American Genius

by Lynne Tillman

  —Dad, visit me, come on, it’s my wish, tell me about being dead. Come close, I will it. I can’t do this. Dad, visit me, stand beside me. I can’t . . . this is stupid.

  Green, moldy bodies in morgues, inflamed, bloated white faces, mutilated corpses, half-blown-away bodies, maggot-ridden, in blue uniform, Gettysburg, lynched black bodies hanging from a despicable tree. Terrible death, I fear you, I have to get out of here, it’s sane fear, I answer it, I’m a coward, I should stay, I want to hear them again. My head splits in two.

  Did I speak this aloud or is it internal?

  I don’t think I’m talking in my darkness. I can’t halt these alien sensations. I place my hands over my eyes and press hard, scrunching my eyes closed again, so that their veins radiate bloody patterns, garishly colored shapes, pale ashes, the papers I burned this afternoon maybe, everything recognizable is ablaze, like my family’s Eames chairs. I can’t hold on to an image, so I tell myself, in a stately manner, Mark this now, fire burns complacent things, and in a flash it occurs to me why I take things apart, and I want to remember the reason but can’t. Another gust of arctic air makes me shiver, there’s nothing to think about, I open my eyes, it’s all gone, I shut them again.

  I HEAR MY NAME, “HELEN, Helen,” so I turn toward the Magician, who stares at me and directs me, “Follow my hands,” which I do, I can see his hands waving in front of his face, but suddenly his head belongs to my friend who disappeared. I can hardly breathe. Then the Magician’s head enlarges, his eyes expand, enormous like universes, much larger than my mad cat’s just before he gouged my left calf, and I follow his agile hands, how they weave in the air, like weavers’ hands at looms, my head drops onto my chest and rolls around, or from side to side, oddly enough I recall this because while my head feels detached and airy, I’m still holding on, so a question about consciousness wings by, about how markedly it can differ from self-consciousness, when it emerges from a consciousness aligned to a self, then questions disappear. I’m not concerned about fainting, I worry I’m dying, even if my skin still itches, my arms, chest, legs, and maybe my dead friends or their ghosts leave messages on my back.

  Against my will—I have no will—while the Magician mumbles something, my skull empties, and the inside of my head becomes dense. I enter a deeper trance, or I might still be in a hypnogogic state, but I do believe the Magician may have hypnotized or entranced me, because from now on what I am certain of is negligible, what I remember is beyond description in ordinary terms.

  I’m near the ocean, because I hear waves, I ask someone, my father, or my friend taken by AIDS, the question I’d asked my mother as a child: Is life worth it, even though you die? She said then, Yes, because you have happiness when you’re alive, you have a lot of good times before you die. I didn’t accept what she said then. I don’t get an answer now. I breathe in the green ocean, fall headlong into a whitecapped wave, let it consume me, I’d been hungry for its endlessness, the hot sand, the summer wind’s raw perfume, the innocent exhaustion after swimming. I take off my itchy sweater and walk unsteadily coward the windows, calling desperately for a birdman, and then Moira, who is apparently clearheaded, throws my sweater over my head, puts my arms through the sleeves, and leads me back to my chair. Moira whispers in my ear, “Did you know my name, Moira, means destiny?”

  Hearing the word from her mouth shocks me, and I jump back, exclaiming, “No, I had no idea, I didn’t know.” Moira’s face transforms, it contorts grievously, and, if that is destiny, it’s an ogre, so I slap her. I suppose I never really liked Moira, though her oddness and inquisitiveness attracted me from the first. Moira smiles and transforms into my young, wild cat, but I’m in a chair, looking down on myself from above, an out-of-body experience, and in it I feel estranged from the world, but long for it, wanting to return and to live forever. In scarlet ink, fluttering on my eyelids, “Live the life you have imagined,” but soon I perceive the closeness of the ogre, destiny, snarling like my mad, dead cat, but destiny can’t be put to sleep, the way he was, it doesn’t go away, and, worse, death wouldn’t. Death stops everything. It’s unfair, but not unjust, since everyone suffers its democratic tyranny. Things flow along, whole and disintegrated, I have at least two minds, so I exhort one, maybe aloud, “Don’t stop, don’t stop. I wish . . . I wish . . .”

  Then my father appeared, I think he did and I also think he didn’t, and my best friend killed in a car crash showed up, with her young, toothy grin, “You haven’t changed,” I exclaimed, and there my brother stood, dead the way I thought.” Everyone wishes to speak to the dead.” I heard that again. My father wore his dark brown trunks, I saw him swimming behind the breakers, far from shore, swimming farther and farther away, until he disappeared.

  The Count produced fearsome yowls, I reclaimed my body and wondered if he were possessed by the devil, but didn’t accept that could make sense. The Count enunciated disconnected words and phrases—“tiny second hand, poison ivy, Descartes, lacquer and jade, the antichrist”—with many long pauses, as if completing his sentences in an interior monologue. I waited for more revelation, but if it came, I missed it. The Magician hushed him and snapped his fingers, and the Count’s seizure, if it was, halted miraculously, and then the Magician sang or chanted, I don’t remember the lyrics, though I usually have extremely good recall of conversations and dialogue, but none of his words stayed with me. Yet with them, we woke up from our sleep or trances, conscious of leaving one peculiar world for another. And so, the sitting reached its end, the way everything does, and, slowly, one after another in an orderly single file, we walked from the Rotunda Room, all but the Count, who, after his outburst or seizure, vanished. No one said a word. It was a few minutes past 1 a.m., so only an hour had passed, but it seemed, as they say, an eternity.

  THE STORM HAD ALSO PASSED, and remote, brilliant stars littered the sky. In my room, I stripped, my skin was exceptionally dry, the largest organ of the body stretched to its limit, I slathered on creams and worried about the scaly spot on my leg. Not surprisingly, death, or mortality, hung about after the séance, especially when the pressure around my heart turned into sharper pain, heartburn, or an event, as cardiologists call an undetermined episode, and, since my father died of heart disease, I worried, but the pain left in no time, and anyway I’m not prone to hypochondria.

  I slept fitfully, awoke twice, walked to the bathroom, hardly concerned about waking the two disconsolate women, since they might occupy other beds, and the third time I awoke, I gazed at the Fabric Monolith, at its hidden potential, its unleashed energy, and imagined I’d unfurl it one day, but only in my imagination. If my bed were covered in Egyptian 600 denier all-cotton sheets, I’d sleep better, but the séance, whatever it is or was, carried novelty’s unruliness and disturbed my rest; the sleep of orphan children, the sleep manual reports, is “made more restless when they leave the institution to see a motion picture in the evening,” so it exhorts readers to “make their mind as blank as that of a wartime flapper,” the Great War, that is, the manual came out in America in 1937, when rationalization, bureaucratization, the New Deal were the rage, like liquor, hard-boiled novels, communism. With age, it’s said you need less sleep, though my mother, who’s very old, needs her sleep and often drops off in a serviceable reclining chair, covered in light brown naugahyde, in her living room, watching a movie on TY, but not when she is reading, which she does with near-perfect eyesight and in a state of total concentration, her head craned to the book on her lap, its covers lovingly cradled in her small white hands. She has a little arthritis, but it’s not disfiguring and doesn’t keep her from knitting, though as her neurological condition deteriorates, her once-skilled fingers lose their way and trip, she drops a stitch, a line, then complains that it’s the fault of the wool—too thin, she says—but it’s not. Soon, knitting wearies her, but her skin glows, translucent and smooth, free of wrinkles, though not as plump and lush as her older sister’s, who used Jergen’s Lotion only, and whom she envied and
outlived, but my mother’s greatest rival was her husband’s mother, whose ancestors emigrated from Egypt, whose green oval eyes and beauty captured him, and whose impetuous, incessant demands he always met. Now my mother envies only youth and worries that her brain will fail her completely and she will not know herself.

  Egypt is the world’s largest producer of high-grade, long staple cotton, most grown near the Nile Delta, and maintaining the quality of its higher grades has been troublesome; the U.S. imports considerable amounts of it for making thread, lace, and tire cord. Foreign imports, from China, India, and the Far East, have vastly changed the U.S. textile industry, and now millworkers in North Carolina can’t find work. Imports drastically affected my father and uncle’s business, which was why it wasn’t an option for me when I finished college, even though my brother hadn’t taken his place in it, but business was bad, it wasn’t encouraging, and I hadn’t wanted to design fabrics and sell them then, which I regret.

  I looked again at the Fabric Monolith, with its plenty of secrets.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I DIDN’T go to breakfast, I didn’t want conversation, contentious or pacific, I didn’t want to leave my bed, I wasn’t very hungry, I ate a navel orange and banana, and knew there’d be lunch, usually the poorest meal of the day, but edible and eaten in private. The radio voices complained and joked, anonymous company, harbingers or bearers of bad news, prejudice, and expert advice or ignorance. I didn’t attend breakfast all week after the séance and, like some of the former residents, entered the dining room when no one was likely to be around, no residents or staff, in order to forage food, so that I wouldn’t go hungry until lunch. Dinnertime during that week, the third in the cook’s cycle, was subdued, even though the Turkish poet, Contesa, Spike, Henry, and Arthur were in residence, and though there was the usual banter, benign grumbling about the lunches, especially from the demanding man, and the appearance of a few new residents, who blended into the walls, whose acquaintance I didn’t want to make, though they appeared to be lively under their skins. After dinner, I hastened to the sanctity of my bedroom, which isn’t mine forever. Life, and everything in it, is temporary, and this oppressive, venerable fact I reckon with and contest daily, if subliminally, and, in a modest, morose manner, attack, which doesn’t afford peace.

  When I’m at home, I may hold my young, wild cat, if he allows it, and, especially when he lies near or on my face and I inhale his familiar musty male feline smell, I feel calm, content and also able to recall the family cat, with her kittens, but not the one who died at birth who lay near her and her other healthy kittens, wrapped in a small piece of black wool. I rub my face against my cat’s coal-black fur, soft as cashmere, and if loose fur doesn’t enter my nostrils and cause me to sneeze, after which he cries—my sneezing upsets him—the cat is a temporary consolation, and when I tuck him even closer in my arms, he objects, usually quickly, and leaps off the bed. When the family cat was given away and killed, because it ate my parakeet, a creature I didn’t care about, though it had once jumped into my soft-boiled egg in a small white bowl, endearingly, I was allowed to adopt a homeless, six-month-old pregnant mixed-breed dog, around the time my brother disappeared. I had my dog for nine years, but I’ve never had another dog, because there can be no other dog but her, or I don’t deserve another, since, if I had protected my dog, if I’d been aware, not lost in myself, my parents wouldn’t have been able to give her away and kill her, for which I take the blame. I feel sorry for people who treasure their furniture more than animals or for people who are allergic to them, since people live longer who have an animal to pet and love, to be in sympathy with, but some people don’t want the bother, have never liked animals, or care more about material possessions and how they appear to others and to themselves than longevity. Allergies are different from intolerances, real food allergies are rare, but here many believe they are allergic to various foods, including milk, which is extremely rare, though some have trouble digesting it; if there is an allergy, an allergic reaction, mild or severe, proceeds, because the immune system is involved, while it’s not involved if a person is intolerant of, or just sensitive to, a food group. Intolerance to foods or food idiosyncrasies, as health professionals lately designate food sensitivities, are reactions and discomforts but not allergies, since allergens are not involved, and many believe they are sensitive, women especially like to think they’re sensitive. I don’t care who sees my black, secondhand, two-seat modernist couch, which my young, wild cat recognized as his scratching post and whose raised one hundred percent wool upholstery he ripped, fabric I selected in ecstasy at a warehouse of sumptuous textiles, many of which I touched and smelled, I won’t let any people enter my apartment, since my young, wild cat might claw them badly and then they might insist I have him put down, or they might imagine they understand me or can defend themselves from me, by what I have on my walls, shelves, and with which furniture I surround myself.

  THE NEXT WEEK, I RETURNED to my usual schedule, needing regularity in most things, and it was on this day that, after breakfast, which the head cook prepared, because the assistant cook was ill again, so the head cook was annoyed to be on duty, though she would, we residents now knew with certainty, retire soon, the Magician left. He said he had been doing a flyby, and moments before he left I urged him again to tell me what he’d done, especially to me but also to the Count, during the séance, but he persisted in saying everything that happened I’d wanted to happen, with no coaxing from him, and I don’t believe him, so, even if my father appeared, which I question, though it was my wish, he was dead, nothing had changed, but that wasn’t the Magician’s fault. The Magician shook his head ruefully and told me I didn’t understand. The Count was no longer in residence and couldn’t argue. The young married man, who didn’t appear as content again, but who still liked everything the kitchen presented, left a week and a day after the séance, that is, last night, a Sunday night, Sunday can be the worst day here, and Sunday dinners are often the worst of the dinners.

  This morning, when I rushed into the breakfast room, past the two disconsolate young women, who were both in their pajamas, apparently in distress, I didn’t hesitate to ignore them, not engage in their business, especially because they sat near new residents who might be stuck in time or who believed themselves ahead of it, since time was and always is of the essence, time’s in everything, it provokes currents and forms in design, it resides in art and history, but I was hungry, nearly late, and feared that the head cook wouldn’t allow me breakfast, because she doesn’t like me or any of us. After I rushed into the kitchen and printed my order, smiling at the cook, so that I might not earn any more of her wrath, but barely looking at the kitchen helper, though he looked at me, the Magician waved me over to his table, and it was then he told me he was leaving, his work here was done, but since he’s an obituary writer, I couldn’t imagine what work he’d accomplished, except maybe the séance, which I discounted, and it was at that moment I received his disappointing answer. When he arose, the Magician rang a bell and announced to all assembled that he was about to make himself disappear, which he accomplished by walking out of the dining room. I felt the need to accomplish something, having spent the previous week indifferently or unremarkably, though deliberately so. For instance, empty-headed, I rocked and swung in a decent copy of an American swinging porch chair, the original dates from the 1920s, while the snow melted incrementally from the main house’s roof and icicles cracked and dropped, and also I reclined on a 1940s leather couch in the library, but didn’t read or listen to music, and watched other residents, surreptitiously. I slept at all hours, day and night, in my room, exhausted, as if recovering from major surgery, an amputation of some sort. In the evenings, before dinner, I telephoned my mother’s companion and listened most carefully to every complaint, to the nuances and shadings in her voice to detect a reason sufficient for her to abandon my mother, because it can be exhausting to tend a person who asks the same question over and over, or believ
es she’s lost a ten-dollar bill, when she hasn’t and yet searches, agitated, all day for it, or, worse, a necklace she never owned, and the whole day frets about where it might have gone, since it must be found, and then she wakes up with it on her mind, and if you say it’s a fantasy or a dream, she is insulted and furious. These problems might require my return to the place I call home, and, against my will and desire, to bear the weight of my mother’s care, relinquishing some of my liberty. People move in with their ailing, aging parents, some sacrifice their lives, in a sense, but I’m incapable of it, though in another society with other customs I might, as I might also have eaten human flesh in a ritual ceremony or walked ten paces behind my husband, but in America, where I’m at liberty to make my own mistakes in marriage, which I have, a woman’s walking behind men has never been required, probably because of the need for their labor from the start, while, in the Donner Pass, westward-bound settlers who followed a little-used route to California, trapped by snow, cold, starving, and near-mad, ate human flesh. After the Magician, I also left the breakfast room, stopping to make an appointment with the Turkish poet and Spike for drinks after dinner, but Contesa said, reticently, that she was already engaged. “A sweet date?” the Turkish poet asked, teasing her and me, “is it a sweet Medjool date?” Contesa paid no attention to his insinuation, but it awakened something in me, and, later, when no one was around, I walked to the kitchen.

  I LIKE TO MAKE ANY fresh start on Monday mornings, and a few weeks later, on a Monday, I decided on a strenuous, long walk, since usually I don’t walk after breakfast, but instead return to the room where I sleep or to the room where I take apart objects and place them in different configurations on the floor, burn old notes and useless designs, or study Zulu and read about chairs, or dwell on some event in or theory about American history, which lies in wait of contemporary interest and whose avid pursuit was once mine. Against myself, another freedom, after changing into suitable hiking boots, appropriate jacket, heavier all-cotton pants and sweater, risking disdain by approaching the head cook to request my lunch in advance, a cheese or turkey sandwich on dry whole-wheat bread and an apple, which she reluctantly dispensed, never looking at me, I walked into a woods in which I’d never ventured and followed a trail I’d never taken with a destination I didn’t know. Spring was finally coming, the ground and snow melting lazily, the cloudless sky a poignant pale blue, while the morning sun burnished the ground, so that I had to shield my eyes from the glare of the last snows, which cloaked some of the treetops and still lay on the fields and had forced most creatures into their hiding places, though there was the occasional chipmunk to whom I spoke that as usual scurried away. The sun’s rays flared and warmed me, spring warmed me, and I hoped to be alert to my surroundings, part of my renewal strategy on this Monday. A medium-size black bird alighted on a branch and two gray ones, mourning doves, I hoped, streaked across the pale sky, Birdman would have easily recognized the birds, and the farther I walked, the less I knew where I was because soon the main house wasn’t in sight. In the distance, three deer leaped across my path, a family, sudden and surprising, they stood still for a while, but when I began to approach, they fled, their forelegs kicking in the air like merry-go-round horses. I meant to walk swiftly, until my heart pounded, my leg muscles stretched and loosened, and I tired. Aerobic exercise raises endorphin levels, I’ve occasionally experienced its benefits, while the tall balding man, who runs twenty miles a day and sweats profusely, experiences it daily, though it doesn’t seem to make him sanguine, unless lust or appetite signals optimism, even when his numerous loves disappoint, which he may desire, as it frees and confirms him, so I walked quickly, then slowed down to pay attention to the vegetation and growth, so my desires were split, I couldn’t have them simultaneously. I walked on the path, not fully aware of my surroundings, since I was distracted and didn’t know how to be what I wasn’t. Tree branches and pinecones littered the way, encrusted in some packed-down snow, melting less because the tall trees hid the sun, and sometimes I slid or slipped. Deer might have leaped across the field, or a pair of mourning doves, who mate for life, might have sailed above me, patterns of brown and gray against a pale blue sky, but I was concentrating on the ground under my feet. Then, before me, about twenty feet ahead, I saw a large clearing and the dregs of a campfire, with some fire or red embers, and knew a person or two must be around, so I turned and looked in all directions, and saw no one, but at the campsite, near the fire, I noticed its almost-burnt configuration, resembling the Count’s fire-building method, since four of its ash-white logs were stacked just as he would have done, at least it appeared to me.