General History

Brian Swann

        A doctor cannot apply medicine to the sick without understanding the cause of the sickness.
                  —Bernardino de Sahagun, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espana


They’re building a restaurant at the top of the hill
on a street of ruined houses, glassless windows,
no doors, in front of heaped stacks of decayed cars
that never made it to the crusher, a restaurant
in the middle of nowhere still in the process of becoming
nowhere. He points it out proudly, the dentist who is
showing me around. “They’re going to specialize
in desserts,” he says. Open fields form the other side
of the street. And yes, I am still considering moving
into the area because I have bought a new racing bike
and want a fresh start. As we ride in his Jag,
I recall riding into the Bronx on the elevated tracks, so
I tell him about the mayor who made landlords
of shattered tenements and buildings stick pictures
of flowers in jars onto the windows that remained,
or pitchers of flowers on plywood where they didn’t,
one after the other. “Who did he think he was fooling?”
he asked, swerving to avoid a young driver in front
who had opened his door and was backing up, trying to
find something he’d just thrown out the window.
“How like me,” I said, remembering how I once tried to
get to the Tower Bridge by bike. “What do you mean?”
said the dentist. I could see it all clearly, the bridge
in the distance, seeming to recede. Nobody could tell me
how to get there. By car, yes, but bike, no. So
I ended up in a fish market and then in a meat market
where I couldn’t take my eyes off the eyes in
a horse’s head lying on the stall, the severed head
that scared me in a fairy tale (“Patient Griselda”?)
where it talked and told the truth. But it’s
not real, it’s just a form, a substitute, I told myself, a shape, no spirit
or soul, a sculpted thing, an authorless artifact, while
over it I could still see Tower Bridge. So I dumped
the bike and jumped into a wherry stinking of fish and
floated upstream, landing among flower stalls
and garden equipment, wondering if I should steal
a packet of seeds, forget–me–nots, maybe, or change jobs
completely and instead of all this, one failure after another,
throw it all out the window. As I was thinking this,
the dentist’s voice broke in with an attack on socialism
in the form of the National Health Service,
using as evidence the rotten state of English teeth.

Brian Swann has published books in a number of genres, his most recent being Words in the Blood: On Native American Translation (University of Nebraska Press, 2011).

“General History” appears in our Summer 2011 issue.