Moth

by Thomas Heise

  Berlin, Late Fall 2011

  I was pulled on a wagon through the snow through the gates of my demonic, postexilic city. And in the sky what I saw was fear and at the end a bright light in my face was there. Among the ruins was a radio that played one song. The subalterns huddled in rags under a freeway clover were the city’s exorcized conscience. An alien presence in my mind kept speaking to me in a strange language about responsibility and love, which are harder to swallow than finely granulated bits of cement. Isn’t this how it was meant to be: the long journey from happiness would start at the outskirts where the first apartment blocks formed a perimeter wall and there above you, tumbling up from the centre, a roaring whirlwind of a great green fire enfolding on itself, devouring the dark sky, and as your brain cracked with electricity you fumbled for the buttons on your shirt desperate to shed your clothing, when from an unfathomable depth of space rose the harmonious song of children that spread over the ice fields, a dawn chorus you continued to hear for the rest of your life? No, it would not be like this. Simpler, a mere residue of a former exuberance and flowered intricacy that could no longer be reconstructed. I was pulled on a wagon through my demonic, postexilic city, white in its luminous decrepitude like cocaine. Time had stopped moving as I moved through it. The original abattoir was no longer a dream but a diorama a child somewhere long ago had built in his garden. And I saw where the deracinated crowds had once slept in the public squares and with no respect for tradition had bathed in the fountains, splashing water on each other. The nude bodies reenacted a Roman mural destroyed by bleach and machete. These and other images would make their way into memory and later onto the pages of an eel-skin notebook. Everyone was gone, because I missed them. My catatonic father had not yet been born from his glass coffin. My dog looked back at me with something approaching regret and with fur smelling of the decay of seaweed. As I wrote, little flakes of skin fell off me. It was clear the Muslim in front of the hospital was an apparition or posthistorical. The sign pointed to a tombstone, then I surmised when I looked away the sign was a tombstone, not a birthing ward. The radio played one song loudly in a foreign language. It made the leaves rustle, but other than that, no effect. After two nights, a digression emerged in the road like a miracle. I passed it by because I didn’t believe in it. The digression led to the sewer. I had a job to do. Nothing, not even fascination, could stop me. The bombers were painted with rainbows and given schoolgirls’ names before they ascended into the nucleus of a dust-coloured cumulus cloud. I quickly went to sketch this in my book, that way I could refer to it later in the middle of the night, but it was already there altered. I sketched it over a drawing of a skyscraper concealed in fog. That was yesterday. A current of remorse moved through the city and could be heard even in sleep or when you placed two hands over your ears, screamed. I counted backward from zero until the numbers were imaginary and my tiny wagon stopped in front of a bank’s window. It held an aquarium with an angelfish swimming around in circles with half its dorsal fin out of the evaporating water. It was inedible. Money was also useless because it was too dirty to eat and it burned too fast. Flowers filled the stomach. As I rode, two twin boys ran after asking Are you my father? Are you my father? My guilt metastasized in strange ways, sometimes as cancer, sometimes as an uncontrollable torrent of emotion that ended in marriage. The girl I loved was a mute and was never able to tell me she loved me, at least not in a way I could comprehend. I learnt to stop speaking with my hands. Whatever I touched fossilized. Look at the sorrow in this statue. The wagon rattled over cobblestone. Inside I loved my city, but it thought I was Jeremiah or a traitor. When the snow fell through the hole in the crumbling planetarium’s dome, a curling, double-helixed smoke-trail of startled bats poured out into the skyline. I wrote these words too, but they were unsatisfying like the colour grey or lamb. The woman who would become my mother found me riding in a red wagon, just like this one, pulled through the streets by a sheepdog. When she lifted me into the sky for the first time, it was my primal scene, one I would spend my life trying to repeat for that same level of spontaneous wonder. Her face was brilliant, pixilated, and filled with a million crystals of ice. What I saw was fear, and bright, unholy fire in my eyes was there. She could see it too, even as she was holding her suitcase and once again as she lay dying. Neither the poets nor the doctors could help her pain. Even morphine was painful. In my demonic, postexilic city I had come to a calm decision or I had come to nothing, it was hard to tell which was which. My map was old, the edges turning back into bark and the ink into rivulets of water that washed off into my hand. Arrows pointed in several directions, which meant the city couldn’t be summarized without turning into a foul blot. I pried one off and beneath it was another arrow’s eroded shadow pointing the wrong way. Certainty is the result of a dead semiotics, and this would be true on any other day, even when your feet take you downhill to a small abandoned woodshop filled with toys. One day my father would be born and from that moment everything I owned would belong to him. My whole life, a simulacrum of a life elsewhere. I was never much to begin with, I saw these words written on my hand, by whom I don’t know, but they seemed fitting enough for the moment, seemed to speak a certain wisdom that was hard to resist. I came to a point. The next street over might be called Violence, which with a turn and a number of switchbacks might lead to an elegy or maybe worse. Perhaps the structure was a series of multiplying crystals that we imagined on a clear morning, when we knew what we wanted, what we had to have more than all else, was taken from us. Let’s agree this is a purple maple, let’s agree the city’s reservoir is too polluted to swim in, let’s agree the future car wreck will occur here, but the couple will by grace survive their wounds, at some moment we said this, even if the words were never uttered. The war was unrequited, love had become a discourse too heavy to shoulder or bear alone. To give shelter. To keep. To love in secret but to stay moving, like sleepwalking, the body in the trance of the mind moving forward through an alley, a pocked wall outward to a courtyard’s single bench yellow in the sodium light. I did not expect to find donkeys, but here was one trotting beside me, how funny and lackadaisical, as if this were the Kasbah and the denouement had already happened, which it had. Not even the poor could outlive the rapture, and so after pleasure was reduced to the shape of a key, who would inherit it, the landfill, the paltry wristwatches, the stray dogs, or even this sick city, for my city of rotting horses, roses, remorse which in moments when I was faraway from myself in the furthest exile of sleep, I wept. I slept in the attic of a decaying A-frame that stood at a road’s end like a monument to an alphabet no longer extant. The top window crested the branches, a widower’s peak. And every day I surveyed the theatre of crumbling buildings not ten kilometres away and watched the extraordinary dark colour of malaria settle each evening. When I felt most lost, I checked in my journal to find where I was and how far I had come. The journal continued to write itself at the exact speed I read it. Logically, it could never predict my future whereabouts. It is easier just to have been lied to in your own language or to be truly wretched without the kindness attached. The last empty page could have been Marat’s sordid bathtub, but to be blank! The city continued to unfold laterally in fractals forever under construction, each “such as” a river or a tunnel or a telescope where, at the end, a corpse waited like a seed. If only I could carry all in my wagon. The radio ran out of music. I had no clue how long I had been travelling. Neither time nor distance mattered. Sleep seemed like the most natural response to the world, either that or killing yourself. I began to nod off to the gentle rhythm of the wheels, as I was pulled down a boulevard resplendent and blinking with Christmas decorations. So much depended on this one gesture, staying at ease until the event was over and all members had dispersed, reluctantly, and one awoke, not exactly refreshed, but neither sad, not yet. A remnant of a former loneliness. This story wasn’t a circular one, for exile was now a form of asylum in the eternal present tense, which even birds sought. Som
ething had brought me here, to a place where nothing ever happens, but nevertheless smells like it has been scrubbed with Clorox. I heard a whippoorwill whistle the sound of an O, followed by another O, and I looked up at the moon’s tractor beam sucking dirt from the planet, and heard O, then a gunshot. A hole torn in the soft static in my ears. Everything said here is either accurate or true. I turned a page and saw my parents, because I had continued to read into dawn, were dead. The sun lifted through the unfinished architecture, the morning a kind of worked-for disappointment you can believe in, you can lay hold of. I sat there for a moment surrounded by abandoned cars. A pond materialised on the hillside, filled with light and a black swan.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank the editors of the following journals in which excerpts of Moth; or how I came to be with you again appeared, sometimes in different form: Animal Farm, Another Chicago Magazine, Canary, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Columbia Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, and The Modern Review.

  My deepest gratitude to Carole Maso, Michael Martone, and Renee Gladman, and most especially to Sarah Gorham, Kirby Gann, Kristen Radtke, Megan Bowden, Jeffrey Skinner, and everyone at Sarabande who believed in this book and made it possible.

  Chris Hosea

  Thomas Heise is the author of Horror Vacui: Poems (Sarabande, 2006), Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2011), and numerous essays. He is an Associate Professor at McGill University and lives in Montreal and New York City.

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