The Operatic State

Moonlit faces and ruddy chins, clapping hands portend a sin // In my headphones: Animal Collective—Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009)

A mosaic opera singer resides at the 66th Street—Lincoln Center station.

At the opera house, I saw men and women singing Puccini, but my attention was directed elsewhere. I focused on the man with the bald head clapping slowly on the gold leaf ceiling. Any time there was a break in the opera, I glanced up to meet the clapping man. And every time I looked up, there he was, clapping—slowly, methodically, without fail. He was a large man, I presume, because his silhouette brought to mind a robber baron. It consisted of a full-bodied large round curve with meaty hands applauding above it and a smaller circle on top of that (it was his head). He was bald, as I said, utterly bald. And he was always clapping on the gold leaf ceiling. Slowly, methodically, without fail.

In the underground, I saw the president sworn into office. I had the eerie sensation of watching automatons in motion as the New Brothers in Government applauded, smiled and bobbed their heads. Their faces were shiny, their foreheads stuck together. The women next to them were beautiful—technically. The men’s mouths, unless surgically altered, tended to ooze downwards, their visages so white, their chins so ruddy. I looked at one as he gazed upon the president, his mouth tied with pride, his eyes smothered with smirking. This rich fellow, ungainly and scared, looked the kid with too much candy in the crevices between his molars; I thought his face would fall off then and there.

In my mind’s eye, I saw my father wearing black tie; I wore poofy girlish whites. I could not take my eyes off his velvet-sashed shoes. They were black and foreboding and took up the whole escalator step. The claws of the step above it rose up like the clef of death. The escalator climbed a cresting wave, free-floating, en plein air, with nothing on either side except for the ground a long way off and the opera house on Mount Olympus. I fell then, and slipped as a ragdoll would. From my feet angling downwards and my hands grasping toward the music hall as toward God, I climbed up to standing with bloody knees. I heard the escalator by the opera house where I’m from doesn’t exist now, but it was endless then, the fanged beast conveying us forever skyward.

The finale snapped me from my reverie. The president had gone, but still the faces of the men behind him hadn’t fallen, though the curtain had closed, long ago. The man with the clapping hands knew all about my broken, bloody knees, I thought, as a stranger in the subway fingered his rosary beads.

~

📍W 4 St—Washington Square Park subway station, New York City, New York

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