Ellis Island

There was the crab man, above the street where the angel was.

The crab man had been in Harlem once, that is where he made a name for himself. Right now he is not frying any crabs.

It’s the horses, it’s the horses, was all he could think as they went by him. They weren’t real, the horses. That is, their bodies were a hologram, a kind of language, not unlike a girl with one green eye.

Across from the corner where he was standing there was a strip mall nearly emptied. The strip mall was no place for people. It had boldly gathered itself into its center skin, and as soon as it became still it began sinking, as it knew that it would. It quit breathing.

This was when the wheel had just been built. So many men had been killed building the wheel that the bodies became a dam in the river. Each body was an empty reed. Finally a storm washed the men loose.

Things were moving too fast, and no one was surprised when it all quit working only five days after the grand opening ceremony; a clearing had been opened inside every man, and in the enclave of every woman’s voice.

Down the street was Ellis Island, and at night the crab man left his cart beside the east-facing wall of this building. It was a monstrosity this place, a place famous for its lemon custard and its meringue. People always said

The meringue is better than anything.

And, the pie is so nice.

It reminded the man who made the meringue and the custard and the pie, it reminded him of his mother just before she gave birth to a girl, his sister, who was dead at the age of nine.

Sometime soon I will make a mousse, the man often thought.

[[[[This was 10,000 years after the spirit had come to Earth.  ]]] ]     ]

It was unclear what mousse actually was. After all this time, the proof was in the pudding. The mystery was in the mousse.

At the age of seven, his sister had carved a magic stick. It was held like a bow, with little rivulets on each end. She called these the rings of other planets.

I’ll make a river here, where there was one before.

How are you sure there was one here before?  

You remember anything if you ask for it. She put her wand on the ground and began rolling it in the dirt.

The thing is unlocking little strings, and letting them go into music.

Her brother remembered when she was an infant and he sang to her about the ocean. He told her their father was a Beluga, that he was white white, and he was in the moon so when she looked at the moon she looked at him. He had been on Earth once, their father. He stayed in a neighborhood with strings of little white lights and streetlamps that were the small, beautiful kind, and people spoke quietly there. People spoke quietly.

He said they should call each other God so that is what they did.

Dear God,

I am getting the sun inside. It comes through my head and I feel it making its way in all four places. I fill the sky by listening.

Dear God,

My body is mountain and fire. In the space around, I see white birds. 

His sister had known about animals. She remembered everything, his sister. She remembered 10,000 years.

At this moment, the man was taking lemons off his tree. He twists them off one at a time and sets them in a yellow bucket. Making custard for Ellis Island. It is the best custard in the world, that is what people say. Everyone says it. Everyone who eats it says this.

Suddenly the man began shaking. He held on to the tree and the tree also shook. It was not as a child who eats a lemon shakes from the inside. This shaking was something that took hold of him. The man saw the ocean. He saw his father in Lake Mead, his sister, and the river opening from Earth.   

They stood there shaking, man and tree. The bucket of lemons was far enough behind so that the man would not spill the fruit onto the atrium floor, into so many waves of light and string.

The sugar was grown in California. It was something like Agave, and it was always deep blue, at times mostly black, and it had the taste of sulfur because of iron. This gave sweet food a kind of glowy taste, it had agency, and a natural leavening. Because the sugar was so blue the lemon custard and meringue looked like a greeny moss. If there had been any mousse it would have been this color too.

The crab man used a little sugar in his crabs. This was his secret—a little sugar, a little lime.

The horses had gone, so he began to fry a few crabs. It was almost mid-day and people would be coming soon for lunch. They would make a little line in front of him, waiting for his good, fried crabs. He would give them the crabs in a cardboard cone, and the sauce in its own tiny bowl.    

Sometimes he also served clams. But not now. Today, just crabs, fried with their shells on, all of them soft enough.

(The crab shells would take the blue sugar very quietly, the sun folding the crabs into a kind of heat as it touched the crystals.)

It was not unusual for the crab man to serve his old friend from Ellis Island, and of course he often stopped in for the meringue. They had known one another a long time. They had been on this road for most of their lives, and before they knew each other as men they had been friends as children, growing up on the same street, playing in this street until sunset and even into the dark. There was a pool for children called Lemongrass. The boys made a fort on top of the wooden patio cover at the edge of the pool. A wide tree grew up and over this structure from the other side of the gate, and the boys kept jars of curry and cans of iced tea in these branches. They often watched the children below, sitting in swimsuits and wet towels, pool water falling off the girls’ hair onto the table, even sometimes onto the sandwiches.

One time a kid said something that neither of the boys would forget, and both of the men remembered even now. They remembered even though they did not remember being boys together. They did not really remember the tree fort or the pool; they never left that place.

It was actually these words which opened the river, when Lily moved her stick through the Earth.

Neither man remembered this river. It was this river which filled their bodies. It was this river which came upon the man picking lemons for the Ellis Island custard, now carrying him into the old Colorado basin, a valley where once was water and now are ravens. The man saw the ravens and he cried out for the valley to free him, but the valley was already inside. The man would be there forever. The crab man would not serve him the soft, fried crabs in a piece of rolled cardboard with the special pink sauce to dip in [[he loved that sauce]]. And now no one would eat the meringue. From now on, they would be served lemon mousse.

They would say, this mousse is better than anything. You know that is what people would say.