by Maria Mutch
I wanted there to be a smell, too, something doused and animal, but I found nothing. Whoever held my shoulders had my hate. We had arrived in a caravan of cars, and perhaps there were eight people, though I seemed to know no one, not even my grandfather. He stood a few feet away, staring into the debris. Neither of us belonged to the world. Evidence of the rift was right at my feet, fetid and terrible, and yet I couldn’t get the scent of it no matter how hard I breathed in. The person holding me thought I was sobbing, but I clawed for remnants.
Others, too, wanted the traces. I felt the shadows of the carrion eaters. Somewhere above were the turkey vultures with their bare heads and the ravens as they circled, just to check. I turned my head to see my mother’s favourite blue spruce, untouched, and the leafless maples. Beyond that, the forest stood all around, looking as it ever did, sunless and complete, saying nothing.
The Neuron Containing a School Desk
When we practiced the safety drills in elementary school, we curled ourselves underneath our desks, miming our defense in the case not of mass shootings but the less personal atomic obliteration or acts of nature. I wasn’t frightened of this pantomime; it excited me, the orderliness of the teacher—nameless, frail-looking under a long blade of hair—how we dipped our heads into that strange space beneath the desks (look up and see three wads of gum and dried paper), folded our bodies so that our mouths touched our knees.
I saw the collective curve of our spines, our fingers around our shins, the remoteness of our salvation. Another girl, two desks over, had eyes drilled black with terror. I almost laughed at her, but stopped myself. I was already thinking like a choreographer and liked this coordination of the entire room, the way we used our bodies and desks in a way that we didn’t normally. We were made synchronous by threat, by a symbolic enactment that couldn’t save us, and yet the ritual was fascinating, even beautiful.
One of the first professional dances I created had a stage set consisting of a dozen oversized desks and chairs that dancers hid beneath at the start, everyone curled up in a posture that was either terror or readiness, depending on your interpretation.
All Structures Are Unstable
The buildings flow, too, though you can’t see it. In this city of losses, the colossal twins shuddering straight down, showing that all along they were rope and smoke. Poured then into the streets, expanding, taking in. Billowing obscenely.
* * *
The size of the loss necessitates ignoring, or unconscious absorbing. Fill the void with people rushing and new buildings and fresh problems. The mind can’t fathom so many names and turns its tricks, and the day is like any other, and we eat our bagels and see the rats blink on the subway stairs and carry our grocery sacks.
* * *
When the towers came down, the falling figures mesmerized us. The videos were played over and over, the dark dots tumbling, or falling eerily straight, as if controlled. Then the appearance of arms and legs, the understanding of clothing, a person. Resolute and falling. Too fast and too slow at the same time. The feeling you get in your gut watching such an image, witnessing the moment just before someone’s demise—its terrible suspension.
* * *
I watched the videos because I was touring on the West Coast the day that it happened, which felt oddly like a betrayal. Just like the night when my parents had the fire, or rather the fire had them, just like that, I was away. And I didn’t feel it, no notion or dream or echo, no sense of a cataclysm, no feeling at all. I didn’t return to the city until weeks later, and while I was away, I watched the videos, and I studied the grainy photographs in newspapers and online. I absorbed the formation of falling, or I understood something about it, the recognition of forces so large that the body can do nothing but employ the currents. No action to take, nothing to be done. Which the brain doesn’t grasp. The brain can’t do not doing. It doesn’t do death. And so we can’t understand the images, the people falling. They are without computation or logic.
Seize
Take possession of. To cohere, as in machinery, the friction or excessive pressure on moving parts.
* * *
To lay hold forcibly.
* * *
Confiscate.
* * *
Afflict. Clutch or grasp.
* * *
An abnormal electrical discharge in the brain.
* * *
Physical manifestations of. Convulsions, sensory disturbances, loss of consciousness.
* * *
Take prisoner.
* * *
To understand fully, as in apprehend.
Permanently Aghast
I sat in his apartment. The gear had been dry for days, but he couldn’t bring himself to put away the tangible reminders of his trip, of the ocean and seabirds and the backs of passing whales whose echoes he couldn’t find in the city. He had been sea kayaking, along the Inside Passage. The trip seemed to scar him in some way, if only because it was over.
“Something about coming home that breaks me,” he said. He put Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman on the hi-fi.
“It shouldn’t do that,” I said.
“It can’t help itself,” he said.
His apartment was laid out with the paraphernalia, his sleeping bag, tent, safety gear, first aid kit, tow straps, and a sea of items that were shape-shifters, folded, doubled as other things, could survive salt water or float. The air smelled briny. A collapsible kayak, yellow as a taxi—I never mentioned to him this particular expression of his subconscious—and seventeen feet long, stretched on the floor of his living room.
“I wonder where I left it,” he said, not elaborating. His face, when he turned to me, was a ghost I’d seen before. I had a photograph of him, taken a year earlier, when he’d barely survived a storm while climbing on Denali. The sparse oxygen supply had aggravated in him what was already a feverish need to plant himself on the sides of mountains like a parasite. I figured he wanted revenge for the accident that had claimed his parents. In the photo from Denali, he had a beard, snow-covered, and his skin had the red lustre of the newly born. His gaze, however, showed that he was permanently aghast at something no one else could see.
His expression now, as he picked his way through the debris field, showed one difference, which was desire. He sat momentarily on the sofa opposite the kayak and watched me, and filling the wall above his head like thought balloons were no fewer than a half-dozen maps. The colours and lines resembled the diagrams of the brain and similarly indicated succinct divisions that didn’t exist in the real.
He poured a coffee for me.
“Your hand,” I said.
“My hand loves you,” he said.
“No. What was that?”
He appeared confused.
I thought I saw a tremor, involuntary and sly. “Never mind. Never you mind,” I said. “Put on Mr. Coltrane, why don’t you?” I glanced away.
“Just the thing,” he said. “Just the thing.”
* * *
Abandon: to forsake utterly. We drifted apart on the surface of the city until we had sunk into the millions of others and become unfindable. But we always found the fated or synchronized or dreamed. A rent in the material substance of one reality so that another only we could see appeared. We were locked in the magnetism of that haunting. Abandon: to yield without restraint or moderation. To give oneself over to impulses.
We tried to obliterate each other. I wanted, deep down, to annihilate him. If I could grind him to dust, my terrible orphan twin, I could change something about the hunger I had. I could be satisfied. Or such was the theory.
Our merger had a comprehension so dark it coloured everything. When he and I looked at each other across the tumult of the bed, what we saw was another person who had been left behind in the strangeness of this place, by the very people who had brought us into it. Whether or not our parents intended it, they had abandoned us by dying. The elders had long ago left the building.
* * *
He arranged his gear until nothing was left untouched, but it all looked the same. Sex then with a kind of robotic tension; frenzy and distance. We watched other people in our heads, or perhaps were not in our bodies at all. Maybe I was working out the piece—I considered nothing so important as the Project, even sex—and he was back on the sea or dangling from ropes or standing in an airport trying to convince security of the blandness of his gear. I still had long hair and he grabbed a fistful of it (to seize), twisting it up and pulling my head back (to clutch or grasp). He placed his mouth at my jugular so I felt the bare pressure of teeth along the skin, a kind of precipice or blunt knife edge, and then the fullness of lips and tongue (to cohere). But this was only routine. I went along that edge as always and then off the cliff into that desultory space, the one littered with abandoned objects and people (to apprehend fully). We had to play out a scene that was instinct or expectation or the last item on a list. Abandon, then.
In the Dream
They are gone from the house, and I walk around the rooms taking in the quiet. The boxes absorb sound, much as a black hole takes in whatever gets too close, and are coated in a layer of dust. My parents have neatly filed their desires and fears, and are unbothered by a silt of skin cells and pollen and strands of the dog’s hair. Regardless of the context of doom or preparation, the boxes are bland and sink beneath the seen; they don’t seem to register.
But the sight of my father in the night has gone to work on me, and I understand that I am a child of mystery. I don’t know them, my parents. The boxes are all around me, silent, labelled, waiting. The arrangement might murmur about displacement or plans, but a house whose structure appears to be upheld by its own contents is another animal entirely.
The boxes snake through rooms and sit under tables and line walls, they line up one side of the piano, muffling its sound. In the large living room, the boxes reach the window ledge and a vase of flowers sits on top. A blanket is folded on two boxes beside the sofa, creating a kind of end table; there is a smudged ashtray, some pulp fiction, and a book of Rumi poems. Boxes in front of the sofa create an ottoman on top of which my father has placed a large rectangle of local maple that will remain one of the most beautiful things I will ever see—its haunting gleam causes the eye to disregard the boxes underneath. Other boxes along the south wall proclaim in tidy, exact lettering, numerals spelled out:
Seven Collapsible Pots or
Two Dozen Instant Potato or
Twenty Cans Beef Dog Food.
Some of the listings are more whimsical:
Fifty Spools Silk Thread, Pink and Purple,
Nineteen Assorted Drawing Pads and Journals,
Fifteen Cases Ink Pens, HB Pencils, Nibs, Sharpeners,
Assorted Books: Children,
Assorted Magazines: Travel and Life.
There are also some odd pairings, revealing a lapse in the system, gaps in the organization, and you wonder how, like mismatched lovers, they came to be together:
Iodine and Tube Socks,
Dried Chilis and Ball-Peen Hammers,
Suction Cups and Jockey Underwear (female, small).
* * *
But I haven’t looked inside any of the boxes; not one.
5
The Documentary
The professor of psychology is being interviewed. The scene is a deli, where he is having coffee and a pastrami sandwich, and sitting across from him at the table is the woman conducting the interview. A salad sits in front of her, untouched. She has waited to interview him, because he’s been on a book tour for a tome about people who lose things. The professor has some ideas, too, about missing people, the cultural aspects; he thinks about how one bad decision leads to another, about subliminal expressions. He agreed to be interviewed on the condition that the filming take place in a deli and that they order food, because he is of the opinion that documentaries lack this sort of arrangement.
Also in his mind is his own colleague, a woman who taught metaphysics at the university, who went missing two years ago when she went for a hike and never returned. He was one of the members of the search party, though he declined to mention to anyone that he had, at one time, known her intimately. Or that he had been the one to tell her about his favourite hiking spot, which was less than an hour outside the city limits. That their original plan had been to hike together, but then their negotiations had soured and she ended up going alone, not returning.
He doesn’t mention any of this to his interviewer, who stabs at some lettuce and puts down her fork again. She had been asking him about his idea of pain and what the missing person means to those left behind. He has seemed preoccupied or enjoying his pastrami too much. She says, “It’s interesting, don’t you think, how many people go missing? I mean, just vanish. Happens all the time.” She gestures expansively, a little impatiently. She waits. He picks the crumbs off his plate with his fingertips, licks them thoughtfully in a way that reminds her of a cat.
“I think what’s interesting is that we’re surprised,” he says, then takes a sip of his coffee.
“But why are we so captivated? Missing people, or even objects. You wrote a whole book about that.” She leans forward, smiling, maybe a little too harshly. “What’s behind that, Professor? Why are we so interested when something is gone?”
He signals the waitress for more coffee, which annoys the interviewer because it complicates the shot. “Two things. One is fear of death; what happens to us beyond this place. The missing person on the news becomes a surrogate experience, whether or not that person is actually alive. Being missing is in itself a kind of death—Thank you, that’s perfect—instead of worrying about our own existential situation, we can work on someone else’s.”
“And the other?”
He rests his fingertips on the hot mug and settles in. “Say we have a bombless existence, that we have a life of relative ease—as in, we turn on the tap, and it works; we eat at restaurants with abundant food; our beds are warm at night, right? We still feel it. ‘It’ being a wrongness so acute, so alive that it can make us want to end it all and in some cases we actually do.
“When things are ticking along with the least resistance and the most peace we don’t realize our luck. We don’t think, This is as good as it gets. Our belief that there’s more glitter, somewhere in the future, is that powerful. Or our belief in inadequacy, our own shortcomings or the inadequacy of the house or the car or the business we’re in is that strong. Something is always missing, yeah? Or not quite right. We feel the misery in such colour and complexity that the torment itself transforms.
“By that I mean the torment actually lives and breathes, it becomes a creature. One entirely fed by our own thoughts. Nurtured, even. We put the creatures into the world, millions of them, and they run everything. All inspired—born!—by the idea of lack. Not actual lack, because, remember, that’s just an idea. We conceive something because we’ve imagined nothing—which is, in some respect, impossible to do, imagine nothing.
“So maybe what we imagine is really an edge that runs along nothing, and we believe in its reality, because we can cling to it. The nothing is what we’re afraid of. It’s the emptiness made by the person or object we believe we’re entitled to but isn’t there anymore. Most of us feel entitled to possess a person or an object, along with our own existence, ad infinitum. It’s all a story, though, a figment of our imagination.”
He drinks his coffee, puts down the cup, and drums his fingers on the tabletop. Then he smiles and bops his index finger toward the interviewer like he’s tapping her with a wand. “But you know what? The monster howling at that edge is real enough, for sure. And we invented him.”
Molly
This place on the sidewalk, for instance. A microcosm of the larger wonder. I feel the warmth of the people around me, and wish that I could tell them what it means. The faces leaning in—the marvelous noses, the cracked lips, the eyeglasses and hats, the tired scarves—cause a terrible love to ripple through me. Eve
n if I am perplexing to them. I can see their helplessness, the beauty and electricity of their panic is like the shower of sparks from a welding torch. In this moment we are being forged together, a single creature with many arms and legs and hearts.
* * *
“Please,” someone says.
* * *
“Oh my god, please.”
* * *
During a fall of this kind I have to rely on the goodness of the world that I’m leaving. The contortions of my own face and body, however, obscure the communication. The storm out at sea must feel the same. It would talk of vulnerability, it would say that it loves. How short its life is.
The boy with the lion in him has wandered back, and he bends with his chapped hands on his knees. In order to see me better, in order to understand what is taking place.
Place has everything to do with this, I want to tell him, and nothing. Lion Boy nods at me, a flicker of that comprehension passing through, a flame that catches. I can feel him breathing.