I lost all feeling of home. I was in Elsa's cage. Yes, Elsa was the one who had taken me in. I was in her territory, having none left of my own. Her walls were too white, asking me for a story I didn't have any more, a stroke I could no longer master. White, too much white — I had to get away. I hid myself in the wardrobe until the truth could not get away any more. It slammed me in the face every way I turned. She'd kept me closed in, she'd been the one to hold me in, to torture me, to force me into the equivalent of her old nook. She'd taken pleasure in watching the truth ferment in me until my soul festered! Then the moment it burst out like a lifelong abscess just pricked, and I had a chance to heal, what did she do but find another instrument of torture. No 'go to the devil', no punch in the old pucker, just flappity flap flap! Fearing all the ifs, praying for all the maybes, until condemned to this nook to rot and decay.
I knocked the metal doors out of their oiled tracks and limped out into the street. Every lit window I passed I looked into. No, no, she'd only played along for my sake, out of gratitude. She'd never been closed in; she'd had a life of her own, got around, had her card games and lovers. And I, for her sake, hadn't wanted to see it. I'd looked the other way, whistling like a fool to help her live her double life.
Cursing, guzzling from a bottle, kicking garbage cans, I scrutinised each passerby. People crossed the road whenever I got near. So where was her old lover boy? I'd beat him to a pulp yet! She wasn't going to get out of it so easily. She was going to have to tell me a thing or two to my face! No more lying!
'You hear?' I grabbed a man who was walking my way.
'Paws off, you drunken bum!' He punched me in the guts and I staggered back.
Drink, I needed more. The potent spirits to rock my body like the seventh sea. What did it matter when she'd disappeared? Weeks ago because she was fed up with me. So many years ago, my knife meeting her throat. My mother suffocating her under the floorboards before sending her remains off to who knew where. That fatal hour she'd swallowed that oily rainbow of toxic paint. What if my mother had let her escape to New York and she'd stood at the prow, an escort of dolphins below like silver needles sewing the surface? What difference would it make to me if she'd died or just run away? She was as good as dead. No, worse than dead: she, her life, lived on without me.
I'd lived all those years with a ghost. Her spirit came to punish me before it somersaulted back into thin air. Thin air. Fat as she'd grown! Ha!
I dragged myself along the road. Elsa and I were still connected in some strange way. The thinner I became, the heavier her side grew. If we considered ourselves one, a unified whole, we never lost or gained matter, it just shifted from one side to another. It was an oddity, but it was true: we were welded together, compound, indivisible.
I stumbled back into the building, past the mailboxes, mine with all the envelopes sticking out of it like a mouthful of broken teeth. I didn't get far before my foot caught one of the plants and I lost my balance. The wall began to dance a drunken farandole around me. Out of breath, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I stood there, entangled in leaves, my skin deadened with hard drink and cracking in contorted lines of sorrow so that it reminded me of bark. My spine stiffening like wood, pains in the soles of my feet as if roots were pushing their way out. All that was left of my eyes was two knots, both over a rotted hollow. My mouth was open in agony.
She'd asked for the truth. I'd given it to her. No! The truth itself was a lying notion! A man who dreams he's being hunted isn't safe and sound in his bed. A man is where his spirit is. If he lived a base life with one woman but had another woman locked up in his heart the whole while, she was the only one he loved. The only one he really shared his life with. The most secret, powerful gift given to a man isn't life, but the capacity to snip at it in his mind, trim it in his heart, cultivate all the branches that should have been and were given life within the nicks in his will, the cuts of his soul. This is where the tree of life is hidden, grafted in each and every man.
It was high time to empty this bottle — and not down my guzzle but down the toilet. Finish with drink! Get cleaned up! Pick up all the dirty clothes, empty bottles, sticky cans! Why didn't I check the mail? Whatever she might have written, however much it hurt, I deserved it. Bad news had to be taken by the horns if one ever expected to bring it to its knees. The answers were perhaps there if only I'd sober up.
Was the situation as hopeless as I made it out to be? Why was I waiting around like a lump on a log for her to make the first move? It was long overdue for me to act like a man! Why, I would win her back if I had to search every house and flat in Vienna to find her, then convince her to give me a second chance . . . I'd go to America if I had to, to that insane maze they call New York. Climb up that skyscraper, high as heaven on my knees, knock at that thousandth door. E. Affelbaum . . . Scoop her up. Carry her away. But not by force, or ever again by lies. By the force of my feelings! The truth of my resolutions! My new leaf! Leaves! Why didn't I put the truth in writing? She could read it and judge for herself. Surely, such an effort would prove my love? I could scatter the leaves across Vienna and New York if I had to. Someone would happen upon her, someone would know who I meant. Even if that didn't find her, I'd still be left with some essence of her in my hand.
In confining reality, feelings and memory to words, I could at least capture the truth of her, of me, of us, house it forever in black and white. And maybe it would work to discover, to uncover her. It takes a good fight to unearth any drop of happiness in this life, doesn't it? Even trees have to force their roots through rock, don't they? Dig deep to get a poor drop of water? Bend with the winds of reality? Sink three-quarters of their structure into the grimy old truth? And there is no such thing as clean soil!
I'd wasted enough time already. There was a stack of paper and a typewriter to be bought. The whole truth to transcribe. Whatever the effort. What more was there to lose? My last room? No more roof, no more family, I'd only be that much closer to her as I roamed the streets of the world. No, I could get her back again if I fought the battle to the end. By God, I swear I could offer her a deeper relationship, a better life, a new home under the tangy citrus sun. I could fly her down to those islands wagging like a happy tail off the tip of Florida! Buy us a pink trailer so we could go bridge over bridge from island to island for the rest of our days. Like turtles — didn't she say that herself once? Our house right on our backs. A new true blue sky, blossoming sunrise and sunset like a great ever-renewing flower, interlocked for good, letting ourselves wander one blissfully slow step at a time under our thousand birds' songs, two-headed, four-armed, four-legged silhouettes of happiness . . .
***
I've written all and reread only for purposes of verification. The words sometimes seem to have taken a direction of their own, made me say more than I perhaps should have for the sake of propriety, but perhaps that is old-fashioned. There are scenes I left out, for they seemed outside some core I was trying to hold on to. I simply wrote, and this is what came, and it had a life of its own, as imperfect and dreamy and mutilated as our memories. I think the genuineness of my love, however, can be seen through the empty white bars between the lines, like a sad primate at a zoo. Tired as I am with lack of sleep, I've never been so awake. I open my fist. May my hope, ever the same, take flight with the force of an autumn army of seeds.
Caging Skies Page 36