by Thomas Heise
Recollection
— I remember a strange family had taken me into its arms, welcoming me “home,” a lost and important part of their life’s dream, they claimed, and when I heard those words instantly I developed fever — I remember red velvet wallpaper shaped with concentric circles which when focused upon seemed to spiral and thought this is a sign of my volition, my ability to move things, and this, I remember thinking, would grow stronger in the coming years I feared — I remember as a young boy wanting someone to take me inside from the wind — I remember on Ms. M.’s dress an embroidered map of Europe before the war where desire shared a border with Russia — I remember how I dared to cross my heart in secret when I was sure no one was looking — I remember the parakeet would fly away over the fields for weeks at a time, leaving me to my own thoughts, and then would return suddenly at night with new words that left me transfixed — I remember how vexed I was on the eve of our departure into the city — I remember kneeling on the floor, sucking at a cut on her fingertip — I remember the description of the bright interior archive was torn, the understory would remain unspoken — I remember the poets year after year praising the amaryllis — I remember red was the colour of circle, red was the colour of being looked at — I remember becoming entranced, my words began to dissolve with each repetition, each involuntary arm movement when I peered up the branches of the bare autumn and when I turned away — I remember at four being called an interruption — I remember the helicopter hovering, pivoting over the skyscraper in strong weather, someone unseen pulling up the rope ladder — I remember they put a tag with my name on it about my neck — I remember how she made me feel urgent and in the heart of the plaza — I remember something pregnant in me — I remember one day I began to suspect I was a minor character in my own story after years of believing I was in the lead — I remember how I didn’t want to be myself for a while or be by myself, for being me was lonely even when I pretended to be someone else — The last thing I remember was promising myself — A scrap of tinfoil placed in my mouth and I thought for a moment how it was like —
Oslo, Winter 2011
With my awakening, there was a buzzing in my left ear — the static sound of an itch — as if a code in a last desperate measure were being whispered. A secret I suspected I was meant to die with. The magnified sun zeroed in my eyes. Sat up, shaking my head no, no. My mind a miasma of thoughts. In the eaves hung silence and a single light bulb at the end of a knotted cord swayed slightly. The A-frame quavered in thunderstorms and the day would come when it would tumble into the sea. I envisioned it many times when staring from under my umbrella in the garden amongst the lightning strikes and lilies. Through the alcove window, beyond the decaying walls of this small, desolate estate, I saw the bright smoke stack of the incinerator on the hill, which fumed night and day without end from the moment I can remember first laying my eyes upon it and saying the word incinerator, emit a blast of saffron fire straight into heaven and then, to my wonder, it ceased. A fly on the windowpane shook its wings, rubbed together tiny hairs on its front legs in irritation. I did not know and did not want to know how long I had been asleep, but I suspect it was longer than I could imagine, longer than I could have ever dreamt. I lay nude, washed ashore in a tempest of rain and leaves, regurgitated back into the world for another go-around. I had been at the tail end of a dream that came frequently in different forms to me for the past year but whose meaning loitered faintly on the edge of my apprehension. It was a dream that seemed to trail me through my waking life, yet hanging back like a small child, as if it had something it were afraid to tell me. I suspect the dream has been dormant in my brain from my earliest days when I was found riding in a red wagon pulled through the streets by a sheepdog. The woman who would soon assume the role of my mother lifted me up into the air, held me against the sky, and said simply Ahhhh. Though my analyst, Dr. T. R., called this a lie, I remember the moment precisely, for it was the first time I had seen the world from what seemed to me then a great height and the sense of awe that emerged out of my wordless mouth was equal to that of my new mother’s. For a year now, I have had dreams of this memory and of other memories I can no longer recall and dreams of memories of a city of minarets I seem never to have visited and of people whom I seem never to have met, though I am sure these are real memories and not the fabrications of my imagination. For a year now my waking life has itself assumed the quality of a lonely dream. In the sanctuary of sleep I have made my cathedrals. When I close my eyes, those I once knew, whose faces are erased more each receding day, fly to me for a little while in companionship and in terror. Before I woke that afternoon, an aged man in a white frock was bent over me, wearing a cap with a spotlight and about his ears a stethoscope like a pair of deflated horns. He wore a squinted expression of sad curiosity, as if I were a son he never knew and now found too late he fathered one night in an alley with a whore under a trellis of moonlight and afterwards wept, as the moon climbed higher into the sky. This is how it would be: my real mother, the woman of debauched flowers. My fictional mother, a suffocating nurse and a dreamer. Like a priest, father crying downward to death, upward to ecstasy and death, death from above, the whole world sin sin sin. He stared at me with his white eye, pressed the stethoscope against my heart and wept, as if listening intently to an old radio program from the war. In his face I could see planes soaring above London in holy flames as he penetrated her amongst the garbage and wharf rats. The entire time he stood over me, I knew I was in a dream, but his sorrow was real and to comfort him, I summoned grief home to my heart, but it was gone, both grief and my heart replaced by reports of a world besieged, and as I searched I could not even find the word sorry. And the word sorrow, well, that is another story. He daubed his worried forehead for a moment with a handkerchief monogrammed H.E.I., paused. A perfect world is right around the corner, and far, far away. Mother, your hair of attic and old coat comes to me on a breeze. The room burnt rose. The red letters of a monogram descending, a branding iron. It was winter, the whole Christian earth buried in a graveyard of snow that fell and fell. A deer with eyes dark as plums looked in through the window. My father began to intone my name in a solemn tongue but it sounded dubbed, as though when he mouthed my name another word emerged. Our shadows stretched, grew larger on the wall. Then in sudden pain, his mouth scrapping mine, there poured from him in a whoosh a storm of fireflies, a golden rain lighting the room in an immolation of tiny loves. He slumped against me and onto his back, a cyclops. Through a lambent hole in the dark, a ray of a film projector on the ceiling. And then, on a grainy Super 8 reel, I saw myself, as I had so many times before, an infant crawling on all fours through long grass following my mother’s yellow hair slipping through a crack in the murk, luminous with pinpricks of light and the falling leaves of a dead autumn that would cover her and these words if I failed to save them.
Oslo, Winter 2011
Possession is nine tenths of a mother. I began to suspect this even then in those early years when I was the one boy in the Asylum for Lost Children who could not sleep. It was postulated that my mother had been in typical fashion “seduced and abandoned” as a young woman and laboured in a neo-Victorian brothel but one town away from the narrow bed where, after being passed like a pail of water through a sequence of hands at a house fire, I had finally come to rest. I would lie there awake on my twin mattress waiting in a state of suspended animation, as if about to be x-rayed, and when the nuns on their rounds leaned over in the dark I could detect an odour of fermentation under their curls and was sure they were to my ill-begotten mind from another world. An odd assortment of groans and hums reverberated through the shuttered rooms, as if a pipe organ had been submerged underwater, and I would in the depths of my insomniatic childhood when sleep was nowhere in sight, through the sheer force of will teleport myself to what I later learned was the primal scene of trauma, the child’s witness to the violence visited upon the mother by the father’s crumpling intercourse and once there I
would begin dreaming. For obvious reasons, this moment of coupling was impossible for me to observe, but I feel I have not been immune from its effects, and when as an adult, perhaps it was out of compensation as much as interest that I read of Little Hans’s cautionary tale, the toddler cocooned in a doublet and lederhosen standing in the muted door watching in horrified wonder what would one day morph before the eyes of Freud into a fear of horses. The scene I confess was the wrong one but a lure nevertheless, for my mother at the instant of my conception was, I sensed, actually alone, sitting at her escritoire in a robe, like a mildly dishevelled stage actress, a vulcanite hair comb holding a small spray of asters above her ear, and in her hand an oyster-shell pen perched over a letter as she waited for the proper word to form in the drop at the nib. Orange hydrangeas in the halogen light of a gathering dusk. I think two thoughts at once and the impossibility of expressing them as one is where anxiety and later eros originate. My mother was, I am certain, always like this: on the precipice of writing, and yet waiting for a knock on the door, perhaps for once a suitor with roses to announce himself and mercifully interrupt her. She must have those many months later when the disturbances inside her marked an unavoidable transition, turned to the complexly brocaded wallpaper and upholstery that darkened her room and looked in speculation and pain when my legs breached from her like a wish: the letter Y. This peculiar detail has never been adequately explained to me though I have poured for hours over the few anonymous letters I received through the years — matted to my left heel was a small, partially decayed leaf and under my newborn fingernails the slightest evidence of soil. I was pulled backward into the world, a sensation that still grips me when I sleep, as if drawn by some inhuman, magnetic force down the mattress toward what I do not know. At some point the past and the present departed — Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today. . . . The slow blotting of faces and words. If you could dream another time, then perhaps you could live in it, the voice in my head, which I facetiously called the Narrator, said to me. I did not know then nor now who or what to trust because the thoughts in my head often seemed unoriginal and would enter without permission, where once implanted formed colonies of association the way bacteria assemble and mutate. By the time I was approximately twenty, my memory of my childhood was thoroughly corrupted as to be quite useless, and yet the little I remember of my earliest days in the Asylum remains remarkably clear as a delicate insect perfectly preserved in amber. I recall a sheepdog as tall as my shoulder that took a liking to me for some reason and we would walk together among the elderberry bushes as another dog unseen to us walked barking occasionally along the outside of the stone wall. I like to think the dog was from the neighbouring houses whose weather-stained wooden roofs I could glimpse from the top step, barely making out the mushroom satellite dishes that sprouted under the wet sky. I like to think now if I were to rest in a field of rococo grasses, pollen and dandelion seeds of late spring, all this life and allergy . . . that if I were to stay in one place long enough . . . a soft cough from the small crawling things of this world. I like to think when I close my eyes I am able to see Caspar David Friedrich’s explorer on a craggy outcropping over the roiling somnolent clouds, with his back turned to his creator (Herr Friedrich himself), captured a second before he leaps. Or perhaps he remains paused in the ghostly fulgent light of his survey, the atmosphere suffused with ripe lilies, soft summer mouldering of leaf and meal, the corpse of a deer biodegrading under a disinterested, camera stare into a rope of purples and cobalt blues as the intricate scarab beetle for whom the universe is death goes about its work. Moon, dark spoor. A thousand decays. Out of a mother’s mouth emerges art like a worm, which is also life.
Oslo, Spring 2010
When I was living a short flight from the nearest city in a Mansard house in a state of advanced disrepair but with high attic windows that opened west over a fjord where oyster boats plied the waters at sunrise and sunset, I entered a period of nearly complete isolation in which my withdrawal was such that an entire day would pass without my uttering a word. To forestall the dangers of loneliness, I took to long walks downhill to the coastal tidewaters to inspect the channels cut by glaciers in the last ice age and then would explore the crags for the afternoon, on occasion encountering a nodding fisher or a woman on a cantilevered patio beating a rug with a broom handle, and as I sat on the dock I would recall reading about the wretched conditions under which the port was constructed and wondered how many of the workers who tumbled into the depths where the temperature hovered just above freezing were preserved at the threshold of metabolism within a few metres of each other. The villages in the immediate area were picturesque without exception, but almost uniformly composed around small harbours of simple red barns and unadorned white clapboard houses whose shutters, come the first of October, were drawn one after another on cue. The region spoke a welcomed insularity and few pleasures during the dark winter months, as if life were a matter to be endured, a long sentence one accepted, for in such isolated climes — reachable by boat or seaplane — any other world existed in a realm of fancy where only children and strangers resided. The whole landscape seemed to me then sheltered from time, not unlike the exquisitely detailed glass snow globes that lined my bookshelf, one every Easter wordlessly arriving in the mail in a wooden crate packed with straw and centred like an egg. They were sent from a great uncle I never met but whose whereabouts for several years of my boyhood I could track at some delay on his travels across Europe and to America by marking with a thumbtack on the large map taped to the ceiling over my bed the city or shrine he visited, and though unable as a child to deduce the true purpose for his journeys, I would imagine as I peered into each diorama beneath a ponderous glass one associates with clairvoyants and a base of handcrafted filigreed pewter and silver, which must have doubled the cost, each pilgrimage was for no other reason than to acquire the small treasures he would box and mail without a letter. A train tunnelling through a Christmas storm into the Bavarian Alps. The black Virgin of Montserrat submerged in an underwater grotto. And two figure skaters beneath the trusses of the Eiffel Tower passing each other on the ribbons of an infinity symbol while a tinny piano solo played if the butterfly key was wound. Etched into its lapidary surface was simply the word Paris. My great uncle’s travels apparently came to a conclusion on a beach in Los Angeles where starfish falling from the sky in a shakeable universe were larger than the young family walking in profile with their terrier. I learned to look upon the world from an insurmountable distance, as if orbiting above or under it as the case may be, attached by a slight tether, which were it to tear would set me adrift backward in space. Writing is a form of travel by which we never arrive. It would take me years to understand that lesson, my cities — London, Berlin, New York — were memories to which I could no longer return, for they belonged to someone else in a grey twill suit worn without a tie and a certain elegant blank stare that betrayed none of the circumstances of its origin. Like a planarian cut in half, I would every few years regenerate into a new version, without wounds, without scars, without history marked on my skin, my heart rebuilding its tissue suture by suture. With the relocation to another city, another apartment in an endless series of spaces temporarily inhabited, a few dress shirts wrapped in the dry cleaner’s plastic, a few small paintings arranged on the wall in a makeshift life, the soul moving into a new story. That spring I walked the fjord, the atmosphere smelt of minerals and ever a threat of snow in the uninhabited upper reaches where the carpet of green was uninterrupted by trees. In the middle of the day I once found myself idle under the awning of a silk flower merchant from Iran, running my fingers over the petals and stems of the magnolias, giant calla lilies, anthuriums, philodendrons, so stunned by the quality of their imitation my confused mind worried for a moment they were a patent infringement. On the few occasions when I have been presented with flowers, I have immediately placed them in the light of a window, and proceeded about the daily rituals of boiling water f
or tea and answering neglected letters, but I always wait in anticipation for the sepals to curl and wilt, to smell their exhaled perfume, and the fallen pollen to dust the sill, noting the day on the calendar, even the hour, at which their vibrancy had begun to putrefy, for it is the peak of their beauty. What a foolish thought. But such was my thinking, as I considered the subtle insult to life of the merchant’s flowers, when I startled on the underside of a leaf a dragonfly which flew up into the sun, and my eyes following after for a split second saw through the stained glass of its wings. Once Ms. M. in Berlin in the midst of a blackout stood half-dressed in my white shirt at the desk and ran her fingers across the indented pages of the journal into which I pressed myself and said they felt like Braille. That spring I lay in bed with my eyes rolled back as if to steal a glimpse of my own thoughts as the curtains in my white room blew over me. For months, I could not think. To think would have been to imagine a future. But my future, I was beginning to understand, lay in the past waiting for me to return by railroad, one word at a time. The early painted stars forming a parabola in the sunset’s stretched latitude that somewhere looped back into a circuit. I recall how one evening in the fall of 2009 when I was sojourning in Rome, I had crossed a courtyard warm with tomato vines and terracotta and a nurse, just released from work, sat on a bench with The Sorrows of Young Werther held high as if advertising the book and murmured a few words to herself as I passed through a beaded curtain into the melody of voices where couples had gathered for a drink, while part of me remained behind, perched over her shoulder like a quotation mark. The two of us, and all the uninvited others who made their appearance and left by a side exit, defined the common space of our listening, the stones settling in the rebuilt campanile, moonlight filtering down like a sonogram over the small enclosed world, a dark flowering.