In the novel The Life of Geronimo Sandoval, the author explores the notion of the simultaneous and the coincidental. But we could also put it another way. Imagine three characters, Esmerelda, Diderot, and Wang, only one of which is a character in the aforementioned novel.
Mornings for each of these characters happens at a different time and under different, as they say, stars, or, in the case of this example, positions of the sun. Each of these characters has experienced water. For Esmerelda, water has always been experienced out of taps or sprinklers, in a swimming pool (crowded), or in film. For Diderot, water is a geographical and geometrical concept as he is connected to his lover by canals, which contain and channel water. For Wang, water is vast and deep; it separates nations, and when the season is on, cold storms crash against the stones.
For each of these characters water is accompanied by two complex phenomena: the sound of birds and the image of trees. When Esmerelda waters the grass, a small plot of it and allowed by the city government on five odd days of the month, sparrows collect on the electrical wire above her garden in a line and watch the water, and behind them, typically but not always, upper wind flow brushes through the trees, and she watches and listens to the birds.
She asks her son, “Why do they do that?”
“They think it’s a million insects,” he says. “And they don’t know which water drop to go after and eat.”
Diderot, on the other hand, departs his lover’s apartment and follows a canal to his own place, which is compressed into a collection of apartments on a hill. The door to each apartment is shaded by a small tree. He carries the image of his lover, who keeps parrots. The parrots come and go out of her open windows. They collect in the apricot trees. From a distance, in those they trees, they look like colored beads.
Wang, however, imagines in the sound of water the movement of trees, as the trees of the city and the winds of storms are inextricably connected. At the market, the white and gray birds persistently land, hop about, seeking the children who feed them, but they disappear when the storms come and the trees that line the streets thrash in the wind.
One day, Wang saw a bird drop something on the sand. He went to it and picked it up; it was a delicate miniature glass pitcher about the size of a bullet, with a piece of paper rolled inside of it. He took this amazing artifact and raised it against the sun. He tried to read what might be written there. Diderot, on another day, purchased a small glass pitcher from a shop, one of those delicate miniature pitchers people use as nick knacks. He gave it to his lover. His lover treasured such things, placed it on the shelf above the kitchen sink, and one of the parrots, who was not amused by nick knacks, nudged it into the drain. Neither Diderot nor the lover nor the bird noticed the small piece of paper rolled inside the pitcher. Esmerelda, at some point in her life, took a small glass pitcher from her mother’s store of collectibles, wrote “How I wish I could live by the ocean” on a piece of paper, rolled and stuffed it into the beautiful miniature artifact, and flushed it down the toilet. (Her father had once told her that this was the equivalent of dropping the message in a bottle from the shore of a lonely island. “If you don’t live at the ocean,” he said, “use the latrine.”) The order of these events can only be inferred.
One day, as it happened, Esmerelda, Wang, and Diderot found themselves seated beside each other at the International airport. This happens every day and so cannot be considered either coincidental or in any way miraculous. And it may happen every day that, seated beside each other, quiet and nervous, each about to embark onto the respective schedules of his or her lives, and at the same moment, they imagine birds, construct the shape of water in their minds, and experience the movement of trees, and perhaps, if they even remember, recall a small glass pitcher (who knows where it is now?).
