After Another Leaping of the Year

Last week, Ava e-mailed me about the death of her student. I have been selfish with the death of mine. Her death has appeared in my long fiction, in many journal entries, and in one or two of the least disciplined of my lectures. But she's dead just the same. And I keep her death as if an amulet. As if the death were mine at the outset (And if so, at the outset of what? Of her life? Of mine? At the instant of our meeting? At the moment of her final breath?)

Maybe I am only allowed to call Lontoc's death mine if I was there at the time and killed her.

I tried to dispel these thoughts with a handful of fictions I have wrought about Alexander, how his greatness was not merely displayed by but in fact depended on the Gordian Knot. How Aristotle could not have been so myopic to encourage in his ward a singular genius in the customs of terror and neglect to train him in the subtler ways.

How, when Aristotle saw the knot, he immediately saw both solutions: one by heave of blade, the other by dexterity of finger. Upon concluding, in his mind, the weave through which the hand can uriddle the rope, his sword flashed. Thus ended the elegance of long divisions.

Thus also did his bleached face, baring all Alexander's military teeth, severe my speculations.

I remember Atienza, my teacher, whose first name is sacred to me, whose thought allowed me to penetrate the profound hypocrisies of infant formula companies, whose long death drew to a close that December 5, an entirely other death, contrasted against the deliberate clangor of Villanueva's passing. I remember that I must forget, as I had to forget then, December 7, because I had to take the stage (shooting my mouth off on Creative Nonfiction, of all things!), and entertain some applause and questions, and pretend that I could contain him. My hand held the podium like a crutch.

I omit two months, because within it is the eye. The eye that sees cannot see itself. Unless it does what I now undertake - yet also, what I have always been undertaking: pretend that everything else is a mirror.

So February 28, I gave a 20-point quiz. Then this mythology class evaluated my months of teaching through the secret forms of Mrs. Daisy Diola. After she left, we checked the quizzes together. Then I called for the papers so that I could receive them from highest to lowest and thereby ascertain my average: 20? No one.

19? No one.

18? Still no one. But I think by the children had begun to laugh.

Only two of the twenty-seven passed. This fact, they met with increasing laughter - so much laughter. Too much, and so I must have said some words. If I know myself well enough, I must have resorted to anger. Yet I cannot in all honesty recall my words. Did I curse? Did I shout? Did I ascend to bitter Filipino or maintain some level of cool in English?

All I remember was hearing a voice trembling over and over inside my head, mounting as their laughter mounted: "They should have failed you. They should have failed you." It was a female voice. It was young. It was right.

I have tried to create another world where Alexander chose to apply his fingers to the knot. He undid it, but after some thought, he restored complexity to the ropes. He abandoned his campaign to dominate the world, maintained governance of Macedonia with the prudence of three years, then retreated to anonymity disguised as a beggar. His face was soon discovered, so he broke his teeth and rolled the sharpest pieces across his face. He kept the pieces in waxcloth and scarred his face every year for the rest of his life. He lived long, well beyond the age of thirty. He took jobs such as a cattle-driver in Gordium or a porter in the Persian docks. They say he also became a fisherman, but also more than that: a carpenter.

They should have failed you, said the voice.

But I disgress. This world dissolved after he died or was killed. So, I created another. In this world, the great ruler freed the ropes of the Gordian Knot precisely as history tells us. But some Asian legends report that at the eve before each conquest, the royal messenger of the besieged state would be cordially received by Alexander in his own tent. The messenger would bear a knot from the court mages. He solved them all two ways in his mind, but his sword was singular in its reply.

In India, where he was to erect the twelve altars that mark the end of his conquest, he received an elephant's tusk, abominably knotted and naturally imbued with a beauty to keep the King's sword hand at bay. Alexander died within three years of the tusk.

Aristotle died. Atienza. Lontoc.

She should have failed me, I said.

Doubleyou

Poem published at Philippine Graphic, the March 3 issue.