Logorrhea

by John Klima

  My bones ached as I struggled to keep from screaming. I stood with my fists clenched and every muscle in my body taut. He put his hand on my shoulder, but I pulled away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I never wanted to hurt you.”

  As he walked away, I whispered, “Please don’t forget me.”

  We only met one more time. At a café, of course. I had ignored the notes he sent and I locked the door when he came to my apartment. It was not because I hated him, though I’m sure he thought that. It was to preserve myself. A thousand thoughts and ideas flashed through my mind in those days, all the shards of shattered fantasies that I barely understood. My intellect and my emotions had been severed from each other. Waves of sorrow filled me, raising questions in my mind: What had I wanted from him? Why had I behaved as I had? If I had gotten all that I wanted, what then? What was the all that I wanted?

  I made plans to return to America. I contacted friends, I reserved a berth on a ship.

  I don’t know why I answered the door that day when I had not answered it any of the days before. Any of the other knocks could have been the last, but somehow I knew this one was.

  He asked if we could talk. He said he had a request. He invited me to a café. I did not speak, but I followed him out.

  He said he would begin the first surgery the next day. We ordered coffee and ate sugary pastries. He laughed as I got sugar all over my fingers and chin.

  “Will you write me a poem?” he said.

  I finished the pastry and did not look at him.

  “A poem for Anders,” he said. “An elegy.”

  I brushed the sugar off my fingers and stood up. I did not look at him. “Yes,” I said.

  As I walked into my apartment, my legs were shuddering so violently that I fell to the floor. I rolled onto my side and hugged my knees to my chest and squeezed my eyes closed as tightly as I could, trying to obliterate the world.

  I did not return to America then. I cancelled the reservation on the ship, I told my friends I needed more time. In truth, I was embarrassed, and I did not want anyone who had known me before—who had known me as the famous poet and the delight of all the best parties—to see me as I was now, devastated and confused, ashamed of all that I had felt and thought. Also, I’m sure that somewhere within the snarled knot of my emotions was curiosity about and even concern for Anders and Andrea. I would not have admitted it to anyone, including myself, but I wanted to see the results of the doctor’s magic procedure.

  I received a letter:

  Dear Edward,

  It is Andrea who writes to you now. Forever Andrea. I wanted you to know that the first operation went well, and that though I am tired and in some pain, I am also excited and full of joy. I am sitting here right now wearing a silk nightdress and a pearl necklace (of all things!). They were both presents from Grete, who is here with me. I will soon be moved to the women’s hospital for the major part of the procedure. I hope you are well. Please remember the poem that Anders asked you to write. I know you cared about him deeply, and that you care about me, and I do not have the words to tell you how much such a poem would mean to us, or how much you, my dear Edward, meant to Anders and mean to me. Please take care of yourself. I look forward to seeing you on my return.

  Your Andrea

  Six months later, Andrea returned to the city from the clinic where she had been convalescing. For a month, I avoided seeing her, making one excuse after another, despite phone calls and letters from her and from Grete. I wanted to be sure I would respond in only the best way, and that I would not foist my disappointments onto her, because there was nothing either of us could do about it now. Finally, I called Grete and asked her and Andrea to meet me at our favorite park.

  She looked vaguely different from how she had looked before, like meeting a woman whom you’ve seen only in magazine pictures. We embraced and kissed and cried together for a moment and then laughed at ourselves. Grete stood on one side of me and Andrea on the other, and we all held hands as we walked through the park.

  Andrea continued singing at the cabaret, and I went to see her whenever I could, but I had decided definitely to return to America, and there were people to say good-bye to and dinners to attend and arrangements to make, so I did not see her or Grete as often as I wished, and then one day we were all standing at the docks together, and I was walking up onto the ship and waving good-bye and watching the city drift away over the dark horizon.

  Andrea rented a small room in the city, and Grete began to put a new life together for herself. They both sent me postcards and letters. Andrea did her best to keep her tone light and optimistic. She said she felt younger, that it seemed her entire brain had been changed as well as her body, that the last remnants of Anders had died and a new emotional life had arisen within her. But sometimes I perceived a sadness beneath her words. She hinted that many of Anders’s friends spurned her, and she suggested that she was having trouble finding work other than singing at the cabaret, a job that no longer paid well. She said she worried about the political situation, but more for Grete than herself, because Grete was better known and might be targeted by the government. She said her health was not always good. She said she missed me and hoped I would be able to visit again soon. She did not mention the poem.

  Grete told me the story of Anders’s change had begun to circulate in the newspapers. So far, very few good photographs of Andrea had been taken, so she was able to walk down the streets without being recognized. The cabaret tried to publicize her, but she quit, saying she wanted to be known for her singing, nothing else. She had not found another job, but at least she was not hiding away in her little room every day. Thanks to Dr. Hirschfeld’s advocacy, Andrea’s legitimation papers had come through, and she was now officially allowed to use her name and sex on legal documents. Grete said that Andrea seemed to have a new group of friends, and even a man who paid some attention to her, a man who knew her history. Grete said that Andrea had talked to a doctor about what sort of operation might allow her to become a mother.

  And then I received a short note from Andrea telling me that she was very sick, and that she was in a hospital. She said that she thought death was near, but that she did not have any regrets. She said she had dreamed of her mother, who had died long ago, and that in the dream her mother came to her and embraced her and told her that she loved her.

  The next week, Grete sent a short note to let me know that Andrea had died of paralysis of the heart.

  It is a gloriously bright and sunny day. We stand in the cemetery, Grete’s few friends and I and the minister, and they wait for me to speak. We stand near where we believe Andrea’s grave was; we will never know for sure, because this area was destroyed during the war.

  I had brought a stanza of Edmund Spenser to read in case I could not think of any words of my own, but I do not have the will to read it.

  I step back, silent.

  The coffin is lowered into the grave.

  I look out over the city and hold in my hand the yellowed piece of hospital stationery on which Andrea, too weak to speak, had written her final words. I found the paper lying on the table beside the bed where Grete died. The handwriting is uneven and the ink is faded almost to nothing, but I can make out the words well enough, and as I stand here and read them again and again above a city of ruins saturated with the past, I know now what Anders and Andrea wanted from me, and why they thought it required a poem, because only a poem can begin to answer the question Andrea wrote on that paper, the question I know will haunt me until I am able to leave this horrible world: What did I do to deserve so much love?

  * * *

  E•U•D•A•E•M•O•N•I•C

  eu·dae·mo·nic yü-'dē-me-'nik

  adjective

  1: pertaining to or conducive to happiness

  2: pertaining to eudeamonics or eudeamonism

  * * *

  Eudaemonic

  JAY CASELBERG

  “TOUCH ME BRIGHT with t
he demons of your soul,” she’d said to him. Bright? Michael had sat back, tasted the word, wondering at her choice. She wanted his dark places to illuminate her, or so she’d said, and Michael had considered. Sometimes we go to strange locales in search of mutual understanding.

  Around that time, Michael lived near the ocean, in a big wooden house, the sound of surf muttering and crashing him to sleep on those thick summer nights heavy with the heat, the faint salt breeze offering scant relief from the gleam of sweat across his chest. The semidark rooms full of the scent of brine and night jasmine. He lived alone then. After two failed marriages, he’d learned; it was better sometimes to have no one but yourself to blame. Bitterness is more than simply the taste of coffee in the morning. The house, a rambling, haphazard affair, came with its own memories, but Michael happily populated them with his own.

  Claire filled it with something else entirely.

  In summer, the beach thronged with tourists and holiday-makers. Even late at night, moon or no moon, there’d be couples strolling hand in hand along the water’s edge. But in winter, it was a different matter, the broad, empty stretch of sand, the cold wind whipping tufts of beach grass back and forth, scattering grains in its wake, a few sun-bleached shells staring white like bones from between the hummocks in the crisp daylight. In those times, Michael would walk, alone with his thoughts and the grey ocean stirring and muttering beside him. Claire had been the last person he’d expected to meet there, along with the body that lay beside her.

  Michael had seen them from afar, a woman crouched beside a male form lying there, unmoving in the sand. She was leaning over him, as if in conversation, and Michael would have given it not another thought, already changing his path to avoid them, except, just then, she half stood and waved him over. Michael had frowned, wondering what she could possibly want, here on this almost deserted beach in the late afternoon, but then it had struck him; the man was lying face down, and for some reason, that just didn’t seem right. Still frowning, he changed his course and headed towards them. As he neared, he saw with more clarity; the scene was just wrong. The man was dressed casually, light brown trousers and a cream shirt, but there was discoloration mottling the trouser legs, and he was still, far too still. Claire had resumed her crouch, one hand gripped inside the other, looking down at the achingly immobile form. As Michael drew closer, she spoke.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I think he’s dead.” She turned his head to the side.

  Michael stood there, looking down at the man, taking in the details and not saying anything. The eyes were closed. Midlength blond hair clumped at the back of his head, but fell evenly across his forehead, as if it had been just combed. A fan of sand marked one cheek, the skin underneath simply the wrong colour. The trousers were stained up both legs in irregular patterns, rimed white at the edges, but darker towards the feet. The strangest thing was the look on the dead man’s face; it was nothing more than simple joy. Standing there, Michael suddenly realized that he actually didn’t know what to do either.

  “Um,” he said and crouched down beside the body opposite her, being careful not to touch it. “Do you know him?”

  “Not really,” she said.

  He didn’t think about the implication of her words then.

  Finally managing to tear his gaze away from the man’s face, he saw her properly for the first time. She was watching him intently with grey-green eyes. Reddish brown curls, the color of kelp, fell to her shoulders. She wore a simple dark top and black sweats. A dapple of pale freckles ran across the bridge of her nose, clearly visible against the paler skin beneath.

  “Well?” she said, tired of waiting for him to say something else.

  Michael looked down again at the body lying between them.

  “Have you touched him?” he said.

  “There’s no pulse. I think he’s dead.”

  Michael gestured back up the beach with a toss of his head. “I live just over there. I could go and call somebody. If you don’t mind waiting here with him…”

  “Okay,” she said. “I don’t mind. He’s not going anywhere. Neither am I.”

  When he looked back up at her, her face was turned away, watching the water.

  “You know,” she said, her voice distracted. “They say the ocean is a great healer.” And then she turned back to look at him. “Sometimes, I guess it’s not.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that either, and there was a pause as he waited for her to say something else.

  “Okay, you wait here,” he said finally. “I’ll go call. I’ll be back in a few minutes. My name’s Michael by the way.”

  “Claire,” she said. “Claire van Maren.”

  Michael left her staring out at the waves as she crouched beside the man who was no longer alive.

  He walked as quickly as he could back up to the house, thinking about the strangeness of the situation and framing words he was going to say to the police. He thought the police were the right ones to call rather than an ambulance. They would sort out anyone else who needed to know. It wasn’t up to him. Normally, he’d be reluctant to get involved, but this time, he hadn’t even thought about it. He already was involved.

  “What the hell are you doing, Michael?” he said to himself.

  He didn’t really have much choice in the matter. Not really.

  The next time he saw her, she wore a simple peasant dress, green and patterned and a loose, pale blue blouse. He didn’t recognize her at first. One weekend a month, the locals held a street market down by the park, stalls of bric-a-brac and oddments, things that people had cleared out of their garages and backyards, and of course the local home produce, jams, preserves, and the like. It served multiple purposes, bringing the community together, but also allowing them to exchange gossip and catch up with each other’s lives. Michael rather drifted through it all, but he liked to go down and see what might turn up. Occasionally, there’d be a real find, an interesting curio, something that had been washed up on the beach that he could pay to take away and wonder about, to turn over and over in his fingers, making up secret histories that belonged to each little object.

  There was one particular stallholder, a crusty old man who spent his retirement years combing the beach, collecting whatever he could find, and Michael always looked forward to discovering what his particular stall might hold. Now and again, Michael would see him wandering the beach with his lopsided gait, pausing to stare at apparently vacant spots on the sand. The old man wasn’t the sort to use a metal detector, but wandered around using merely the keenness of his eye, or the instinct in his gut to find his little oddments, and from time to time, they would turn up on his stall. Sometimes, Michael would wonder if the old man kept them at home, inventing his own secret provenance before he tired of them and they eventually found their way to his table.

  Michael had been meandering among the various stalls, keeping his favorite till last, not even looking in the direction of the old man’s table. It was a little game he liked to play with himself, holding back the expectation until the last possible moment. When he finally did turn his eye in that direction, he was a little annoyed to see the view blocked by some woman leaning over the table, apparently in discussion with the old man about one of his oddments. Michael moved up behind her and waited impatiently for their conversation to end. Finally, he was rewarded, because she straightened and turned, moving to walk away, but instead, rounding almost into him. They were standing face-to-face, her eyes looking straight into his. There was a moment of confusion, and then she smiled.

  “Why, hello,” she said. “It’s you. I remember you.”

  There was a warmth in her voice that spoke of familiarity and summer afternoons sitting together in a private garden. He blinked a couple of times before responding.

  “Hi,” he said. “It’s Claire, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, from the beach.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, not really wanting to drag up the context, but forced into i
t anyway.

  If anything, her smile grew broader and she lifted her hand and placed the tips of her fingers on his forearm.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” she said. “Listen, do you want to get a cup of coffee or something?”

  Flustered by the directness, Michael could do little more than nod, and he acquiesced as she turned him around and led him up the street by his arm. They walked in silence, which he found strange, as if she was holding back all words until they had found an appropriate setting, away from the wave of voices and chatter of the marketplace. Once or twice, she glanced up at his face, smiling, and as they walked, he watched her, looking at the pretty peasant garb, the way the sun caught the red highlights in her hair and her eyes that one moment looked green and the next were blue. He tried putting her in context with the woman he’d met on the beach, but she looked so different, or at least not exactly how he had remembered her. Her forthrightness had put him a little on guard, and he wasn’t quite certain that he should be doing this at all.

  A small coffee shop lay at the end of the street, one of those places that did afternoon teas and pastries, with small tables covered in white chintz tablecloths and the smell of sweet cakes permeating the air. Michael didn’t go there much—not his kind of place really—but in the current circumstance, it seemed as good a choice as any.

  Claire ordered a spiced-apple tea and he a latte. When the mugs came steaming to the table, the scent of spiced apple wafted up from Claire’s cup, surrounding them in an ethereal cloud that reminded Michael of the hippie shop down the street. She sat watching him for several moments, and then finally lifted her mug to her lips, still watching him over the rim.

  “So,” she said. “Michael, wasn’t it?”

  Michael nodded, returning her look, reaching for his own mug, but not lifting it, turning it slowly around and around on the table with his fingers.

  “Imagine meeting up like this again,” she said, slowly lowering her mug, and gave him a quick little smile.