After James

by Michael Helm

  Shoad had built the stag on a base that sat atop skids. He hauled it with his tractor to the front of the yard. He couldn’t say why he’d made it or why he’d positioned it there but it somehow displaced the turbulence he felt at the memory of the accident and its aftermath. He and the animal had happened to each other, a chance intersection of two beings that only one had survived. Their coming together had changed him wholly, not just his ways of saying but of seeing too. His work was filling with animal forms, simple enough, and with something inside them not otherwise seen. There was no way to say this even before the accident, and the way of saying it now was through the pieces themselves. His old works had been stillborn.

  “The new ones are alive. They carry death inside them.”

  —

  So he said, or seemed to say. His words were too simple for their volume of meaning. He barely spoke and yet the story came to her whole. In the variable speeds of the mind, her perception outran time. Had he said all this, and so willingly, or had he sketched a story that Alph had remade in great detail? She tried to stop listening. As Shoad sat before her, speaking, memories glinted and disappeared. A neighbour’s mean boxer tied to a sapling. Pigeons wheeling over rooftops of some foreign city. She could see them there against the wall. Her father, young, watching TV in a motel room chair.

  Shoad took a sip and continued.

  Stefan drove into the yard. He stepped from his car absent of the usual forced good cheer through which he tried to convince himself he occupied some world different from the one he stood in. Even in his posture he seemed troubled. Months ago, when he’d first visited after the accident, Stefan had neither reacted to Shoad’s appearance nor pretended not to notice it. It was as if Shoad’s face was of no matter to him, as if he’d seen real monstrosity and this wasn’t it. Now some distance, Denise, had formed between that Stefan and this one.

  They walked to the pasture and said hello to Aurelius. Stefan looked confused, as if unsure of why he’d come. His movements were muted. He declined an invitation to the house. Shoad described his renovation plans. He referenced the walls Stefan would know, walls Shoad intended to knock out. He described the ironwood posts he’d procured to buttress the beams, the position of the fireplace he’d build. Shoad led him around the property, pointing out the work he’d done. A newly mounted yard light, a new well cover. He walked him to a stand of sumac, the deadwood cleaned out and piled in the open, in need of burning. Together they heaped the wood into a pyre. They gathered hoes and blankets from the barn and gasoline from the machine shed and poured it onto the pile. Shoad lit a match and tossed it. The wood fired in a great convulsion and they stood before it and Stefan began to talk. He said fire was where it all began, the troubles Shoad had no doubt suspected. He had always known his wife was holy but she was prone to visions that were not, or so he believed. It was natural for him to reject the visions. They isolated her from him. He felt they stood against him, so his position was determined. Stefan didn’t tell Denise’s story so much as confess the ways in which it confounded him in a series of unconnected pronouncements about fire and visions and the pitch and length of strange Russian vowels. Shoad couldn’t follow him but felt he shouldn’t interrupt. It was as if Stefan were speaking neither to him nor to himself but to a third party unknown between them.

  Because of her illness, Stefan said, they had backed out of a planned African mission in the winter.

  “I can’t reason with her about her Russian friend,” said Stefan. From his pants pocket he produced a necklace with a locket. “She said her friend gave her this. I’ve never seen it before. Denise doesn’t wear jewellery.” He handed it over. “You see those words there, on the clasp?” Shoad could see there were faded characters or numbers barely impressed on the cheap metal but couldn’t make them out. “I guess you don’t read Russian.”

  “Never made a study.”

  “I looked at the words under a magnifying glass. They look maybe Russian.” There were no words on the locket itself. It was empty. “When we bought the place there were all sorts of things that would just turn up. One time in the walls I found insulation cinched around a water pipe with an old wristwatch. Maybe this is something like that. Maybe she found it in the walls.”

  Though Shoad felt the heat on his face and through his clothes, Stefan put the blanket over his shoulders and cut a figure in the light, holding his hoe like a staff.

  “My wife has visions, Clayton. She’s unstable but she has the greater faith. I wait for revelation but it doesn’t come to me, maybe because I fear it. And so I sift through fallen things looking for evidence. I try to fill my heart with goodness but I don’t know how to be open to revelation. I believe in it, I think I do, but it doesn’t choose me.” He seemed to be working toward a question he couldn’t find words for. Shoad imagined the question concerned the impossibility of absolute trust in a God never present to the senses. “How can we know if the presence we feel is of God or the Enemy?” Stefan said he felt the Lord only when in a state of prayer, but his wife had had even this beautiful gift poisoned by disease. For years they prayed aloud together every night, prayed in their shared language and in tongues. “The gift of tongues sounds different in different people,” Stefan said. “I know the sound of her gift like I know the voice that comes to me in my thoughts. But one night her tongues changed, another voice came. And I knew what it was, this language. She was speaking Russian. The spirit of her friend, her dead friend, real or not, lives inside her.”

  With the new spirit in her came no easing of the willfulness Stefan had never been equal to. In different hours she could be one or the other, almost herself or almost another, truly foreign woman called Irina who enraged the Denise he knew for her fate and her acceptance of it. Surely Irina was just a picture on the internet, and yet Stefan too was divided against himself, wanting his proof, something that would after this dark interval finally again bring their beliefs together, even though to want evidence was to want a confirmation of a suffering outside of his wife, a suffering and murder and the revelation that Shoad was not who he seemed to be.

  “I confess to wondering,” said Stefan. “I come here to your place and I know the truth, but at home I see her suffering and I want another truth.”

  But even if he could find proof that Irina had been real, there’d be something more terrible. He would be forced to confront something else he couldn’t accept, that his wife now carried the souls of two tormented women. Shoad understood that Stefan wanted to find evidence of Irina and to have come to believe in her. But to find it or not, neither result would release him.

  “I can almost see her, Irina. Sometimes the way Denise looks at me, her eyes, they’re shaped wrong, flatter to the brow, and she holds them on me for just a second. Then she turns away and she’s gone.”

  After Stefan left, Shoad walked the perimeter of the fire, looking for stray embers. Now and then he found one and stabbed it out with the hoe. He tried to imagine what might be done for this man who would confide in no one else. He thought of the word mission. His own mission was to help Stefan and Denise, but he had no idea how to reach them.

  That night when Shoad undressed he found burn marks on his legs, red lines in curls and flares, like ancient letters painted with a thick brush. The heat had burned through his canvas work pants and left the pants unmarked. Only in the cool of the bedroom did he feel the burns alive.

  The last thing Stefan had said to him, “To remake the house, Clayton, build it simply. All things toward God.”

  —

  “I can’t tell you more,” he said. She understood him to mean he wasn’t up to it. He seemed depleted, his shoulders rounded in resignation.

  He left the house to check the sky and the water level in the ravine. Ali sat in the cool room and the remainder of story. Her memory wasn’t of hearing it, but of having been present at the events, there by the fire with Shoad and Stefan, there with Shoad that night in his room. On her shins she felt a phantom heat. She
could picture the burn marks on his legs that read to her as math and science symbols. One was shaped like psi, phase difference. Another was theta, time constant. Eta, hysteresis. And alpha, the false positive rate or fine structure constant or a constellation’s brightest star. Alph produced the alphabet and fitted the characters into her thoughts.

  She picked up the two empty cups and took them to the kitchen, rinsed them in the sink. The stream died in her hands—she’d forgotten there was no power, no pump—and something about the water on the base of her thumb looked wrong. Or it looked as it should but felt wrong, given where the hand was wet. As if her nerves were reading sensation through a new, fast-evolving system. What would it be like to lose this, to be on the other side, after weeks of this feeling, to be blunted back into common, unremarkable days? You might choose to pitch yourself off a bridge.

  She looked for Shoad through the window. The weather vane on the barn had almost stopped spinning and now she could see it was in the shape of a soldier, a man with a rifle. He wore a cap or helmet of some kind. Or maybe not soldier but hunter. Only now she noticed the top of a smokestack above the roofline.

  The rest of the story, the part Shoad couldn’t bring himself to tell, wasn’t hard to put together. She had Denise’s version and the evidence of this place, the sculptures, the new barn, the scorched wood, and Shoad himself. Denise had omitted from her telling all contradicting details. Her Shoad was not a keeper of animals, not an artist, no one with a use for a forge. She would have driven into the yard, imagined a communication from her imaginary friend, and somehow spilled fire into the barn. Aurelius had died in the fire, the barn had burned to nothing, had had to be rebuilt. Stefan, if he came at all, would have witnessed the aftermath. And whatever the time between then and now, the Dahls were not in West Africa. Denise was likely a new patient in some long-term care facility, and Stefan would be living near her, looking daily for signs she’d return to herself.

  A few hours more and the pill would wear off. Would she retain this comprehension and what was she blind to? She felt herself lagging behind some important understanding, something right in front of her that she couldn’t see. A need for revelation connected her to Stefan. Like Shoad they were part of the pattern. Both needed to step away from their fears to sort the false from the real, the consoling illusions from what was unsettling or unendurable. She felt the quick in her molecular and genetic levels, the decouplings, the triggered gene expressions. Of course she couldn’t really, but she did.

  As in fourteen percent of the subjects, a headache announced the onset of the peak effect. Next might come more intense visual disturbances, scintillations, cuneiform patterns overlaid on points of focus.

  A flashlight stood lens down on the counter. When had he collected it? He was thinking ahead, thinking better than she was. Other things were out of place. A slotted box of cutlery on a stool, a canvas ball cap propped with a plate in a dish rack. Sitting on top of a covered wicker basket with a decorative floral inlay was a yellow plastic pill dispenser.

  Across the room, a door ajar. She saw a glimmer on a blue wall. She walked over and opened the door.

  The room held a small table, a window onto the yard. Against the blue wall opposite the window was a stepladder and an old cardboard suitcase with a faded Fragile sticker on the side. On the wall itself were a few photographs, tacked polaroids connected by angled lines that as she came closer resolved into writing, the minuscule jitterscript she recognized from the note he’d left for her. The polaroids were placed it seemed randomly on the wall. She recognized the barn and weather vane in one shot, a view of the house from the yard entrance in another. Two photos were unreadable, extreme close-ups of surface textures, maybe wood grain, maybe fur. Above the others was a picture of a smokestack streaming greyblack. Where the photo ended, the written lines took up the path of the smoke and drifted toward the ceiling. She took in the words at eye level. They began on the margins of the house shot and extended in three parallel lines to the barn.

  The sculpture must not stop. To see past plane and volum. The time around the moment. A stranger in town with blue sleeve. She handed me Samuel three 19. “and the Lord was with him and did let none of his word fall to the ground.” So who is it with me.

  From the barn to the wood grain the lines angled downward again.

  In a crow we know what to look at dimension perspectiv. The tree near the window. The crow in the tree is and is not bigger than the barn. He would paint the crow if he painted who is with him. The sculpture is a prison. The life inside is long-tailed. Like zoo animal. Like wartime animals starve. The skul is a prison.

  The handwriting would be part of a therapy to address his lexical agraphia. Of course he would make of it a locally open book. You could know him by his spaces, his workshop, his living room, this study, places Denise had never set foot in.

  She read into the crowded margins of the photos and saw that the lines crossed into the pictures in places. In the slatted walls and tire-rutted foreground she looked for references to family, friends, a deep past, but the cobalt lines floated in a shallows of personal time. The depth was only in his need for words, the need was ancient human, there in the early brain. Language began a hundred thousand years ago, writing eight. Again she thought of the earliest art. Representational cave drawing, adornments made of bone and antler, an awareness beyond sensation, into reflexive consciousness, a kind of early selfhood.

  Her father had taken her caving once.

  Lined into taut, parallel strings of words, Shoad’s fragments assumed a disciplined force, not the obsessive massings of hypergraphia. She’d seen such tiny writing before, in galleries, cramped into notebooks, in the reproduced pages of famous men. Dostoevsky, Van Gogh. Lewis Carroll and his ninety-eight thousand letters, a number she remembered from her own childhood obsession with Carroll and his Alice, whom she used to like to think she was named after.

  Above the smokestack, the top corner of the wall was barely marked. She mounted the ladder, followed the smoke plume where it broke into skeins trailing into clear space, and read what seemed the most recent entries.

  The sun hit the ice. Meltwater rush in the stream. Smell of first things. Thawing things thawed on the

  bank. Digging at the source.

  The source a humanform. He found a hand, the arm, the head he backed off the shape. The smell brought him backed off again. His own sound sounded strange.

  The light shot into him falling

  So the day’s thaw had revived him in the light of creation. He’d described it all in the third person, as if trying to get outside himself. The word “humanform” seemed to refer to his sculpture, Descendant. She noted a few more dropped letters. The more energy in the writing, the more urgent, the more mistakes he made.

  The vertigo arrived with a half-formed memory that wouldn’t come clear. She hung on to the ladder, then step-floated down as if onto the moon and said a simple “ouch.” She had never been prone to bad headaches. It didn’t help that she could picture the brewing storm in her brain, a storm aware of itself just got more agitated. She sat on the hard chair and felt Crooner’s collar in her back pocket. She withdrew it and with no regard for the mess she was making rubbed the dried mud from the leather only to reveal strange dark discolourations.

  When she closed her eyes she was falling so she opened them and tried to focus on what was before her, the shard of pain in her head. She was already passing through the living room before she realized she was walking, looking for medicine, and then she was back in the kitchen holding his plastic med dispenser shaped like a multistorey building sheared in half. The pathways inside formed a maze. Each compartment was marked with an hour. The pills were of every description. She worked at the casing, unroofed it.

  Only one compartment was empty—he’d missed at least two doses, which made sense, somehow, on this clockless day. Whites, blues, yellows. Rounds and oblongs, precisely machined edges. She recognized the Gilshey brands and their knoc
koffs but saw nothing for her head. He must have been in near-constant pain. Meds for sleep, digestion aids. Meds for joint inflammation, depression, and others she didn’t know what. She wondered if a small dose of Alph would be of use to him in finishing out the kinks in his speech. More likely, on a calm day, a day not like today, it would help the depression with the elating wonder of simply seeing more, creating more. Maybe all the pills could be cleared away if he took a hit of Alph with his breakfast. The hell would be the headaches and the coming off. He’d recover speech and end himself.

  She had a moment of panic, then remembered that the stash of Alph was in her suitcase. The sudden adrenaline should have dulled her pain but it worsened.

  She put the dispenser back on top of the basket, took it off again and set it on the counter. She tried to think precisely about what she was looking at. Wicker, weave, the words seemed to cluster in little near-likenesses and the word cluster took her back to the headache. She lifted the lid off the basket.

  It was full of old pill bottles and packets. She searched through the drugs, in vials and small boxes. Over-the-counter cold reliefs, topical ointments, allergy pills. Expired, most of them, now that she checked. Lemon cough drops. Letters she couldn’t read became “Lozenges” when flipped. There was nothing to touch what was happening to her head. And then there, at the bottom, a broken silver packet of capsules. She turned it over and saw the word “КОДЕИН.”

  She stared into the mystery of it. She ran her finger along the date crimped into the edge. Whatever they did to you, these Russian ones, they could do it yet.

  She needed to move but she stood there.

  And whatever the effect of the drug КОДЕИН, it was nothing compared to that of the word itself. It named one thing, enacted another. The row of strange characters gave her certainty. Certain knowledge in a half-familiar word. Then the six Cyrillic letters drove the sense into questions that wouldn’t stand still.