by Maria Mutch
Supplies
My parents kept their belongings boxed and labelled and organized. I didn’t understand there was a word for what they did until much later. I never, strangely, heard anyone refer to them as hoarders, or as hoarding. Their process, to package up and keep time in this way, like trying to collect air in jars, was nameless and belonged to the world of only partly seen things. They couldn’t take the boxes with them, or their bodies, all of it transformed to ash. Their desperation, blandly described in their labels, turned delicate and grey also, went up with the smoke to find another home, another physical body to inhabit.
This Is How I Arrange It
When the house burned, it was engulfed so thoroughly that one of the neighbours said the sky inhaled it. There was a series of booms as the flames ran room to room, and then the moaning of the little upright piano from its tight corner in the living room. Boxes of playing cards and cod-liver-oil pills had been lined up under the keyboard so that when the flames reached it, the laminated wood, after a pause, went up in a rush and folded in on itself, though no one was in the room to see it.
The sofas and chaises were gobbled easily. The garage was a bonanza of oily rags, cardboard boxes, and eleven gas canisters, an unused hydroponic system, ten years of seed catalogues arranged alphabetically, and an enormous wooden worktable that would vanish beneath the tools whose blades were found intact the following day. The house, and everything and everyone in it, collapsed and was licked up into the air. My parents, unaware of the dog corralling its last moments in frenzied circles, felt nothing but a suffocation so abrupt it remained in their dreams.
* * *
This is how I arrange it. That they felt nothing. I wasn’t there.
* * *
I wasn’t there. I was sleeping at a friend’s house.
* * *
I was sleeping at a friend’s house, disrupting the narrative. Escaping it.
The Neuron Containing My Grandfather
“I can see your heart beating. You’re like a rabbit,” her grandfather said.
“I know,” she said, but it bothered her that he could see it.
She had lost the fundamentals. She stood on the sidewalk with him about to climb the stairs to his apartment, in a three-storey walk-up, what would be her apartment also, the new home. She felt the stony hum of the city under her feet. The sounds of traffic and people hadn’t dissolved for her, and they never would entirely. The city was already absorbing her, piece by piece.
“I’m trying not to say something trite, like ‘You’ll love it here,’ ” he said, shrugging.
Even though she was twelve, she held his smooth-skinned hand. She looked at the ground. He had lost his wife many years before and been called widower. She called him Daniel. There isn’t a word for someone who loses a child. Whatever he considered himself to be now he kept to himself. She was already aware of the O in orphan, its shocked mouth, its eternal, unbroken body. She moved like an orphan and breathed like one. Despite years, already, of attention to the body, and the most essential thing, its breath—how deep, how to fill the lower abdomen, use the diaphragm, fill the chest last and reverse this process in exhalation—the creature she had become no longer remembered the fundamentals. Her breath was quick and shallow, or she seemed to not breathe at all. She was holding her breath as if afraid to give it out again, as if hoarding.
He was a retired mathematics professor. His plan had been to read the books he hadn’t gotten to, haunt some museums, play bocce. Also make up for the decades he had spent in the guise of a straight man. Raising another child had not been in the plan, and yet he never let on what a burden she must have been, what a terrible surprise. Her mother had adored him, but the physical distance, another country, and her growing obsession with the boxes and the things of the world created another kind of distance, so that in the last few years, they had hardly seen him at all.
“You will love it here,” Daniel said.
Her fingers around the suitcase handle. He watched her, waiting. She was filthy. She had been refusing to bathe, even though much of her practice had begun to incorporate floor work. The ground had changed everything—the floorboards or the tiles or whatever she was dancing on, no matter how recently cleaned, was never really clean. She had learned the secret knowledge that something is always raining down, unseen, onto the world’s surface. She felt the energy of the ground, the rootedness of it. Flight from it was even more pronounced after she had taken the pulse of it with her whole body, laid down on it. Before her parents died, before she had to leave that house and that yard, she would lie in the grass, do somersaults and cartwheels. The numerous bare patches showed the tight drum of earth, and that tawny nothing colour that no one noticed.
Molly
Stella and Augustin gaped at Sabine, wondering who she was and what had brought her to our living room. She looked like she could have been one of my dancers from long ago. Her coat was enormous and loose on her, like an animal skin over the shoulders of someone emerging from a forest. She stood next to an armchair but didn’t sit. When someone has been looking for you and then they find you, there is an interesting adjustment, almost a resistance. Even if they badly wanted to find you, they are sorry deep down that the finding is over.
Raf was holding a section of the Times, even though he hadn’t been reading it. “Raf,” he said, absurdly, hand extended. “Raf.” It was almost funny. Often during an episode I feel the sense of stopping, and of physical detachment, as if I could mosey around the people in the scene, make adjustments. Tie Stella’s shoe. Wipe Augustin’s nose. Apart from Sabine and me, no one in the room had heard of Seth. No one knew who he was. Stella and Augustin knew in the way of their marrow, their breath, they carried a psychic imprint of him that they couldn’t yet put language to.
* * *
Being found suggests being lost, a wandering off the path. Or being found suggests another person and their particular need. “I have something to tell you. There is something you need to know.”
And once found, then what? Only the waiting again, slightly altered. You make a note to hide better next time. And time, that progressive, inexhaustible tick. Chronograph of the heart. The hand touches your arm, or the doorbell rings, or your inbox flickers, or your phone blows up, and you are found.
* * *
Begin with being found.
* * *
But the boy is lost. Even I wonder where his mother is—I can’t detect her in the crowd. He has stopped looking at me and looks down at his shoes instead, which are brown leather. They have brown laces and resemble shoes that might have been worn by boys many years ago. They look as if he’s kicked at cans and curbs many times, or keeps them in the bottom of a pile. His jacket is open, and he’s only wearing a T-shirt underneath. His socks show because his pants, navy corduroy, only come to his ankles, and the melon socks are pill-y. I can feel the clarity of his breathing, the crystalline intake of air and his exhales, until suddenly he is moving away. He was close to my body, but he’s turning, looking back down the block, and he moves through the people gathered and begins to walk along the sidewalk, back in the direction he originally came from, and stops. He is unsure which way is which.
The fact of his dislocation doesn’t bother him; not yet. He plays in his mind with the sentences that occupy him. His aunt has been reading to him a Rumi poem.
You that come to birth and bring the mysteries,
your voice-thunder makes us very happy.
Roar, lion of the heart,
and tear me open!
The last two lines affect him most, the idea of being torn open by sound, by ferocity, or an actual animal—a huge cat—big enough to eat him. Your voice thunder. He wonders what it means to be eaten, how fundamental it seems, and he can imagine it. Or if the lion is inside him, comes out of the heart, and if it did, then would he finally be able to speak? The sound would be like the darkest sky, and maybe this is what his aunt is trying to tell him. They want him to talk bad
ly enough that they’ll bring a lion to eat him—or they will pull one out of his heart. Which says that one lives inside there. He puts his fingers on his chest as he watches the traffic and tries to imagine a cat beneath his sternum. He wonders if he’ll see his mother, where she could be, if she has a lion in the heart also.
I Have to Talk to You
“Sometimes I’m not sure what you want,” Jon said. This was one week before this sidewalk and its watchers, when I was at the studio. “You want a fall. I give you a fall. Right?”
“Right,” I said. He was one of twelve dancers trying to understand the move.
“But then you say I’m not doing it. I could swear I’m doing it. I feel like I break my head otherwise.”
“I know. I promise you won’t. Trust the move. Trust the idea,” I said. “Okay, let’s go again.”
I had asked, demanded, that they fall to the ground, not as if they were pretending to fall, but actually letting go. When the body falls, it has to have complete faith that a different consciousness will carry it down. Some of them have been working with me for years and even they didn’t believe in what I had shown them. How to fall, how to forget entirely what it means to resist. But they resisted so much that I was beginning to doubt myself.
And then I saw them do it: remove the structure, unmask themselves. Meet the ground as if their spines were gone. They risk everything to do a move like that, to make themselves entirely vulnerable, including their heads and faces.
They started unfolding, and popping back up, shocked themselves at whatever had allowed the known rules to bend. They laughed and howled afterward, high-fiving. Elizabeth, Sergei, and Trent threw their arms around me. This is the kind of joy that creative breakthroughs render. What I’ve lived for, those shrieks and eurekas and shocked faces. They get it, at least for a while.
But Sergei stared at me, then squinted. He caught the shadow inside me, and I knew. I can’t hide how the pupils narrow to a point so empty and black that it’s possible to recognize an infinite space.
* * *
After everyone left, I gathered up my coat, my notes, my video camera, my bag, and turned off the studio lights. My plan was to go to the apartment before Raf and the twins came home and watch some of the footage, see again how that transformation had unfolded, set it on rewind, freeze the frame, allow those falling bodies to stay in the air. Suzi has the best face, if not the strongest body of the group. As I watched them rehearsing, I focused on her expression. She has the kind of face that audiences respond to, sometimes without knowing exactly why. The aliveness is tangible. Ming is a close second—something rushed through her and she made, despite so many years of training, an involuntary sound, which would be there on the video, along with all the other metamorphoses and transits that I wanted to see again.
When I walked into the apartment, I found the stillness that signalled no one was home. I went into my office and checked my email, despite thinking that I should hold off, despite feeling the presence, already, of her words there.
i know it’s been how many years?
couldn’t find a number for you anywhere, not directly.
i have to talk to you.
The email sat in my inbox, and I decided that if I allowed it to remain unanswered, it would cease to exist. Then she was in the building, the voice of the intercom, a physical presence in my apartment. There were witnesses, and the impossibility now of turning her into a phantom. She delivered her message, and that folded-up paper, too, telling me it was mine to keep.
The Paper
Which was compressed and battered. Dirt embedded in the fibres along the edges created borders within borders and made it beautiful. After Sabine was gone, I sat down with the paper in my office, placing it, still folded, on my desk and stared at it. I waited for it to tell me what it wanted. I envisioned a performance where the paper could surprise the audience by being unfolded to a size much larger than would be anticipated. It might even be funny. The paper could itself become a performer and be transformed, folded into various shapes: a boat, a swan, an airplane. It could become human. Perhaps it would even enjoy its mutability, offering surprise.
* * *
I sat there with the folded paper for maybe half an hour before I put it away, unopened, in a desk drawer. Then I changed my mind and decided I would put it in my coat pocket, carry it the way that she did, in the place of the heart. As a heart.
* * *
Did I feel something like hatred for her?
Clarity
I think it’s possible that I did.
* * *
The following day, I sat in the living room, trying to unthink both of them. The brother and sister I wanted to leave unacknowledged, somewhere on the margins of whatever territory I considered to be mine.
But the time was four o’clock, and the light was doing something strange. I became captivated by Rafael’s phone, that it was on the coffee table in front of me. It was unusual for it to be out of his reach. Just as I was wondering about the meaning of its placement, if it was conscious or unconscious, a text came through from someone named Claire.
why
No capital or question mark. Just there and gone. After a few moments, during which I waited and watched, the text washed to the surface again, silently, because he had muted the sound.
why
Intimate, and yet. And also clumsy in a way that Raf himself would not normally allow—his rule was leave no trace. Nothing so unimaginative as a remnant earring or lipstick mark, no misspoken names, no witnesses. Only the unmarred surface of a scintillate quiet, something that could approach innocence.
* * *
The why searched with the open arms of its first letter. We don’t tend to say why to strangers. We implore the gods or the cosmos, or someone close to us, as the mind tries to arrange its causes and effects. We want to understand and want a particular person to respond. She might have been asking, Why did you say that, or Why do we exist; it didn’t matter. For hours afterward, in the dark lake of my mind, the why would bob up, sudden as a body part.
* * *
I decided then to go to a café a few blocks from home to sketch out some ideas. I brought the why and its monstrous simplicity with me. I could sit for a few hours at a corner table and think. I walked in the cold, without my jacket, arriving at the café just as the sun was going down. I settled at my favourite table, one with circular stains like planets embedded in the varnish. I brushed off the crumbs and opened a notebook. The owner, Amina, came over to say hello and bring me biscuits that were still warm and a pot of tea. She returned to helping other customers, but I could feel her gaze. Apart from the businessmen seated by the window, and a few students in line, it was oddly quiet. When the door opened, I could hear something scratching outside on the sidewalk. I lifted out the sounds of people and taxis and heard only footsteps. Only that.
After a while, Amina came to the table again and asked if I was all right. She had the kind of face where the soul appears at the surface. Two deep scars ran the length of her arm, though they were partially covered by her sleeve. The scars were the remnants of an attack she had endured years before, not in the country where she was born, but in this one. The skin was arranged in pleats and it was possible to see that she had been sewn together. She smiled at me and the smile was enormous, somehow unburdened. Before she came back to the table, I had seen a peripheral form, smudgy and grey, that disappeared when I turned to look. Nothing was there. It diminished in the scope of her presence. Her expression turned quizzical, and she touched my arm.
After I had convinced her all was well, I put my notebook back in my bag and left the café. I was trailed by something, a cross between ink stain and dream world, as if another form of incoming message. Near the corner of Washington and Greene, I heard the sounds first, a woman’s voice, and turned to see where she was, but there were only the usual fast walkers and students. My brain had either prevented me from seeing her or caused her to take shape, I didn
’t know which. She was about fifteen feet ahead of me, with a face I recognized but couldn’t place. She spoke, pointing to the ten-storey building that rose from the corner in shades of beige and grey, but no one listened to her.
“They fell,” she said. “From right up there. The eighth floor. And the ninth. Right up there.” She turned to look at me, and her face and voice, which had seemed for a moment like my mother’s, weren’t that way at all. The face was heart-shaped and lined, and she wore layers of frayed clothing, some strands of beads.
“I know,” I said.
“They landed right here. 1911. Right here, on the sidewalk.”
“Yes,” I said. Her face, which had appeared adamant and concerned, began to change. The more I looked at her, the more elusive she was.
I said, “No, don’t go. Don’t,” and I’m not sure why I said it, when I knew the proclivities of my brain. No one paid any attention to me, either, no one glanced over as if to wonder who I spoke to. I couldn’t trust what I was seeing, where I was, even if the concrete under my feet was solid and my hands, which I shoved in my pockets, were cold.