Inspector Inspector 1-5

The Body Camera

 

“You cannot bring the body camera with you to the grave,” says the kitchen inspector. He dips his finger into the batter and tastes it. It is grainy. We are, after all, in the quarterfinals of the Great British Baking Show, where the judgment will be more severe than ever. For the technical challenge, Paul and Mary would like you to bake an anti-terrorism sword. It is a Chinese app and everyone will be required to download it onto their phone. You have two-and-a-half hours. You may remove the gingham covering now. The camera is rolling. The anus remembers.

 

The Scout Leader

 

The search in my underwear is unwarranted. I have not had a nocturnal emission since I was fifteen, dreaming that my scout leader was pulling off his shirt and advancing on my vibrating form. Before he could touch me, I was all wet and warm below. But now, whenever I write about the dream, and I am always writing about the dream even when I am not, the beautiful scout leader wears the air of an inspector who has a master’s degree in detecting signs of child abuse. His right hand pulses with an ultraviolet light. No matter how hard I write, I cannot change him back. You know him too. The undeniable UFO that blots out sun and rain.

The Bad Prompt

The inspector came to me while I was writing with my writing students because none of them had submitted a poem for workshop. They were a good bunch, but school knocked the stuffing out of them that week. For a prompt, I told them to let one word lead to another. I know. It was not much of a prompt. I had given better prompts in the past. I thought this bad prompt would open the door to our wintry room for different kinds of visitors from beyond. I did not ask my students who came to them, but for me, the inspector came, stamping his boots free of snow, his hands holding my head by my big ears. In a normal voice my head said, write me.

The Bagel Door

The man behind the counter had a bad night. He banged the brown paper bag of bagels in front of the customer in front of me. I did not know that bagels could make such a smart tap, as if a building inspector was at the door of my apartment. What could I say to the unsmiling caller? My bathroom faucet was leaky? I had no permits for the double-glazed windows? The fire escape had rusted shut before I moved in? No explanation would satisfy the inspector, not even the two dollars that the customer stuffed into the little metal basket between them before waving a cheerful goodbye, which authenticity was hard to ascertain.

The Ghost Bus

The bus goes past us, and then stops a full length ahead. An inspector, blue-uniformed, hops off, and the bus takes off. It is not our bus. The next bus stops for us, but also stops a full-length before my bus-stop. There is no reason for it, as the bus lane in front of it is blank, as blank as the white spaces between words. There is no reason for my bus to stop there. I walk down the length of my morning bus, and I walk down the length of the ghost bus, wondering how many ghost people are riding it to a ghost destination that I know nothing of. The lights change just in time for me to cross the road, and I look down the full length of the ghost bus, seeing no one, but my morning driver who is looking, I imagine, back at me. It is the first year of the pandemic.

*

I found the epigraph for the sequence in Hilary Spurling's biography of Matisse.

“The depicted world is one of waiting and sadness; a world of heavy eroticism, almost a world of the voyeur. A distant world in which communication seems impossible, or futile; besides, human beings have become painted things in this world, colour events in view of obtaining light on the painting’s surface—they are dispossessed of all but their chromatic lives. The world of these first years in Nice is a world behind glass—the world in a fishbowl, the world infinitely repeated in a kind of insistent, existential loss. As if the light one had to obtain resulted in nothing but solitude, and demanded a fatal renunciation.”

—Dominique Fourcade, “An Uninterrupted Story,” in Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice, 1916–1930, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1986), pp. 47–48.