I put a DVD in a laptop?
I have forgotten E’s face, but
I remember B’s, each aspect of it,
its slow contortions when he spoke,
or tried to, when something inside
wouldn’t let him, his dark brown hair,
a wavy strand of which fell over his
beaded forehead. He was handsome,
not in the manner of Jeremy Irons,
but differently, beautiful sharp features,
strong nose. Most vividly I recall,
his restless lips, jaws grinding
involuntarily as he groaned,
and his brown eyes, etched with
terror and helplessness. Ten years after
I watched Irons play Eliot and Beverly
both on an LCD screen, I saw him on the stage
of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
If Dead Ringers is horror, then I suppose
Long Day’s Journey into Night, which is about
family, too, but in a different way,
is terror. He was playing James Tyrone,
the father. “Edmund,” he said, to one of his two sons,
James, Jr., before turning to step into the wings
before turning back to correct himself:
“Er, James.” This was, by a fine actor, a
slip, some might say a Freudian
slip, though no one in the theater as much as
gasped, not a single fusty or feisty New Yorker.
Maybe the audience thought some actors
had licenses to err. Maybe—this was post-
intermission—they were all drunk
or sleepy, or too horny to care. Maybe they understood
the dimensions of lives lived in roles—
past seeping into the present,
present spilling into the past,
two brothers interchangeable, one and the same,
everyone transposable—
and the moment was not one of reckoning
but of recognition. Maybe they thought it was
part of the script, a nice touch of human
fallibility by Eugene O’Neill.
The performance was not a matinee,
so maybe it was, not only in the auditorium,
but also outside, the darkness,
which, like intense brightness, renders everything
and everyone self-same and lucid
as, from act to act, the drama unravels
before the curtain falls,
before the encore,
before the commute home,
before the awakening again, the next day,
early enough to beat rush-hour traffic.
