Bramhall Square The Hollow Men BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

I’m reaching the boiling point. Trying to get away from the Times and the radio and the phone (where I sit with Golda as she tells me what they’re saying on CNN and Fox because she has cable and I do not), Cowboy and I go outside into the dry September air. Another September. We mark tragedy with more tragedy. Incompetence with more incompetence. Death and grief and heartache.

It only brings me back to months of smoke billowing up avenues smelling like burning bodies, which no one will understand unless they were there. I can’t tolerate anyone who didn’t experience loss, from anywhere else, telling me what that day was like for them. They will never know what we lost, who we lost.

Cowboy and I can’t stand it anymore: the news, the injustice, the facts, the spin. We clip bushes and tear out weeds with a vengeance. Haying season, I tell myself, and try to imagine that I’m in a Thomas Eakins painting, or a Rockwell Kent — because that’s where we’re going later, the Kent show at the PMA, and I wonder what it what might feel like to sit on an iceberg.

We walk to Katahdin to have a salty margarita and up to the museum. We don’t talk much. We are stiff with each other as the weight of everything around us makes us feel small and angry and terrible. Where are we, I wonder? Who are we? Why aren’t we on the streets? What will make us change?

I know, because I’ve been here before, how hard it is to find comfort in grief. And yet I have the distance this time of miles and miles. I will not smell any bodies, I will not soak my sneakers, I will not lose my cat, I will not lose a child, I will not lose my grandmother, I will not lose a friend, I will not lose this time.

My oil went empty. I have no hot water. I called and paid through the nose to have that luxury as people die in the sun on rooftops. I complained about the cost of gas and through the phone my Aunty B dismissed my concern: "Who gives a shit. People are dying." I know she is right. I want it all to go away. What will we do? Just wait for another Rove spin? We know it is coming, of course. And then what?

In the cool, slick museum, two young women wearing jean skirts that are too tight and layered T-shirts that are too short exclaim loudly that they think "Kent sucks." This is funny to them. "I mean, I could paint that," one points out. "I know, like," says the other, "even I know that if the sky is going to be turquoise then the water would be too. I mean, duuuh."

Her voice is in her nose like all women’s (it seems) these days. What is that? Self-consciousness? A voice learned from automated phone-answering services? Can’t they speak from their overly capacious abdomens?

Achh. They’ll probably be married before I am.

Even here, among the silence of paintings, it seems we can’t get away from our inherent awfulness. A New York Tribune under glass says this: "When the World Runs out of Gas." This is 1922, mind you. Cowboy and I look at each other and then at the yapping girls.

In these last days of sun and cool air at night, I want to hang out and forget what cannot be ignored. On some level I understand how our president, after a month away all tanned and relaxed, could feel fuzzy like none of this is real. I understand him when I read that newspaper like I never had before because I, too, took some time away to tan and swim. I feel his fog.

This is the way the world goes, not with a bang, but a whimper.

"Bramhall Square" is published every other week, and Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@aol.com