In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

-Mark Strand

We’re in Brussels walking across a quiet square half-lost and cold.  The sky is gray, the city quiet.  What we thought we’d find isn’t here.

“I’m hungry, I need to eat,” you say, a few steps ahead.

I see a photograph lying on the cobblestones.

“Don’t pick it up,” you say.  “It’s dirty.”

There’s a wet, cold wind blowing across the square.

I kneel down.  It’s half a snapshot, torn down the middle.  An infant with a mess of black hair sitting on a man’s lap.  She smiles at the camera, her mouth open.

Between the fore and ring fingers of his right hand the man holds her fat wrist like a cigarette.

I pick up the photograph and put it in my pocket.

“You don’t have to touch it,” I say.

We cross to the other side of the square and turn down a small side street.  I’ve got the photo in my pocket.  I’m aware of the thing despite its near absence of weight.  I imagine I can feel it curling there in the woolen warmth of my coat.

We’re looking for a place to eat but it’s late afternoon on the last day of the year.

“Should we just eat here?” I nod at an empty gyro shop.

“I don’t know,” you say absentmindedly twirling a strand of your hair.

The two of us stare into the white fluorescent light.  A thin girl wearing heavy black eyeliner looks up from scooping fries.  She watches us there in the middle of the street.

What do we look like the two of us in the wind?

We are bewildered and disappointed tourists.

“No,” I say.  “Come on.”

So we end up in the bar of an elegant hotel off the Grande Place.  There’s a band rehearsing and a group of workers in blue coveralls setting up tables and chairs around a small stage.  They keep their heads down and whisper quietly to one another in Arabic.  A tall woman in tight jeans sings to her band in Portuguese.

We order an expensive lunch and are grateful enough for the warmth and to be sitting down that we don’t talk about the prices. There’s a guy drinking a whiskey.  There’s a couple reading the Herald Tribune, a pot of tea in front of them.

We’re out of things to say to one another.

I take the photograph from my pocket and put it on the table.  You look across the lobby.

The man holding the child has been torn away.  There’s a bit of his nose pressed against the baby’s cheek, a sliver of his bottom lip, his chin, a hairy arm, long delicate hands.  A knee.  The rest is gone.  They’re sitting on a cheap yellow-brown leatherette loveseat.  In the background, there’s a baby’s bottle, pale flowered wallpaper.  After the burst of flash, I imagine the room returning to a feeble orange glow.

I turn it over.  It’s dated October 25th, 2001.

When the waiter comes with a bottle of water I return it to my pocket.

How does this scrap end up with me?

I know two things: It was printed more than seven years ago.  Someone tore it in half.

The tear down the middle seems deliberate, expert.  So much care has been taken to remove the man’s face while preserving the child’s.  But then why leave those hands?  Why not a horizontal tear?  And if someone were trying to remove the man and keep the baby, why does this half end up on the street?  Perhaps it was a mistake; perhaps it fell from someone’s wallet as they ran across the cobblestone square.

Is the child dead? Does someone want her forgotten?  Whatever is left of the photograph and wherever it is, the man will have a half a face.

Perhaps both pieces were dropped on the square and I’ve only found one.  Maybe the other half is scraping along the streets in the wind.  Maybe someone found it.

I can’t stop thinking that it was a woman who tore the photo.  The limitations of my imagination.

Our food still hasn’t come.  We complain to the waiter.  He feigns concern.  The tables have been arranged and the workers are gone.  The band stops playing.  The singer hums the end of a slow Bossa Nova melody and then flicks off her microphone.

“Ciao,” she calls out to her band waving her hand in the air like she’s swatting at a fly.  She clicks away across the marble floors.

Then the bar goes quiet and fills with the absence of noise.

A few moments pass before a tall American man strides to the bar.

“Can you have a sandwich here? I’ve been walking all over this city looking for a sandwich.  I can’t find one anywhere.  One guy’s got the stuff but no bread.  The other guy’s got the bread but no stuff.  I just want a sandwich.”

The bartender smiles and laughs politely.  “Yes, sir,” he says giving a slight bow.  “Here, you can have a sandwich.”

“Great.  Doesn’t seem a lot to ask for.  Fucking sandwich.”

You smile at me.

I shake my head.

“Why do people think anyone cares?  Buy the stuff, go next door, buy the bread, and make your own fucking sandwich.”

You laugh and look over at the man.

“What’s he doing?”

“Looking at his hands,” you say.

I look at you watching him.  You tighten your mouth and push your lips slightly to the side.

I look at you and watch your pretty cat eyes turning sad.  And I nod before you say it.

“Lonely people talk to strangers about sandwiches.”

I slide my hand into my coat pocket and touch the photograph.

I wonder when I’ll have children.  You wonder when we’ll have children.

In a field I am the absence of field.

I think about the child in my pocket and I say to her, “Wherever you are, you are what is missing.”

TAGS: Birth, Childhood, Dreams, Family, France, Life, Loathing, Love, Personal, Philosophy, Relationships

ALEXANDER MAKSIK's work has been published in France, the UK, the Czech Republic and the United States. His fiction, poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Above Magazine, The Texas Observer, Grasp, Crate, Inkwell Journal and Nerve.com, among others. He's a presently a Truman Capote fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.   For more: Pont des Arts.

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