A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  “I wasn’t doing anything,” he murmured through her hair. “I was standing in your yard.”

  Even then, even so young, she knew he wasn’t as lost as he wanted to believe. Probably standing in the birdbath, she thought. For the effect of the footprints up the drive. Almost-Twyla had said, “What do you want?” very gently but Anther said nothing, only sighed, and his breath was sweet like her breath and they were children wobbling on the edge of sleep. Almost-Twyla had turned then and pressed her body against his body. Their shoulders were the same breadth, but his legs were longer. Their lips were the same shape, but his were thinner and cooler and crooked in a smile. “What do you want?” said her very best and only friend. Almost-Twyla opened her mouth, curious as to what she would say in return, but nothing came out. A little while later they were asleep and, in the morning, her father found them there and yelled until he coughed a gob of blood onto her carpet, where it left a stain.

  Time is not a tonic, Twyla thought, suddenly awake and a little frantic. She looked around the room from her vantage on Anther’s pillow but there was nothing to help her. A blank television screen. A sink. An end table wild with roses. Twyla composed herself and thought of a corpse. Nose to toes. She breathed in, out, in. Upshama Valentine had meant a corpse flung in the road, Twyla feels certain. She meant the dress pulled up the mottled thighs, the slack belly twisting unseen, the disordered bones, the lolling neck, but Twyla’s corpse is always decorously laid out. Twyla’s corpse is wearing earrings that perfectly match the baubles that shine on the toes of her shoes. Next to her, Anther shifted slightly in his sleep and said nothing. Twyla opened her own mouth, but whatever was in there still would not come out. Perhaps it was her the whatever repudiated and not the larger world. Perhaps the whatever was so disgusted at the thought of her gaze it preferred to live forever in the dank anonymity of her physical state. A horrible thought. Twyla shuddered and forced herself to concentrate.

  Her corpse’s hands are folded, fingers interlaced. Her corpse’s hair has been teased out of its matted curls and lipstick has been applied to her corpse’s peeling lips. Her corpse was buried in a business suit because there was nothing else of hers left behind, not in the whole house. Not a scrap, not a slip, not a sock. Her corpse’s name is engraved on a shiny stone in a garden chock-full of them and underneath someone has left her corpse a ceramic teddy bear, a comical ceramic toad, a vase of wilting flowers that will be cleared away by the groundskeepers at the end of the week, four tiny pills as black as the total lack of light.

  Something in Anther’s blank cheek made Twyla think he was awake, but even so she didn’t move. In her mouth the word was peering around, taking it all in. It didn’t like what it saw, Twyla knew, but still she lay on the pillow with Anther, mouth open, breathing in, breathing out, waiting. Through Anther’s window Twyla could see the hospital night shift ascending a hill into the parking garage. The cars processed. In the gloaming, their lights came on. She tried to imagine the cars as a line of something else: ants, bees, blinking squid luminescing with hunger or regret. Or cars. Just, you know, like cars. With people in them who are late for work. People wearing sensible shoes, surrounded by the drift and glow of the soft, easy, growing darkness they will labor all night to keep at bay. Anther sighed. Twyla waited. Nothing emerged between them. The room grew dark.

  Sometime later, in the decrepit light of the fluorescent overheads, Anther finishes writing on the pad. He underlines something once, twice, fixes her again with his eye. What does he see? Twyla imagines herself a vessel, a stringently empty pot. “Fill her up, boys,” Twyla thinks and holds her breath and waits. Then, feeling just the slightest, most ticklish slight tickle of impatience, she evokes. “Anther,” she says and holds out her blameless hand. But Anther doesn’t pass her the pad. Instead, brow furrowed, he tears the pages—one, two, three, all thickly filled—crumples them, and drops them in the wastepaper basket at his side. He writes again and turns it to her:

  My name is Adam.

  No one calls me Anther anymore but you.

  Your name is Tricia.

  It’s getting late. Why are you still here?

  That night, Twyla did not think about Jancie, who is now seven and going into second grade; rather, she picked up a man at the bar and took him home. He is somebody who has hovered around the edges drinking quietly for some time now. A month? A year? She thinks one of the Flying Roll-Lindas told her he used to be a truck driver and now he has become someone who used to be a truck driver. Twyla likes his forearms. She has a vague idea that the forearm is a part of the body a person would develop as an incidental benefit to truck driving. That and stereoscopic vision. Oh, enough, enough: he has a good tan; they drink wine on the couch. It stains their teeth an X-ray color and when they kiss the man tastes so much like the way her own mouth tastes to her that Twyla thinks it is like kissing a mirror, though one with hands and stubble. One that is sort of exhausted, but still willing. Twyla can see in the bend of his neck and the lines that crease around his mouth that in another few years he will have tipped irrevocably into the other half of his life—the lonely half—and this is something else she finds attractive about him. He is like a still frame on a video. Behind him she can almost see the shape of the frying pan that will knock him silly. Kwahang! is the sound this man’s future makes. Followed perhaps by splut.

  Still, Twyla knows she has made the right choice for this evening. For example: when the man is on top of her he moves her the way he would like her to move just enough times that she catches on and moves that way herself. For example: they do not talk. The neighbor’s porch light is blinking on and off, on and off. He doesn’t ask her “Like this?” or “OK?” and she doesn’t say “God” or “Yes” or “Good” or “Slow.” She gives him nothing. It doesn’t matter. Her curiosity about him is laissez-faire. She will know what comes to be known—but what will that be? (she cannot help herself), but when will it come? It is possible—the light blinks on and off—that in the moment of their fucking this man doesn’t exist. A figment not of imagination, but of happenstance. She comes and then she is done and will not move anymore. Shortly afterward he finishes as well and rolls over next to her, his hand falling over her hand as his body shifts. She squeezes it. He squeezes back. The light blinks.

  After a while, Twyla gets out of bed and leaves him sleeping. She goes to the window and looks out on the empty street. A bicycle chained to a tree. Green trash cans pulled to the curb at every house. Two doors down someone has left the light on in the kitchen and Twyla can see their empty kitchen table, a bookshelf behind it stacked with cookbooks, the corner of a picture that might display a woman’s hand holding a basket of fruit. In the kitchen go kitchen things, and in the bedroom, the bathroom, the room for living, etc. This is the way it has been ordained. Perhaps even from on high. Twyla goes to the closet and parts the cardigans. She lifts the sculpture out by its string and stands for a while at the foot of the bed holding it. The man sleeps on his side, curled into a ball. She can see the line of his spine, the appeal of one naked foot flung on top of the sheets. The sheets and her quilt are tucked up between his legs, his hands slipped between his thighs—the entrusted body, left behind. She wants to reach out and run her finger along the arch of his foot, but considers what she will look like to him if he wakes up—a shape of darkness in the darkness, something strange in her hand (what is in her hand?), someone he cannot convince himself he knows. He is a stranger, but she doesn’t want to scare him. From now on whenever a person—or even an animal: a squirrel, a pigeon—looks at her, Twyla wants them to feel only mild surprise. Like, “Oh, I didn’t know anyone was standing there,” and then the empty, humming space wherein she is supposed to demur and step out of the way. Instead, she goes to the window, opens it, and leans out.

  Jancie has brown hair, cut straight across her forehead, and her father’s googly eyes in brown. Twyla has not seen her since the funeral, but her own father forwarded her some pictures. Jancie in a pumpkin
patch astride a hay bale. Jancie at the water park, the zoo. Jancie, much younger, in what must be her very own room, looking up from a book held in her lap. Jancie’s father has just called her name to get her attention. He stands at the window—his shadow crisp across the square of sunlight on her carpet—and holds the camera before his face so that she can’t see his eyes. But it is him, the child knows. Her father: body, smell, stance. Her father: hands, hair, swallow, click. Camera down, “Jancie? Can’t you smile?” and all over again. A second after this picture was taken, Jancie turned her head back down to her book, the pages of which Twyla can’t see. There is a witch in there, or a tiger. Some other creature a child might trace with the tip of a finger and then put that finger in her mouth. Snake, rabbit, spider, monkey. Mouse, mouse, mouse.

  Twyla leans out the window and lets the sculpture dangle from her fist. It pendulums on its cord, metal weights very softly clinking against each other. Gravity sways it; the nets conceal it; the woman who made it made its man shapes over and over. Too many testicles for one man’s body so the body must not be invisible and thus these weights dependent, but rather severed and thus these weights trophies. Or relics? Or a bounty netted like fish? Twyla considers that when she stole the sculpture she did so to scratch the itch she always gets when no one is looking at her. Now, though, leaning out the window with her arm starting to ache from the sculpture’s unpredictable weight, Twyla is curious. No one is looking, but what is she doing? Behind her, the man she does not know shifts in the bed, further entangles himself in her sheets. What is the size of the shape missing from her and Jancie’s life? What is the shape of the nothing that still refuses to give up this nonsense and just come home? The street remains empty. Shadows lie uncast across the moon. The shape of nothing is another nothing that stands beside it: a father in the window taking pictures in which he includes his thumb/a father in the living room hanging pictures in which people he doesn’t know beam toward him, faces suffused with desire. A mother in the bed at night smoothing back her hair/a mother lost in the orange light, not even a gingerbread outline to know her by.

  In the bed behind her the rustling has taken on a kind of intent. Is it an untangling noise? An arising noise? It seems like a little too much noise for one man in his good body who had been probably too pretty a boy and would be, in his old age, grotesque. Doll’s eyes, too blue, pressed into a horse’s head. A sunken spot where the frying pan kwahanged him. Liver spots on the forearms from too much sun. What will Twyla see if she turns around just now? What will she see if she does not?

  “I don’t know the answer to any of this,” thinks Twyla. But what she says in the second just before she lets the sculpture drop—spectacularly, smashing the windshield of her neighbor’s car, bathing the street in the hoots and whistles of the car alarm, lights on one by one in all the bedroom windows, curtains drawn back, doors opening, “What’s that?,” “Who’s that?,” the night a blurt of orange panic strobing in the center of all its surrounding days—is the one word she has kept always just underneath her tongue. Evicted, it wobbles out into the darkness and disappears. If it looks back, Twyla doesn’t see it. If it waves goodbye, that gesture too is lost. Its curiosity is projected forward, intent only on what it will become. And if you’d like to know just what that will be, then open up your own mouth. Turn it out into the air.

  Three Poems

  Gerard Malanga

  A PHOTOGRAPH OF YESTERDAY & YESTERYEAR

  I find it odd to be talking to a photograph of you.

  You—yes, you!

  But what other choice is there?

  It’s not like I can make some existential leap,

  some guess of guesses,

  through the emulsion of the several prints surviving.

  It’s not like just you, the tonalities,

  the lights & darks.

  In fact, the shot of you taken at some city beach

  was of a sunless grayish gray.

  I could hear the chatter in the background, off the frame.

  The vendor hawking Nathan’s hot dogs.

  Breyers ice cream. Nedick’s soft drinks.

  What seemingly appears to be a boardwalk in the near & far distances

  is but a dead giveaway for Coney Island.

  Yet it could be anywhere.

  I don’t know of any other beach that parades a boardwalk.

  It’s a crapshoot of description & deception.

  There’s no way that you can come alive for me

  than who you were for someone else,

  a group of friends.

  Even the photographer who remains mysterious,

  though my hunch is Emma, my mom, before she married,

  may have snapped you.

  Why else would she have had these many prints of you

  mixed up with all the rest, if you & she were never friends?

  But beyond that you remain a mystery. Why?

  I wouldn’t know whom to ask, where else to look.

  All I can do is stare & stare, and maybe maybe something might click.

  But there’s no way I can hear you.

  There’s nothing to disclose.

  The stoop you sat on.

  The beach where you reclined on a towel in the sand,

  or the trees that loom behind you.

  Was it Glen Island? Was it Pelham Park?

  Why would anyone be taking your photograph on so many different days

  or weeks or months? Can you answer that?

  If I name you, will that make you come alive?

  How does Cora sound? Cora?

  You look like a Cora.

  And yet I never met a Cora in my early adolescence;

  even in my teenage years.

  *

  I can’t recall.

  And surely Emma never mentioned you.

  Who are you?

  I can’t place the place,

  nor can I place your name because you haven’t told me.

  I haven’t heard you.

  Speak, speak to me.

  JERRY & ME

  I wish I could be that kid in the snapshot from 1951.

  My First Communion suit sized and stitched by hand to fit by Jerry

  with tender loving care. The pride shown on his face

  looking down at me as I awkwardly looked on,

  and on this day

  still small for my age, age eight.

  Gradually I’d outgrow Jerry, but not by much.

  He’d trail my curiosity of awe and wonder

  with his curiosity as well. His silent guidance.

  What would he be thinking had I asked? What was I seeing?

  My dad is history.

  My childhood is history.

  My reverie had ended.

  We stood in the breezy midst of a rooftop silence in the Bronx.

  ALAIN DISTER, JOURNEYMAN PHOTOGRAPHER, 1941–2008

  You and I barely said a word through all our smiles,

  the briefest of our times,

  yet we knew

  each other well. We could relate,

  as if we stepped through pictures we could see, afar and near,

  or any grainy picture you and I had taken side by side.

  A drizzled street in Paris in the early hours

  or late later in the day.

  A southwestern desert vista, a desert calm.

  A nightclub in New York.

  We understood each other’s silences.

  We understand, even now.

  That is our way,

  the nature of our way.

  How the next picture’s made without a thought

  and how it’s time to put the camera down and just to see.

  What counts is the curiosity.

  We move in those peripheries.

  An Anatomy of Curiosity

  Martine Bellen

  1. CURIOSITY AND INTERDEPENDENCE WITH TIME

  Hourglass, shadow clock, circadian trap

  Structural mirror ticks the s
tory’s timer

  As we dance farther from the center of the universe

  The story proceeds from the Heavens to Earth to the Underworld.

  A construct of imagination with concealed collective cache. Minutia

  slows the bloodstream; permeable skin stretches the search.

  (From Cupid and Psyche: Then the recurring dreams began … look at him, the voices whispered, see him for who he is … you know you want to know, they nagged in my sleep. So I opened my eyes, and he was lovely and, like a gangster, armed. I scratched myself with the tip of something sharp. And he transformed into the most amazing creature, the only one for me. Of course, that’s when he ran. I had wounded him.)

  Beyond stream there is a vastness, an unseen site:

  The smell of brine, the small of its back.

  Turning on its side and stealing away. It snores,

  Expels the swells of a shell wave. Miles of swirling hours. Passing

  Storm through a still sky. Of swimming

  Updream with rosy salmon,

  A sunset melting its liquid light cubes into the glassy sea

  Or the turbulence of breaching humpbacks

  rolling around the sheets of ocean before dipping into the below.

  2. THEORY OF COGNITION AND MOTIVATION

  Psychologists don’t question their quest for collecting truths from the black box of the brain, all the while knowing it distracts from our collective purpose.

  Consider how the right and left lobes drive the directives of two mistresses, the Detective and Psychic. Hemispheres of land beneath a surface of chaos, Chronos. How expansive is this dream, this machine, this time, moving us together on a mechanism, this travelator.